All posts by Rick Hasen

“Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith faces investigation by Office of Special Counsel”

authoritarian threats in US, chicanery, Department of Justice

WaPo:

The U.S. Office of special counsel said Saturday it is investigating Jack Smith, the former Justice Department official who oversaw two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, for potentially violating the law barring federal officials from political activity.

The independent agencytasked with overseeing investigations into partisan influence and coercion confirmed its investigation of Smith over potential Hatch Act violations.

The Hatch Act prohibits most federal employees from using their official authority to influence elections or engage in overt political activity on the job. If the office concludes a federal employee has violated the law, it refers the case to the president. Discipline can range from a reprimand to a removal from federal service. Criminal penalties are rare.

Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department in the days before Trump’s inauguration this year, became the public face of the department’s efforts to hold Trump accountable for two sets of alleged crimes. Trump was accused of trying to block Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and, after leaving the White House upon completion of his first term, mishandling highly classified documents and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. Neither case went to trial.

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“Democratic governors advise strong counteroffensive on redistricting”

chicanery, redistricting

Politico:

A  group of Democratic governors is urging its colleagues to get tough in countering Republican-backed efforts to gerrymander Texas’ congressional districts.

“It’s incumbent upon Democrat governors, if they have the opportunity, to respond in kind,” outgoing Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly told reporters at a Democratic Governors Association meeting Friday. “I’m not a big believer in unilateral disarmament.”

The advice from Kelly, who chairs the DGA, came two days after Texas Republicans proposed congressional lines that would create five GOP-friendly House districts ahead of next year’s midterms. Democrats need only to net three seats to regain control of the lower chamber.

Kelly didn’t cite California Gov. Gavin Newsom by name, but he is the most high profile, and likeliest, example of a Democrat considering a counteroffensive remapping effort to squeeze more seats from a blue state. On Thursday, Newsom said he’d seek a November special election to have voters approve a new House map that would boost Democrats’ numbers. It’s an expensive and potentially perilous gamble that his Democratic colleagues throughout the country appear to be backing — a notably more aggressive posture for the party….

NYT on “maximum warfare”:

The aggressive push by President Trump and Republicans in Texas to squeeze as many as five House Democrats out of office before a single vote is cast in the 2026 midterm elections has opened up a new chapter in an era of unconstrained partisan warfare.

For six months, Democrats have watched, sometimes haplessly and sometimes hopelessly, as Mr. Trump and his allies have bent much of the country’s political, legal and educational systems to his will.

But the bald attempt to redraw the Texas congressional map to shore up House Republicans has pushed many Democrats, including some longtime institutionalists, to a breaking point. Now, they are vowing to “fight fire with fire” and even to embrace some of the very gerrymandering tactics they have long decried as anti-democratic.

“The Texas Republicans are taking us on a race to the bottom,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who lamented in an interview that his party must reluctantly participate in “this rotten system.”…

The gerrymandering is deeply consequential at a time when a single House race can cost tens of millions of dollars. Republicans won control of the House in 2024 by only three seats, a margin the remapping in Texas alone would more than double.

One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House’s political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

The redistricting push is only one element. Mr. Trump has targeted Democratic law firms with executive actions. He has threatened prosecutions of and ordered investigations into his political enemies, while the Justice Department has dropped lawsuits aimed at protecting voting rights. And his congressional allies are investigating ActBlue, the organization that processes an overwhelming share of online donations for Democrats….

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“Revealed: Elon Musk’s $1 Million Gift to Trump Inauguration”

campaign finance

Influence Brief:

A Jan. 15 in-kind contribution from X Corp., the social media company previously known as Twitter and owned by Musk, never appeared in any of the Trump inaugural committee’s original disclosure or in multiple amendments.

The donation only appeared in a supplemental FEC filing on July 18 — just days before a key federal lobbying deadline when lobbyists are legally required to report political contributions from their clients.

On July 30, a new lobbying disclosure filed by X Corp. confirmed the $1 million contribution.

Despite announcing plans to step back from political spending in May, new campaign finance reports filed July 31 reveal Musk kept making political contributions into at least June — even as his tension with Trump escalated.

Musk gave $45 million to his own pro-Trump super PAC, America PAC, with contributions into at least late June.

But Musk didn’t just give to his own super PAC.

Despite a dramatic falling out with Trump after his departure from DOGE, Musk gave $5 million to Trump’s main super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., on June 27, according to new FEC filings first reported by Politico.

