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Today, a federal appeals court shut down the Trump administration’s last-minute push to set aside thousands of California ballots. A federal judge opened a formal investigation into whether Justice Department lawyers misled her about Trump’s plans for a Washington golf course. A Republican strategist is admitting the GOP’s plan to have Trump rescue the midterms has failed. And a Texas grand jury indicted an ICE officer accused of running down a construction worker with his SUV.
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Today, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Donald Trump another stinging loss. Judges officially shot down the Justice Department’s demand that California set aside thousands of ballots in the upcoming midterms, under the baseless argument that they may have been cast by non-citizens. The court handed down the decision on a 2-1 vote, with the majority opinion authored by Circuit Judge Mark Bennett, who is a Trump appointee. He was joined in the ruling by Biden appointee Gabriel Sanchez.
The DOJ is claiming that California mailed ballots to roughly 20,000 people who may not actually be U.S. citizens, and it wanted to prevent the state from including those ballots in the official count on November 3 until the voters’ citizenship could be verified. California said the list the DOJ provided is unreliable. A district judge had already denied the administration’s request on the grounds it could disenfranchise eligible voters.
The Ninth Circuit panel agreed with the lower court ruling, writing that there’s “no feasible way to identify and segregate the ballots of specific individuals without potentially catastrophic effects on the entire system.” Hundreds of thousands of ballots have already been processed and anonymized, meaning there’s no way to trace them back to the people who cast them.
However, the pressure campaign is still ongoing. U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in the DOJ’s Los Angeles office, warned that any state official who knowingly processes a noncitizen’s ballot is “opening themselves to legal jeopardy.” At least three election officials in Los Angeles County have been called before a grand jury on November 4, the Wednesday after the midterms. It’s also important to note that a federal judge already disqualified Essayli earlier this week, ruling that he was “unlawfully serving” in his role due to never having been actually confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
A coalition of labor unions — including ones with millions of members like the AFL-CIO and AFSCME — is now petitioning a federal judge to block the Justice Department from ordering officials to stop the counting of ballots, and to drop its threats of prosecuting local and county officials. In Washington state, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to hand over its list of names of potentially ineligible voters who cast disputed ballots to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the UCLA Voting Rights Project. This marks the first time anyone outside the federal government will actually get to examine it.
This is important precisely because federal data used in other states has wrongly flagged thousands of actual U.S. citizens, many of whom are immigrants who legally went through the naturalization process. The United States unfortunately has a long and ugly history of purging legal, eligible voters under the guise of election integrity, dating back to the Jim Crow South’s literacy tests and poll taxes.
Meanwhile in the nation’s capital, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes — an appointee of former President Joe Biden — just opened up a formal investigation into whether attorneys with the Trump Justice Department and elsewhere in the administration lied about Trump’s renovation plans for the East Potomac Golf Course. The investigation is expected to be handled by a special master appointed by the court, and it may even lead to sanctions for top DOJ staff.
Judge Reyes’ hearing ran for almost three hours, and she repeatedly admonished Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — who is the third-most senior official at the DOJ — at the lectern. Reyes began by reading aloud the professional conduct rules for lawyers practicing in D.C. According to CNN, Reyes looked right at Woodward as she emphasized the part about attorneys being required to only make factual claims in court.
The context is key: the Trump administration has been insisting all along there’s no formal plans to renovate the course, despite Trump announcing the project will begin “immediately.” On October 10, crews ripped out more than 400 trees at the course after only giving notice at the last minute. At one point during the hearing, Woodward seemed to suggest the tree removal was part of a broader plan to update the course, which the administration had previously denied.
When Woodward tried to walk back what he’d just said, laughter reportedly broke out in the courtroom. Reyes then proceeded to read his own words back to him from the transcript before asking, “Are you kidding me right now?” In an earlier exchange, when Woodward was arguing that Reyes’ questions weren’t relevant, the judge was unbothered, and simply asked Woodward if he was done and was ready to give the answers she had already asked him for.
