The California Secretary of State questions authority of DOJ to send monitors to 5 California Counties:
The CA GOP released a letter citing supposed irregularities in the 5 California counties that formed its purported basis for “requesting” DOJ monitors.
Despite the announcement and concern, this seems very modest:
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who has clashed with President Donald Trump, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury in Virginia, three sources familiar with the matter confirmed to NBC News.
James was charged with one count of bank fraud after Trump publicly called for his Justice Department appointees to bring charges against her.
As NBC News reported in August, Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed a special attorney to probe mortgage fraud allegations against the New York attorney general, who brought a successful civil fraud case against President Donald Trump before he retook the presidency. Though the text of the indictment is not yet public, the bank fraud charge appears to be related to the mortgage claims.
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte had referred the case to the Justice Department, alleging that James had made false statements on mortgage loan applications. But the case hit a standstill last month because federal agents and prosecutors didn’t believe they had the evidence to secure a conviction, two senior federal law enforcement officials told NBC News last month.
Trump then named one of his personal attorneys, Lindsey Halligan, to be acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, though she lacked any prosecutorial experience.
Trump has repeatedly sought charges against his political enemies, including James and former FBI Director James Comey, who was indicted in September on charges of lying to Congress and obstructing a congressional proceeding.
Emily Bazelon for the NYT:
Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.
A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”
Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. “What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.
We recently returned to our group with a new survey and follow-up interviews about Trump’s impact on the rule of law since retaking office. The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House. Just as chillingly, the new survey reflects near consensus that most of the guardrails inside and outside the Justice Department, which in the past counterbalanced executive power, have all but fallen away. The indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Trump ordered the Justice Department to charge, represents a misuse of power for many of our respondents that they hoped never to see in the United States.
These respondents include former attorneys general, solicitors general and their deputies in the Justice Department and White House counsels, as well as former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country. (Forty-two people who took the survey last year did so again, and we added eight more to replace those who did not. The group is again evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.) Some of the former officials we surveyed, in both parties, are speaking out against the wrongs they see unfolding despite the professional and personal risks.
But many of them — more so than last year — don’t want to speak on the record. These are people with stature in their world, custodians of the American Bar who have represented clients of all stripes, taught law students, served on professional committees. But now they’re worried about retribution, for their law firms or their family members, if they draw Trump’s ire.
Our new survey channeled their collectively grim state of mind. All but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election….
On Tuesday, a group of nonprofits and private citizens sued DHS, SSA, and DOJ, alleging “a months-long campaign to access, collect, and consolidate vast troves of personal data about millions of U.S. citizens and residents stored at multiple federal agencies,” centralized at a USCIS “data lake.”
Per the complaint, this includes the pooling of data in the immigration-related SAVE database and distinct Social Security records (which NPR was on top of from the beginning), along with the voter rolls that DOJ’s been after and DOGE teams thrown in the mix. And on both the voter file side and the SAVE side, the complaint asserts (inter alia) violations of the Privacy Act along the same lines I’d been flagging.
This is a case to watch.
This morning, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed six new lawsuits, against states that have refused to give DOJ copies of the voter file complete with sensitive information like SSN digits (and, not for nothing, data on individuals’ party registration). The litigation was filed against California, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania (the complaints are linked in the press release) — joining suits filed a few days ago against Maine and Oregon.
As with Maine and Oregon, while nobody likes getting sued, I think this litigation is likely to be a good thing — now there will be federal judges carefully examining the claims that DOJ has made about its authority under specific statutes, and truly putting them to the test. I also think the breadth of the litigation is likely to be a good thing, as it enables that conversation in the context of the DOJ’s reported attempt to acquire a national voter file – having eight states sued at once makes that context more present.
I’ve not been shy about my feelings about the merits of the DOJ’s demands under HAVA or the NVRA or the CRA, or about what I still think are grievously unanswered questions about Privacy Act lapses subjecting DOJ officials to criminal liability. (See, for example, here, here, and here.) Now there are eight opportunities for federal judges to decide whether those concerns are right or wrong — and eight reasons for other states to wait for the courts rather than rush to comply with an unwarranted demand — and I think that’s also a good thing. (And even if the states lose, having disclosure driven by court order — including the potential for court-supervised confidentiality protections otherwise unavailable in just responding to a DOJ letter — also seems like a win.)
Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian for MSNBC News:
In an undercover operation last year, the FBI recorded Tom Homan, now the White House border czar, accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents — who were posing as business executives — win government contracts in a second Trump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.
The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled soon after Donald Trump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Trump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the case, two of the people said.
It’s unclear what reasons FBI and Justice Department officials gave for shutting down the investigation. But a Trump Justice Department appointee called the case a “deep state” probe in early 2025 and no further investigative steps were taken, the sources say….
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, however, in either late January or February 2025, former acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove was briefed on the case and told Justice Department officials he did not support the investigation, according to two people familiar with the case.
Around the same time, the Public Integrity Section was battling with Bove over his demand that they dismiss a bribery case against New York Mayor Eric Adams. The section’s supervisors, who would resign one by one in February rather than agree to dismiss the Adams case, had assigned a top supervisor to help oversee the Homan case with federal prosecutors in the Western District of Texas, where the investigation began, two people said….
Undercover FBI agents posing as contractors communicated and met several times last summer with a business colleague who introduced them to Homan, and with Homan himself, who indicated he would facilitate securing contracts for them in exchange for money once he was in office, according to documents and the people familiar with the case.
On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.
FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors took no further investigative steps in the final months of 2024, the people said, and expected to keep monitoring Homan to determine if he landed an official role and would make good on steering contracts in a future Trump administration….
Justin again. On Wednesday, Ned linked to two new lawsuits DOJ filed in Oregon (here’s the complaint) and Maine (here’s the complaint) over DOJ’s demand to get full copies of the voter files. Though it’s never a great feeling to be sued, I’m glad these suits were filed. Because I think the litigation is likely to show exactly why Oregon and Maine have been right to push back against DOJ’s demands. The Privacy Act still seems like a giant red flag to me.
Leave aside, for a second, the flawed factual predicate in both complaints, which includes an insinuation of wrongdoing based on a repeatedly debunked apples-to-oranges methodology, comparing a pinpoint number of registrants on the file to a multi-year census estimate of eligible locals. (A summary of the problems with the comparison: these aren’t measures of the same information, they’re not measures of the same time range, they’re comparing a snapshot to a survey estimate, and they don’t account for the law. Which is why a federal court said 7 years ago that the disparate data sets do not allow for an accurate comparison and did not amount to credible evidence of wrongdoing, and why the 11th Circuit affirmed that conclusion.)
The real fight here isn’t over inadequate list maintenance. It’s about getting access to the lists themselves.
I’ve written about these DOJ demands for the lists before (for starters, here and here), trying to explain why they’re not particularly useful in enforcing the parts of the statutes the Civil Rights Division says it needs them to enforce. There’s new reporting that indicates DOJ may be after the information for an entirely different reason: to give it to DHS for immigration probes (though that’s likely to be a conspicuously target-poor environment for DHS). The Civil Rights Division hasn’t mentioned that little detail in its demands to the states.
But the real sticking point for me is the Privacy Act, which I think affirmatively precludes the DOJ from getting the voter files until it answers some basic questions about who would have access to what information for what purpose. (Indeed, the Privacy Act makes it a federal crime to collect the info first and explain later.)
The DOJ has been demanding these files with such confidence that I’ve been wondering whether there’s some not-visible-to-outsiders internal document that relieves those Privacy Act concerns. Both the Oregon complaint and the Maine complaint begin to lay out DOJ’s response to why it’s complying with the Privacy Act. And if what they said is all they got, that’s an awful lot of confidence without the substance to back it up.
In the complaints, most of the DOJ responses on the Privacy Act (including their citation of a website for voluntary reports by individual citizens of civil rights violations) are non sequiturs: they just don’t answer the question. But the DOJ does mention the “systems of records notices” – the disclosure required under the Privacy Act – that it thinks authorize grabbing the voter files. (Here, here, and here.) There’s only one that’s even plausibly relevant: it’s the one that allows the Civil Rights Division (CRT) to keep general info on targets, victims, and witnesses associated with their cases. The notice is pretty straightforward, and its roots go back to 1975 (when the information was stored “on index cards and file jackets”).