That same day, Musk poured another $10 million to the main super PACs backing House and Senate Republicans — with $5 million of that to Congressional Leadership Fund, which is aligned with House Republican leadership, and another $5 million to the allied Senate Leadership Fund.

Musk’s multimillion-dollar contributions made him the largest individual donor to both super PACs allied with congressional leadership during the first six months of 2025….

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“How the New Texas Map Changes the Outlook for Control of the House”

redistricting

Nate Cohn for The Tilt:

So far this election cycle, most analysts have assumed that Democrats will win the House next November. No, it’s not a guarantee. But the party out of the White House usually does well in midterms, and Democrats need a mere three seats to retake the chamber.

Over the last few weeks, this reasonable assumption has started to get more complicated. It turns out that Democrats might need to flip more than three seats, as President Trump is pushing red states to undertake a rare mid-decade redistricting effort to shore up the slender Republican House majority.

On Wednesday, Republicans in Texas unveiled the first of these efforts: a new map that could flip as many as five seats from blue to red.

It’s still too early to say what might happen beyond Texas. Maybe other Republican states will join; maybe Democrats will retaliate. Obviously, a wider redistricting war could have far greater implications, to say nothing of whether it is healthy for the country. But on its own, while the Texas map makes the Democrats’ path to the House harder, it doesn’t necessarily make it hard. They would still be favored to win the House if the election were held today on the new map, even though they don’t hold a very large lead in the polls….

For another, recent electoral trends have positioned Democrats to win House elections more easily. The Republican advantage in the early 2010s was partly a reflection of the geographic distribution of the Obama coalition, which showed its greatest strength in urban areas where Democrats had already been winning House elections. Since then, Democrats have made big gains in highly educated suburbs, flipping many previously Republican-leaning districts. At the same time, the collapse of the Obama coalition cost Democrats many popular votes in urban and rural areas but didn’t cost them many House seats. Put it together, and today’s congressional map is arguably the most balanced map since the enactment of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Perhaps the easiest way to tell: Democrats barely lost the House popular vote in the last two elections, and they barely lost the chamber. By some measures — including the so-called efficiency gap promoted by redistricting reformers — the current House district map actually leans slightly to the left. By others — including my preferred measures — the map leans slightly to the right.

Either way, the fundamentally balanced House map is the backdrop to the new Texas map. While a few more Republican seats will certainly help the G.O.P., it will take more to give Republicans a major structural advantage in the fight for the House….

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“Texas House panel advances redrawn congressional map that would add more GOP seats”

redistricting

Texas Tribune:

A Texas House panel on Saturday advanced a draft congressional map aimed at adding five new Republican districts next year over protests from Democrats that the proposal would suppress the votes of people of color.

The chamber’s redistricting committee approved the map on party lines, 12 to 6, after spending much of Friday hearing testimony from U.S. House Democrats from Texas and members of the public largely opposed to the plan. The map could be considered by the entire state House as soon as early next week.

Earlier in the hearing, GOP lawmakers said that they are redrawing the state’s congressional map to advantage Republican candidates, setting aside a legal justification offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and making their political motivations explicit for the first time.

“Different from everyone else, I’m telling you, I’m not beating around the bush,” Rep. Todd Hunter, the Corpus Christi Republican carrying the bill, said about the goal of the map. “We have five new districts, and these five new districts are based on political performance.”

Texas Republicans launched the redistricting effort after pressure from President Donald Trump’s political operatives, who demanded state leaders redraw the map to help Republicans maintain their slim House majority ahead of a potentially difficult midterm election.

The House redistricting committee released its proposed redo of the map Wednesday. It slices up districts in the Houston, Austin and the Dallas areas, yielding five additional districts that would have voted for Trump by at least 10 percentage points in 2024. In 2024, Trump won 56.2% of votes in Texas. Under the current lines, Republicans hold 66% of Texas’ 38 House seats. The new map aims to push that share to 79%….

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“Donor List Suggests Scale of Trump’s Pay-for-Access Operation”

campaign finance, campaigns, lobbying

NYT:

When the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Eric Schiermeyer heard that President Trump was holding small group dinners with major donors, he saw opportunity.

Mr. Schiermeyer reached out to a lobbyist with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit, who arranged for him to attend a dinner with the president at his private Mar-a-Lago club on March 1 in exchange for donations to a pro-Trump PAC called MAGA Inc. totaling $1 million.

