The Justice Department has stepped into the final weeks of the midterm campaign in ways that break with decades of restraint, The Guardian reported. The calculus is hard to miss: raids, lawsuits and campaign appearances, all within weeks of the vote.
The recent record
On Monday, federal agents raided the Washington home of Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, who is running for re-election. The raid was reportedly part of an immigration fraud investigation and an apparent push to denaturalize her. Omar is an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump.
The department has also publicized criminal charges and arrests of noncitizens accused of voter fraud, sending out press releases with arrest photos. Noncitizen voting is extremely rare, the Guardian noted, and when it happens it is often because someone is confused about eligibility. Attorney General Todd Blanche has spoken at rallies for Republican candidates and at the Republican convention in Dallas earlier this year. The FBI published a video criticizing Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, and one watchdog said it “has no place in a democratic society.”
The California list
Last week the department sent election officials in Los Angeles a USB drive with a handwritten password, containing names of potential noncitizens on the county rolls. It gave them 48 hours to check citizenship, separate the ballots of anyone whose status they could not confirm, and threatened to seek “emergency relief” otherwise. Dean Logan, the county’s top election official, said his office would not open a drive it did not consider secure. The department did not say how many people were listed or how it picked them. A later court filing put the number at 20,000.
After California refused, the department sued on Thursday, asking a court to block the state from counting ballots from anyone on the list whose citizenship was unconfirmed. David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the names and method could have been shared months earlier, but the department waited until mail-in ballots had gone out. Federal law also bars systematic voter purges within 90 days of a federal election.
What the rules say
A justice department manual provision says prosecutors and agents should not take “any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.” Another says the department should avoid overt criminal investigative measures in ballot fraud matters until the election is concluded and certified.
An unwritten practice sets a 60-day blackout window before an election. A department official said no rule or policy bars action close to a vote and called the 60-day rule informal. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward said the department “is doing the opposite” of what that rule protects. In 2024, Blanche, then Trump’s personal attorney, invoked the same rule against special counsel Jack Smith.
Stacey Young, a former department attorney who leads Justice Connection, said that for decades the department avoided steps that could influence an election. She said this administration pushed out the public integrity experts who made those calls case by case, and staff now go to political appointees loyal to the president.
Blanche’s rally appearances raised ethics concerns, though a spokesperson said he appears in a personal capacity, cleared by ethics officials. The stakes go beyond November. The Guardian wrote that the department’s conduct leaves little doubt it would help if the president tried to subvert elections where his party is forecast to lose seats and control of Congress. In 2020, by contrast, senior department officials threatened to resign en masse rather than back Trump’s effort to overturn the result.
Sources
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- 2026 midterm election FAQs
- Do Americans own the president's papers? Appeals court to weigh in
Photo: Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0)
