Trent McCotter

This is a threat coming from the acting Deputy Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice.

This is the number two person in the Department of Justice, Trent McCotter.

Trent McCotter is a lackey for Donald Trump.

He is a made man in the election denier movement.

This is someone who has been put in this position, I have no doubt, in order to do exactly this.

But if you look at it, what you will find is that the, uh, the, a very curious thing, which is that the, the lawsuit against California appears to have come through the deputy attorney general's office, okay? What we sometimes refer to as the DAG.

So that is R. Trent McCotter, who is by the way, on his own right a, a, you know, a Trump sycophant and loyalist.

I- in his own right is an election denier.

But it comes through his office.

So the U.S. Department of Justice is not objecting to the Georgia State Elections Board, which is the good portion of the Georgia state election system, from obtaining electronic scans of 2020 election materials from Fulton County that the FBI prepared earlier this year under a judicially authorized search warrant.

So acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter confirmed a copy of those scans were previously given to the Fulton County Clerk of the Court.

The Georgia State Election Board has been formally pursuing Fulton County's 2020 election records through subpoenas since fall of 2024, which is now nearly two years ago.

And the letter was addressed to James Mills, the executive director of the Georgia S.E.B.

The Justice Department's put California on the clock.

In a letter sent Tuesday, October 13th, acti- acting Deputy Attorney General, uh, Trent McCotter told California Secretary of State Sheler- Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar Reco- Registrar Recorder Dean Logan to review within 48 hours a federal list of registered voters the government believes are likely non-citizens who were sent mail-in ballots for the November 3rd election.

If the state and county do not put the request process in place by noon on Thursday, the letter says the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief in court.

[coughs] So here's my online.

Oh my God.

But a letter sent this week by Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter to California Secretary of State and the Los Angeles Registrar appeared to dispute that finding.

That's what Democrats said.

This is a quote.

The first story that we want to talk about is this news that the Department of Justice is now suing the State of California over 20,000, um, ballots that were mailed out to suspected or alleged non-citizens.

US Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter, um, contacted the California election officials and provided them with a thumbnail drive with the names of these officials and asked them to review and make sure that, and segregate these ballots.

Uh, they want to prevent them from being counted unless and until these people can be verified as citizens.

This, of course, caused outrage by Carl's good buddy, Gavin Newsom, who responded, quote, "This is a sad, desperate attempt by the Trump, by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try and suppress California voters just three weeks before election day.

So you cannot tell me that 20,000 doesn't change elections, because it can.

And so the lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California came after acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter sent letters to counties earlier this week, including Los Angeles, ordering them to review a list of names of suspected non-citizens who he alleged received mail-in ballots for the upcoming midterm elections.

"State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America," Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a statement announcing the lawsuit.

"If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation's representative system of government." And in the letter that McCotter sent to the Los Angeles County Reg- Recor- Registrar-Recorder County Clerk, he enclosed a password-protected thumb drive that he said contained names compiled by the Department of Homeland Security and imposed a 48-hour deadline for the clerk's office to review the list.

In an October 13th letter, DOJ shifted tactics, demanding California review its own list for non-citizens registered to vote using DOJ's data and gave the state forty-eight hours to do so, or else.

In the letter, first reported by Reuters, Acting Deputy Attorney General R. Trent McCotter threatened that if the state didn't implement the process by noon on October 15th, quote, "Given the ongoing federal election, the United States will have no choice but to seek emergency relief," unquote.

That could mean a fast-tracked case to federal appeals court or the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Associated Press reports that a similar letter DOJ sent to Los Angeles election officials contained a thumb drive of alleged non-citizen voters.