LEMON DROP: Trump's Voter Raids Hit Legal Wall as Federal Judge Steps In - Miles Taylor Reacts

Don, great to be with you, my friend.

There is not, and I can tell you firsthand because in the first Trump administration, when I was helping to run the Department of Homeland Security, they wanted us to look into this. And our agents and our officers and our agencies, Don, told the White House we don't have any indication of widespread voter fraud. In fact, never in the history of the United States have there been any federal elections that have been found to have been affected in terms of their outcome by some sort of influx of non-citizen voters. This is a phantom menace, if there ever was one, right? So, not real, not a real threat. Are there handfuls of people who've registered and voted and they shouldn't have? Yeah, and those folks should be investigated and prosecuted. I'd probably argue there's a lot more important crimes for the federal government to be going after if these aren't actually affecting elections. So, what they are doing, Don, they know this. They know it's voter intimidation. And I'm going to tell you in past elections, they've had allies who've undertaken efforts like this. For instance, in 2020, federal judges had to tell Trump-aligned militia groups, you cannot go to the polls as poll monitors with your guns because it's voter intimidation. I mean, people in this movement know what happens when guys with badges and guns show up at polling places. And now the Trump administration is doing that effectively as a matter of policy, like we saw in Fulton County. I think the worry is that what you saw in Fulton County is going to be something that takes place during a live election. Thankfully, the courts have been very tuned in on this. The legal groups have been going after the administration, and our organization, DefendDemocracy.org, has supported and funded a number of those lawsuits, including lawsuits to strike down Donald Trump's illegal mail-in ballot executive order.

We'll see. This could be a constitutional showdown. The judge was very clear that if... you know, the judge didn't say that DHS agents cannot go investigate crimes, okay? If they have reasonable suspicion that a crime has taken place, someone has engaged in an illegal voting scheme, they can investigate it. But the judge said they can't be doing these, you know, knock-on-door interviews with people who might be or would reasonably be suspected to be US citizens. They can't just go out there door-to-door and hustle people about how and where and whether they've voted and ask to see their papers. They can't do that. That's not what happens in the United States of America. The presumption here is that if we're registered to vote, we're allowed to vote. And when you register to vote, Don, you swear under penalty of perjury that you're allowed to vote. And so I think this is a very important ruling. If the Trump administration does not comply with this ruling, yeah, it will be a constitutional showdown. But again, I'm going to go back to a little bit of optimism here. The states have never been more prepared for this fight. I've sat in the rooms for the past year with dozens of groups and state officials across the country. They are ready. In fact, we've helped fund the preparation of lawsuits in all 50 states for the types of things we might see the Trump administration undertake. And earlier this year, in anticipation, Don, that they might break the law and engage in voter intimidation, we organized a nationwide network of prosecutors, local prosecutors, to be prepared to arrest and prosecute federal agents if they knowingly break the law and engage in voter intimidation and voter suppression. One of the heads of that group is Larry Krasner, Philadelphia district attorney. And Larry's comment the other month was, 'If they do this, if they break the law and try to violate your constitutional rights, I'm going to lock their asses up.'

Correct. So, we launched an effort called the Fight Against Federal Overreach. A little bit of a cheeky name, Don, because it stands for FAFO. And this is a network of prosecutors that includes Philadelphia and Dallas and Minneapolis. All across the country, we've got local prosecutors who are being trained up to know the limits of the law when it comes to federal agents at the polls, and they are prepared to enforce that law up to and including, if they have to, arresting federal agents who break that law and bringing charges against them. We are not allowed to have troops and armed federal agents within a certain distance of US polling places. And all year, members of Congress have been pointing to those statutes in congressional hearings and trying to get the administration to admit that they will comply with the law. But as recently as last month, we saw Kash Patel refusing to definitively answer that question in testimony before Congress. And so local prosecutors all across the country are prepared, if they need to, to bring those charges against federal agents if those laws are violated.