The personal and corporate donations were among dozens of seven- and eight-figure contributions to MAGA Inc. from crypto and other interests revealed in a campaign finance filing on Thursday night that hinted at the access Mr. Trump accords those willing to pay.

At the dinner, Mr. Schiermeyer, who had never given a federal political donation before, presented an idea for a cryptocurrency called “U.S.A. Token” that would be distributed to every citizen, according to interviews and a flier he distributed to attendees that sets out details of the proposal. He hoped it could be supported through a federal contract with his company.

“I don’t usually put time and attention on politics,” Mr. Schiermeyer said in a text exchange with The New York Times. But, he added, “I was able to say my piece, and the idea is clearly making the rounds, so mission accomplished from my view.”

While the Trump administration has not given Mr. Schiermeyer any indication it is pursuing the U.S.A. Token idea, the episode underscores the face time that Mr. Trump has been willing to grant to deep-pocketed interests seeking business, preferential treatment or protection from him and his administration.

It also reveals how lobbyists, political consultants and others in the influence industry have capitalized on Mr. Trump’s aggressive fund-raising while in office to deliver for clients and earn chits with a president who keeps close tabs on who is delivering cash and listens to their appeals. It is a cycle that has helped Mr. Trump fill the coffers of his political groups, defying the gravity that sometimes drags down the fund-raising of term-limited presidents….

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“The Great Political Money Gap; When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats.”

campaign finance, campaigns

NYT:

There are many signs that the Democratic and Republican Parties are in different places. Here’s one: The main Republican presidential super PAC controls almost $200 million. The main Democratic presidential super PAC is still repaying millions of dollars it accepted from someone who is now a convicted felon.

Such is the state of big-dollar political fund-raising, as last night’s filings with the Federal Election Commission made clear. When it comes to attracting mega-donors, Republicans are crushing Democrats. That could mean a lot more ads for conservatives than for liberals in next year’s midterm elections.

MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC, collected about $177 million in the first half of 2025, in large part from cryptocurrency interests eager to curry favor with Trump.

The corresponding group for Democrats, Future Forward, had a slightly different tie to crypto: It spent the last six months disbursing $3.4 million to what is known as the FTX Recovery Trust, repaying money it had accepted during the 2022 election cycle from crypto-exchange executives like Sam Bankman-Fried. (Last year, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of stealing billions of dollars from his customers.)…

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“Top Biden Aide Had $4 Million Incentive to Secure a 2024 Win”

campaigns

NYT:

Mike Donilon, the longtime strategist and confidant for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., told congressional investigators Thursday that he would have received a $4 million bonus had Mr. Biden won re-election last year.

That shows how Mr. Donilon held a financial interest in Mr. Biden’s remaining in the presidential race, all while Mr. Donilon was part of a very small inner circle of aides who kept damaging information from Mr. Biden. Mr. Donilon had also warned him that his “biggest issue is the perception of age.”

The admission from Mr. Donilon, revealed by a person briefed on his testimony who also confirmed that Mr. Donilon said he was paid $4 million for his work on the campaign, came during testimony before a House Republican-led Oversight Committee investigation into Mr. Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office. It was earlier reported by Axios.

Mr. Donilon was among the Biden aides who resisted calls for him to end his re-election campaign even after a debate performance that prompted a swell of opposition from within the Democratic Party. As recently as March, well after Mr. Biden left office, Mr. Donilon told The Harvard Political Review that Mr. Biden should have remained in the race and could still serve as president. “I still think he’s the best person to be president today,” Mr. Donilon said then….

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Breaking: Supreme Court, in Order Asking for Additional Briefing in Louisiana Voting Case, Appears to Put the Constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act into Question

Supreme Court, Voting Rights Act

The Supreme Court just issued this order:

Louisiana had to create that second majority-minority district in order to comply with the Voting Rights Act, as it had been found to face Section 2 VRA liability for not creating that district. What the Court seems to be asking, without directly saying it, is whether Section 2 of the VRA, at least as to how it has been applied to require the creation of majority-minority districts in some circumstances, violates a colorblind understanding of the Constitution.

The stakes here are enormous; I was worried the Court would put the VRA’s constitutionality into question when there was this great delay in the Court ordering supplemental briefing. Something big was happening behind the scenes. And now we know.

This Court is more conservative than the Court that in 2013 struck down the other main pillar of the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. This is a big, and dangerous, step toward knocking down the second pillar.

There was a LOOOOONG delay in SCOTUS issuing the supplemental briefing order, burying it after 5 pm on a Friday in August rather than at the end of the Supreme Court term when everyone was paying attention.

