Sunday, October 18, 2026
How Trump’s justice department is testing separation of powers before the US midterms
How Trump’s justice department is testing separation of powers before the US midterms
“Trump’s justice department has aggressively intervened in midterms, including raiding Ilhan Omar’s home, suing California over 20,000 names, and sending Todd Blanche to Republican rallies. Officials claim no rule bars actions, though norms and manuals discourage interference.
Donald Trump’s justice department has aggressively inserted itself into the midterm elections in the contest’s final weeks, shattering the department’s longstanding practice of political neutrality and leaving little doubt about the department’s willingness to help should the president attempt to subvert elections where his party is forecasted to lose seats and ultimately control of Congress.
In the last few weeks, federal agents have raided the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election. It has touted criminal charges and arrests of non-citizens charged with voter fraud. The attorney general has hit the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. And the department gave California election officials 48 hours to investigate the citizenship of 20,000 people, and then sued the state when it refused to comply. The FBI also recently published a video criticizing Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, drawing an immediate rebuke from one watchdog, who said the video “has no place in a democratic society”.
On Monday, federal agents raided her DC home of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, who is running for re-election this fall. The raid was part of a reported immigration fraud investigation into Omar, an outspoken critic of the president, and an apparent push to try to denaturalize her. Omar is up for re-election, and Minnesota Democrats broadly are facing more headwinds than fellow party members in most other states.
“For decades, the justice department sought to avoid investigative steps that might influence an election, recognizing that election integrity is threatened when DoJ is perceived as putting its thumb on the scale,” said Stacey Young, a former justice department attorney who now leads Justice Connection, a group that supports justice department alumni.
“This was always a case-by-case analysis, led by experts in the public integrity section. But this administration pushed those experts out of the department, and employees seeking guidance are now directed to political appointees loyal to the president,” she added.
A justice department official said there is no rule or policy that bars the DoJ from taking action close to an election. The department is not required to stop ongoing work during election season, the official said.
A provision of the justice department manual says prosecutors and law enforcement agents should not take “any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party”. A separate provision of the manual says that “the Department should not engage in overt criminal investigative measures in matters involving alleged ballot fraud until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded”.
An unwritten department practice has established a blackout window of at least 60 days before an election in which prosecutors should refrain from any activities that could influence the election. In September 2024, Todd Blanche, then serving as the president’s personal attorney, pointed to the rule to argue that special counsel Jack Smith should not be allowed to file a long brief with damaging information in the criminal election interference case against Trump. “Departures from these practices should never be countenanced because they risk allowing prosecutors to impact national elections,” Blanche wrote at the time. Experts disagreed with that argument at the time, pointing out that Smith was responding to a court-ordered deadline.
“For decades, the justice department has avoided even the appearance of political interference in the run-up to an election, and that’s exactly what the 60-day rule exists to protect,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a watchdog group. “This DoJ is doing the opposite.”
Now, Blanche leads the justice department, and the 60-day rule seems to have gone out the window. The DoJ official said the 60-day rule was an informal practice.
Over the last few weeks, the department has sent out press releases announcing voter fraud charges against noncitizens with photos of their arrests. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare, and when it does occur, it is often because someone is confused about their eligibility. Court documents filed in many of the cases the justice department have charged contain little detail about whether the people charged knew they were ineligible.
“The DoJ’s actions ahead of the election, which violate longstanding norms, are extremely concerning. They are emblematic of how the Trump administration has repeatedly and illegally weaponized the federal law enforcement apparatus to interfere in our elections,” said Donald Sherman, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog group.
The department has also made a last-minute push to try to force states to purge voters from the rolls.
In an extraordinary move last week, the justice department sent election officials in Los Angeles a USB-drive with a handwritten password. The drive contained the names of potential noncitizens on the county’s rolls, the justice department said. The department gave county officials 48 hours to investigate the citizenship statuses and segregate ballots from anyone whose status they could not confirm and said the department would seek “emergency relief” if they did not.
Dean Logan, the top election official in Los Angeles, told the justice department his office would not be accessing the drive because it didn’t consider it secure. The department also didn’t say how many people were on the list and hadn’t described its methodology for identifying the voters. The department later said in a court filing it had provided the names of 20,000 people to the state.
After California rebuffed the DoJ’s efforts, the department sued the state on Thursday, requesting a court order blocking the state from counting the ballots from anyone among the 20,000 whose citizenship had not been confirmed.
The DoJ could have easily provided California with the names of people it suspected were on its voter rolls and its methodology for identifying them months ago, said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a group that works on election administration issues. Instead, the department waited until after California had sent out mail-in ballots. Federal law also prohibits election officials from systematically purging voters within 90 days of a federal election.