Reyes made it clear that so far, she hasn’t found evidence of anyone misrepresented anything, and is only allowing for the possibility through the formal investigation. She’d already blocked removal of additional trees in a 70-page opinion issued earlier this week, which the administration is appealing. Meanwhile, Trump has attacked the judge on his social media platform, calling her a “crazed lunatic.” She also ordered DOJ attorneys to preserve all documents relating to the case.
With the midterms now just four days away, the Republican strategy of putting Donald Trump at the forefront in hopes that the president would bolster turnout is apparently backfiring. That’s according to a GOP strategist working on multiple battleground races, who told HuffPost in a text message that “it didn’t work,” and that every Republican on Capitol Hill is paying a heavy price.
That strategist made the remark after Trump said Thursday he would be staying at Mar-a-Lago rather than following through on previous plans to headline rallies for Senate candidates in Iowa and Kansas. The White House has since reversed course Friday and scheduled Sunday events in both states, but political strategists in both parties say there’s almost no chance of those appearances turning things around for the GOP short of a significant polling error.
Democrats are now pouring money into races that just a year ago were considered to be safely in Republicans’ corner. That even includes Mississippi, where incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith is in an unexpectedly close race with prosecutor Scott Colom in a state Trump won by more than 22 points just two years ago. House Democrats are also spending money in an attempt to oust National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson in North Carolina. They’re also attempting to flip three Republican-held districts in Florida as well as former Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s deep-red seat in Upstate New York.
The latest polls show that 82 percent to 84 percent of voters who disapprove of Trump’s job as president are planning to vote for Democrats. Additionally, Republican pollster Brent Buchanan found that while 81 percent of self-identifying progressive Democrats say they’re extremely motivated to vote, only 58 percent of traditional Republicans are saying the same. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts believes Democrats will win up to 230 seats (218 seats is enough to secure a majority).
Democrats are also benefiting from increasingly high early voter turnout from Black voters across the Deep South in states like Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina. That’s partially due to voter anger over the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision this spring that significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act. Republicans in Ohio are also spending millions of dollars to prop up up socialist candidate Greg Levy in an effort to siphon votes from Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown.
Our final story tonight: a jury in Harris County, Texas just indicted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Mario Alberto Morales for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors say that on October 10 in Houston, Morales drove an unmarked SUV into 48 year-old construction worker Miguel Parra Hernandez as he ran through a parking lot, breaking his leg.
ICE is claiming that Parra Hernandez deliberately ran in front of the SUV. But District Attorney Sean Teare says video shows otherwise. Surveillance camera footage shows Morales’ vehicle jumping over a median and heading straight toward Parra Hernandez. Body camera footage prosecutors played on Monday showed Morales saying, “I was coming in and I hit him with the car.”
Morales’ attorney insists it was an accident, and accused Teare of indicting his client for political gain. ICE stated that the allegations against Morales were “RECKLESS and FALSE” and claims local prosecutors have no authority to prosecute federal agents.
But ICE’s version of events has other problems that could complicate Morales’ case. The agency admitted that the real target of the investigation on the day Parra Hernandez was hit was a man named Jose Mendoza-Cervantes. To further complicate matters, an immigrant rights group working with the man’s family now says that, according to Mendoza-Cervantes’ daughter, he’s been dead since 2017. Parra Hernandez has lived in Harris County for over 30 years, and has no criminal record and no current deportation order.
Teare says the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has yet to cooperate with his investigation. He’s also accusing ICE of destroying evidence, in the same way that DHS stonewalled his investigation into the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction worker who ICE agents shot to death earlier this summer.
We’re only able to cover stories like these — in which a local prosecutor is accusing ICE of obstructing a criminal investigation, a judge investigating Donald Trump’s Justice Department and the president losing his bid to throw out thousands of ballots — because we don’t answer to a MAGA billionaire or a corporate board. That kind of independence is increasingly rare today, but it can only work if readers believe in it enough to keep it funded.
I’m British Chris, with Raw America. Thanks for watching, and thanks for supporting independent reporting. Please help us reach the most people by clicking the ❤️ and tapping the restack button. It genuinely helps more than you know.