Like, what does the DOJ say about that?

Well, the DOJ pushed back on any notion that their monitors are going to be interfering, uh, in voting, uh, or election administration during the midterms at all.

They sent me a statement saying that DOJ staff, the monitors, are expected to do their job consistent with all legal and ethical obligations, no exceptions.

They also said to imply that our team will act improperly based on nothing more than speculation would be dishonest.

And to be clear, there is no evidence at this point that there are going to be any sort of disruptions at polling places or that any Americans are not going to be able to vote as a result of this monitor effort.

But we did see this incident in Wyoming that was quite interesting, where Republican officials in the state essentially said that the two federal monitors that the Justice Department had sent there during the August primaries were very aggressive, that they had tried to interview voters in Wyoming-

Wow.

So the Republican officials there were quite fired up about what happened.

Yeah, I was gonna ask, are they actually finding any?

Well, we, we don't really know.

We don't have public numbers on it exactly, and we know they're also using this information to chase deportations.

But they have only actually publicly named a, a handful of these cases, uh, where they are prosecuting individuals for illegally voting.

Uh, they've also been running state voter lists, any that they can get their hands on, some that have been handed over by Republican states, others, uh, that are public lists that they have purchased.

And they're running them through these federal systems that they've beefed up over the past 18 months, where they've pulled together a, an array of data, Social Security information, immigration records, and using it to search for non-citizens.

And they've publicly touted some of the findings, where they've said that they have found hundreds of thousands of non-citizens who are registered to vote really in just a handful of states.

And what the president is doing today is he's going to make sure that mail-in ballots are safe, secure, and accurate, and-

Okay, Gabe, so beyond this wild cast of characters that you've been describing, I guess I'm wondering, has any of this dysfunction actually hampered disaster relief efforts in the last year?

Yeah, I think the clearest example was last July during the deadly floods in the, uh, in Texas, in the Texas Hill Country.

Kristi Noem had just implemented a policy a few weeks earlier that any spending over $100,000 across the Department of Homeland Security needed her, uh, s- direct sign-off, and that really impacted FEMA hard because first of all, $100,000 is a drop in the bucket when it comes to emergency management and disaster response.

During a serious hurricane, they will spend billions and billions of dollars.

And so nothing could get done without DHS approval within an agency that, by the way, they didn't really want operating at full speed.

That was the whole point of this eliminate FEMA movement and what they were doing.

And so what we saw in Texas was, in the hours after, uh, the floods began and people were dying, FEMA, as it usually does, was working to start to get resources out the door.

Wow.