“If they were seeking to work in good faith to clean up the voter list that they believed had issues, they would have done this months ago in a much different fashion,” Becker said. “However, it does raise questions as to whether or not the sole purpose of this is to set the stage for false claims about election theft after an election that the president might be worried his party was going to do poorly.”
In what may be the department’s most overtly political act, Blanche has also spoken at campaign rallies for Republican candidates and at the Republican convention in Dallas earlier this year. The department recently revised ethics guidance for officials appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to allow them to participate in more partisan political activities, according to a memo obtained by the PBS News Hour.
Blanche’s appearance raised concerns among ethics officials, despite the department’s claims that he was acting in his personal capacity.
“Attorney general Blanche’s appearances at political events are made in his personal capacity. His appearances are reviewed and cleared by the department’s ethics officials. Travel expenses are reimbursed by the attorney general in accordance with federal law, regulations and policies,” a DOJ spokesperson said.
Federal ethics regulations prohibit officials from taking actions that “create even the appearance of violating the law or ethical standards”, Joseph Tirrell, who was fired as the top ethics official at the justice department last year, wrote in a blogpost earlier this year.
“The question is not merely whether Blanche crossed a technical line. It is whether his appearance made federal law enforcement look like an arm of a partisan campaign,” Tirrell wrote.
“Senior Trump administration law enforcement officials at DoJ, FBI and DHS have yet to be held accountable for their weaponization of prosecutions and legal attacks on candidates or their apparent violations of the Hatch Act, which bans them from using their official positions for political purposes,” Sherman said. “From Blanche’s participation in political rallies to Trump’s attacks on voting to the recent raid on a congresswoman’s home, these relentless attempts to influence the upcoming election are incredibly disturbing and pose a serious threat to our democracy.”
The DoJ’s insertion into electoral politics comes as far-right figures have urged Trump to take the drastic step of seizing voting machines before the election – something he does not have the power to do. The Trump administration has also refused to rule out sending ICE agents to the polls.
A compliant justice department would get rid of a significant guardrail to implementing some of those ideas. As Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, senior officials in the justice department refused to go along with the idea and threatened to resign en masse. William Barr, the attorney general in 2020, told Trump the claims about election fraud were “bullshit”.“
Elon Musk Is Beyond the Pale
Jamelle Bouie
“Elon Musk spent over half a billion dollars on elections and directs federal shutdowns while promoting white supremacist views. Republicans face no scrutiny over this influence; Democrats should investigate and potentially sever ties with his companies.
Elon Musk Is Beyond the Pale
Elon Musk is the world’s richest man. And he is using that wealth for political ends. Musk spent more than $290 million on the 2024 presidential election. So far, he is the biggest known spender on this year’s midterm elections, with about $276 million funneled to conservative political groups and Republican campaigns.
In addition to his work as a technologist and politico, Musk is also a prominent, and powerful, white supremacist.
Musk, as I noted in a column earlier this year, traffics in lurid, eliminationist fantasies aimed at immigrants and racial minorities. As the most-followed man on his social media website, X, Musk amplifies far-right accounts, spreads racist propaganda and endorses calls for violence against those deemed “invaders.” He supports “remigration” — the forcible removal of nonwhite citizens to their supposed countries of origin — and fears the demographic collapse of “Western,” meaning white, civilization.
I have quoted from Musk’s invective before, but it bears repeating.
“White people are a rapidly diminishing minority of the global population,” Musk wrote in September 2025.
“Low birth rate,” he later said, “is the number one threat to the West followed closely by migration. There will be no West if this continues.”
A century ago, a similar demographic panic among white American elites led one man, Lothrop Stoddard, to warn of a “rising tide of color against white world-supremacy,” in a book that was a huge best seller. Musk is working, if you can call it that, in the same tradition of white supremacist hysteria.
Recently, a number of Democratic candidates for office — most prominently Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan — have been asked to answer for the words of Hasan Piker, a streamer and political entertainer who has campaigned for progressive and left-wing Democrats, including El-Sayed. The reason they have been asked to answer for him is that Piker holds a number of views that are well outside the mainstream of American politics. But aside from words of support and a few appearances with a few candidates, Piker is a fairly minor force on the political landscape.
Compare that with Musk, who, again, has spent more than half a billion dollars trying to elect Republicans and who spent several months as the de facto leader of the executive branch, directing his cadre of young programmers — some barely out of their teens — to systematically shut down programs and agencies that he disliked, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development.
