President Donald Trump promised jail for California officials who don’t heed the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) warning that they will be criminally charged if they include the mail-in ballots of the some 200,000 people reportedly identified as potential noncitizens in their midterm election tallies.
“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.
Along with his statement the president shared a copy of a letter the DOJ sent to the Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office, promising “significant” consequences for “facilitating or ignoring” the “federal crime” of illegally voting in a federal election.
On Thursday, the DOJ sued the Golden State after providing state and local election officials with a USB drive “containing voter roll citizenship data, giving the state 48 hours to compare 20,000 names the Department of Homeland Security flagged as non-U.S. citizens with its own data rolls,” the Hill reported.
Earlier in the week, the DOJ sent a letter to election officials that included a password to access the files on the thumb drive.
“If California was unable to independently confirm the citizenship of people on that list, the Federal Government asked that California set aside ballots received from them until the person’s citizenship was confirmed,” according to the lawsuit, which was also posted online as a “courtesy to the public,” the DOJ said.
California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a written response to the civil complaint, calling it a “sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”
“The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of Californians voting, they have asked local officials — who do a damn good job defending democracy — to violate federal law,” Newsom also said in the statement.
In September, a group called the UCLA Voting Rights Project, sued the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) questioning how the administration came up with their numbers of noncitizens registered to vote, according to news reports.
The Hill reported that the group would seek a temporary restraining order if the Trump administration did not abandon plans for a criminal crackdown on the state’s officials.
“Your clients’ actions in compiling the list violates established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws,” attorneys for the group wrote in its most recent letter to the DOJ.
Earlier this year, President Trump alleged that California, along with three other states, collectively had 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls, a number disputed by his opponents.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more