It’s not hard to understand why law enforcement needs to keep some information on people for cases involving people. Here’s the unedited description of the “individuals covered by the system” that DOJ has provided to the public:
These persons may include: Subjects of investigations, victims, potential witnesses, individuals of Japanese ancestry who were eligible, or potentially eligible, for restitution benefits as a result of their evacuation, relocation, or internment during World War II, and representatives on behalf of individuals and other correspondents on subjects directed or referred to CRT or other persons or organizations referred to CRT in potential or actual cases and matters of concern to CRT, and CRT employees who handle complaints, cases or matters of concern to CRT.
You know who’s not in that list? Voters who are innocent bystanders for all of this nonsense. The 3 million people in the Oregon voter registration file and the 1 million people in the Maine voter registration file aren’t targets, victims, or witnesses of a civil rights investigation. Before the DOJ “explained” itself, I was wondering where DOJ ever notified the public that it’s going to be collecting all those voters’ information. After the DOJ “explained” itself, I’m still left wondering where DOJ ever notified the public that it’s going to be collecting all those voters’ information.
Read the public notice for yourself, and see whether you think it offers fair notice that the Civil Rights Division plans on building a database to collect the personal information of every voter in the country, including not just SSN digits and dates of birth but party registration. The notice DOJ issued decades ago (and updated periodically in the interim) isn’t built to authorize fishing expeditions. It’s built for individual records pertinent to an individualized investigation. Because that’s actually the individualized information DOJ needs when it’s doing its real job.
I suspect that the states resisting DOJ’s demands are going to respond, in part, by saying that they’ve got the right (and responsibility) to decline to abet DOJ’s violation of federal law. That, in turn, means that the DOJ is likely to have to defend its compliance with the Privacy Act in court, with federal judges probing whether they’ve done their homework. And that is a resolution I think Oregon and Maine – and their citizens – are likely to welcome.
Bizarro World continues:
The rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, secured a shocking double victory this year.
President Trump granted them clemency for their crimes on his first day back in the White House, and in the months that followed, he allowed his Justice Department to purge many of the federal agents and prosecutors who sought to hold them accountable.
But even though the president has given the rioters their freedom and has taken steps toward satisfying their desire for retribution, they are asking for more. In the past several weeks, the rioters and their lawyers have pushed the Trump administration to pay them restitution for what they believe were unfair prosecutions.
On Thursday, one of the lawyers, Mark McCloskey, said during a public meeting on social media that he had recently met with top officials at the Justice Department and pitched them on a plan to create a special panel that would dole out financial damages to the rioters — much like the arrangement of a special master to award money to the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The panel, which Mr. McCloskey called a “voluntary nonjudicial resolution committee,” would consider rioters’ cases individually, he said, then assign them sums according to harms they had purportedly suffered at the hands of the federal government.
Mr. McCloskey said that he wanted the panel to be overseen by Jeanine Pirro, who runs the federal prosecutors’ office in Washington that took the lead in filing charges against nearly 1,600 rioters who joined in the Capitol attack.
“The only thing I can do as your lawyer,” he told the rioters who were at the online meeting, “is to turn your losses into dollar bills.”
Neither Ms. Pirro nor a spokesman for the Justice Department responded on Sunday to messages seeking comment on Mr. McCloskey’s plan, and it remains unclear how seriously top administration officials are taking it….
Emil Bove III, a senior Trump administration official, was narrowly confirmed last month to serve as an appeals court judge, brushing past a bitter confirmation fight despite concerns that he would carry out the president’s directives while on the federal bench.
Still, Mr. Bove has continued to work at the Justice Department, appearing just last week at a department event to celebrate the crime-fighting takeover of the Washington police, according to video of the gathering. It was just one instance of Mr. Bove’s presence at the department, where he has also attended meetings, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the department’s inner workings.
The code of conduct for federal judges does not appear to apply to Mr. Bove, who court records show has yet to be sworn in. But the fact that he has remained at the Justice Department has raised eyebrows. Some legal experts said that working for the administration after being confirmed could undermine faith in the court system. Others expressed worry that Mr. Bove could expose himself to potential conflicts, advising Justice Department officials on matters that may eventually land before him as a federal judge.
“What the rules protect is public trust and confidence in the independence of the judiciary, which is of great value to the country, whether or not there is anything else that is untoward,” said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s law school. “Socializing with Trump is fine. Advising Trump is not fine. Putting himself physically in a place where it looks like he is identifying with the president’s political agenda is not fine.”…
Pursuing a theory promoted by Trump loyalists, the Justice Department is investigating whether F.B.I. officials during and after the Biden administration tried to hide or secretly destroy documents that might cast doubt on the earlier inquiry into Russia’s attempt to tilt the 2016 election in President Trump’s favor, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
The steps taken by the Justice Department are the latest in a series of efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to impugn the Russia investigation, which the president sees as having been a partisan witch hunt that unfairly dogged him throughout his first term.