UPDATE: Page 36-38 of appellees’s brief, referenced in the order above, make it clear that Section 2’s constitutionality is being put into question:

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“Eligible Voters at Risk: Examining Changes to USCIS’s SAVE System.”

election administration

New issue brief from the Fair Elections Center:

Changes fueled by election-denier conspiracy theories are in the works for a system created by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) nearly forty years ago to verify citizenship status and legal presence in the United States. DHS recently announced major modifications to its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE, for the state and local election agencies that use it in the voting context (not to be confused with the anti-voter SAVE Act which is pending in Congress and fueled by the same conspiracy theories ). Most significantly, state and local agencies can now query the system using Social Security numbers and submit queries in bulk uploads. Though technical in nature, these changes may impact voters across the country, especially as more states sign up to use the retooled system.

The SAVE system is administered by DHS via U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”). Originally created by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and then expanded by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the SAVE system is used to verify or determine citizenship in response to inquiries from federal, state, and local officials, usually related to applications for public benefits. In recent years, state and local election officials in certain states have used SAVE to verify the citizenship of voter registrants and currently registered voters who provide a DHS-issued immigration identifier. User agencies sign a memorandum of agreement (“MOA”) with USCIS and, in the past, were charged a fee for each case they submitted to SAVE. Prior to the Trump administration, ten states had MOAs to use SAVE for voter registration and/or list maintenance purposes: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia….

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“Forged signatures found on Mayor Adams’ petitions to run as an independent”

ballot access, chicanery

Gothamist:

Mayor Eric Adams’ re-election campaign submitted faked and fraudulently obtained petition signatures in his effort to secure a spot on the November ballot as an independent candidate, a Gothamist investigation has found.

Gothamist reviewed signatures submitted from across New York City and found people who said their names were forged, as well as people who said they were deceived into signing the petitions. In at least three instances, the campaign turned in signatures from dead people.

Under state law, Adams needed to submit at least 7,500 signatures from voters who wanted him on the general election ballot as an independent. The tactic enabled the incumbent mayor to avoid a crowded Democratic primary race that was shaping up as a referendum on the federal corruption charges he once faced and his growing ties to President Donald Trump.

The Adams campaign hired several companies to deploy employees across the city and gather signatures of registered voters in New York City who supported the mayor’s re-election.

Signature gatherers were required to sign a form pledging that each signature they collected was from the person whose name appeared on the sheet. But an executive from one company said he also warned the Adams campaign that it should run additional quality control measures – a suggestion he said the campaign rejected. In response to Gothamist’s inquiries, the campaign said it expected the companies it hired to follow the law but nevertheless pledged to now conduct its own review of the signatures….

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Alaska Supreme Court Finally Explains Its Ballot Access Order from September 2024 in Divided Decision

ballot access

Alaska Democratic Party v. Beecher:

This case concerns a challenge to the Alaska Division of Elections’ inclusion of Eric Hafner — a federal prisoner in New York — as one of the four candidates on the 2024 general election ballot for the United States House of Representatives. Hafner finished in sixth place during the open primary under rankedchoice voting, but the Division elevated him to appear on the general election ballot after two of the top-four primary candidates timely withdrew. The Alaska Democratic Party and Anita Thorne, a registered Democrat (collectively ADP), argue that Hafner cannot be elevated to the general election ballot because Alaska law allows a single replacement for a withdrawn candidate: the fifth-place candidate in the primary election. The superior court rejected ADP’s claims for injunctive and declaratory relief.
Due to the time-sensitive nature of election appeals, we affirmed the superior court in a short order dated September 12, 2024. We now explain our reasoning in full, holding that the laws establishing ranked-choice voting require successive replacements on the general election ballot if more than one top-four primary candidate timely withdraws and additional primary candidates are available as replacements.

The majority relied in part upon Alaska’s particularly strong use of the democracy canon.

From the single-justice dissent:

“Fifth” has a clear meaning — the one that comes after the fourth. And the statute fixes its application to “the candidate . . . in the primary election.” The “candidate who received the fifth most votes in the primary election” therefore clearly means the candidate who received the next highest number of votes in the primary election after the candidate who received the fourth highest number. I fail to see “the facial ambiguity in the statute”2 that the court identifies as the reason to undertake its circular journey through principles of statutory interpretation to arrive at its starting point of the ambiguity it posited. I respectfully dissent.

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