And yet, despite Musk’s power and actual, material impact on American elections, hardly anyone seems interested enough to ask Republicans to comment on the views and preoccupations of their largest, most important donor. House Speaker Mike Johnson can do the rounds on the nation’s news programs without fielding a single question on Musk and his influence. Trump can host endless news conferences without being asked about the violent, extremist views of one of his closest political allies. Senator John Thune, the majority leader, can go days — if not weeks — without hearing Musk’s name from a journalist.
I have no particular explanation for the lack of interest in confronting Republican politicians with the views of their most important donor. But given those views, I think Republicans should have to answer for them. Do they agree that the chief threat to “the West” is declining white birthrates? Did they see the movie “Citizen Vigilante,” heavily promoted by Musk, and do they believe that the spectacular violence visited on immigrants depicted in the film might be necessary in the real world? Do they support the “remigration” of nonwhites from the United States to their home countries or God knows where else?
As for Democrats, they should see that Musk is a rich political target. In addition to his racist views, he is responsible for the degradation and destruction of large parts of the federal bureaucracy, directly harming the millions of Americans who rely on agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Moreover, Musk is both deeply entwined with the federal government as a vitally important contractor and a notoriously unreliable figure who has acted, in foreign policy, against the interests of the United States. His interventions against Ukraine in its defensive war against Russian aggression are prime evidence that we rely on both Musk and his companies at our own peril.
If Democrats win Congress this November, they should use their investigative powers to scrutinize Musk’s companies, question his relationships to foreign governments and ensure his compliance with federal law. And a future Democratic White House should use the result of that investigation to re-evaluate the government’s ties to Musk, up to and including removing his security clearances, canceling his contracts, divesting from his companies, leveraging federal antitrust law to break up enterprises such as SpaceX and even placing some key functions under direct federal control.
The immediate reason to do this is the degree to which Musk has abused his power and influence to spread misery, transform the federal government and support far-right political movements. The broader reason is simply that no one man should have all this power.”
Saturday, October 17, 2026
Friday, October 16, 2026
Katie Zacharia Is Ousted After 5 Days as White House Press Secretary
Katie Zacharia Is Ousted After 5 Days as White House Press Secretary
“Katie Zacharia was fired after five days as press secretary following questions about her legal background and briefing performance. Trump suggested she reconsider the role, noting possible future work.
The ouster came as Ms. Zacharia was shadowed by questions about how she had presented her legal career and handled her first press briefing.
President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired Friday, after less than a week on the job, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the decision, which was not yet announced. Neither the White House nor Ms. Zacharia responded to requests for comment. But Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday that he had encouraged Ms. Zacharia to “reconsider” the job.
“Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he told reporters, recounting his conversation with his press secretary. He said he added: “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.”
He said Ms. Zacharia might continue to work for him “in some form, but maybe a more pleasant form.”
Ms. Zacharia had gotten off to a bumpy start with her first and final press briefing on Tuesday, in which she largely read off a script and ended questioning after just three queries. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.
She had just started on Monday, and hadn’t even moved to Washington yet.
It was last Friday that the president offered her the job. A little-known Fox News commentator with whom many in the White House were unfamiliar, she was a surprise pick. While Ms. Zacharia did have the support of Natalie Harp, the powerful West Wing aide who rarely leaves the president’s side, others in the building believed her debut had been a disaster.
She was not a deft communicator.
She had represented herself as a lawyer in the news media, but when asked repeatedly by a reporter on the South Lawn of the White House to say in which state she had passed a bar exam, she twice replied, “When I moved to China.” She later told The New York Times that she had simply misheard the question — even though the president had repeated the reporter’s question to her while standing feet away.
The end was nigh after she appeared on Fox News on Thursday night to be interviewed by the president’s friend Sean Hannity, who asked her a few tough questions and treated her with rare skepticism.
The reception she got on Friday morning on “Fox and Friends” wasn’t exactly friendly, either.
“Do you wish you would have disclosed to the president about the bar and not passing the bar?” one of the hosts, Lawrence Jones, asked her.
“Well, Lawrence,” Ms. Zacharia responded, “those questions weren’t asked.”
The firing of the administration’s top spokeswoman capped off a week of remarkable upheaval inside Trumpworld.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, was fired on television on Tuesday (during Ms. Zacharia’s only briefing). The president spent time in the Oval Office trying to get to the bottom of a vicious fight between two of his loyalists, Richard Grenell and Alina Mildon.
Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump confidant who claimed to have introduced the president to his wife, was pushed out at the State Department after one of his internecine feuds spilled into the press. And the daughter of Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and others in her circle, came under scrutiny for their moneymaking overseas.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Hamed Aleaziz covers the Department of Homeland Security and immigration policy for The Times.“
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