The new inquiry seeks to determine if senior F.B.I. officials spent years working to cover up the supposed misdeeds of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time of the Russia investigation, and John O. Brennan, who was then the C.I.A. director, after the two men left government by squirreling away potentially damaging classified documents.
The disclosures bring into sharper focus how Kash Patel, now the F.B.I. director, is intent on substantiating longstanding claims Mr. Trump has peddled to his base that he was framed by the Obama administration. Under Mr. Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, the bureau has moved to oust employees they believe are disloyal or who have worked on investigations into Mr. Trump….
The lawyer took the elevator 32 floors to the U.S. attorney’s office, where for eight years he had worked as a highly regarded prosecutor. He had a container of homemade chocolate chip cookies to share and some thoughts to keep to himself.
“You have to be polite,” the lawyer, Michael Gordon, explained as the elevator rose. “But I don’t want to minimize it, or make it seem like everything’s OK. It’s not.”
Mr. Gordon was heading up on this steaming late July day in Tampa, Fla., to collect his things and say goodbye. Three weeks earlier, and just two days after receiving yet another outstanding performance review, he had been interviewing a witness online when a grim-faced colleague interrupted to hand him a letter. It said he was being “removed from federal service effective immediately” — as in, now.
Although the brief letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, provided no justification, Mr. Gordon knew the likely reason: Jan. 6, 2021.
He was being fired for successfully prosecuting people who had stormed the United States Capitol that day — assaulting police officers, vandalizing a national landmark and disrupting that sacrosanct moment in a democracy, the transfer of presidential power.
He was being fired for doing his job.
The letter did more than inform Mr. Gordon, a 47-year-old father of two, that he was unemployed. It confirmed for him his view that the Justice Department he had been honored to work for was now helping to whitewash a traumatic event in American history, supporting President Trump’s reframing of its violence as patriotic — and those who had prosecuted rioters in the name of justice as villains, perhaps even traitors….
In the seven months since Mr. Trump, newly returned to the White House, granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people charged in the largest criminal investigation in Justice Department history, his administration has turned the agency upside down….
To date, the Justice Department has fired or demoted more than two dozen prosecutors who were assigned to hold the rioters accountable — roughly a quarter of the complement. Some were junior prosecutors, like Sara Levine, who had secured a guilty plea from a rioter who had grabbed a police officer. Others were veterans, including Greg Rosen, who had led the department’s Jan. 6 task force. Scores more prosecutors, involved in these and other cases, have left, either in fear of where the ax might next fall or out of sheer disgust.
The Justice Department declined to comment for this article, but a White House spokesman, Harrison Fields, described the agency during the Biden administration as “a cabal of anti-Trump sycophants” engaged in a “relentless pursuit to throw the book at President Trump and his allies.” By “uprooting the foot soldiers,” Mr. Fields added, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Ms. Bondi, “is restoring the integrity of the department.”
And so Mr. Gordon. As the elevator climbed, he braced himself. In an interview the day before, he had talked about what had happened to him and many of his colleagues from the Justice Department’s once-vital and now-defunct Capitol Siege Section. Disbelief colored his every word.
“When you stand up in court and say, ‘Mike Gordon for the United States,’ you don’t say, ‘Mike Gordon for Donald Trump,’” he had said, adding: “I’m standing up there, and I’m speaking for the government. For all the people of the country.”…
You can find the government’s brief on the merits here. You can find the brief of the Republican Party making similar arguments here. Because the government has taken the unusual position in attacking the constitutionality of a law passed by Congress, the Court appointed an amicus to argue in favor of the law’s constitutionality. The Democratic Party also intervened to defend the law. Their briefs will be filed later.
The Republican Party brief cites a blog post by Rick Pildes and Bob Bauer, The Supreme Court, the Political Parties, and the SuperPACs, ELECTION LAW BLOG (June 24, 2025).
A month ago, I noted that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had sent demands to a bunch of states for copies of the voter files. These letters were pretty unusual. I didn’t think DOJ’s ostensible rationale for demanding the files made much sense. I didn’t think the statutes DOJ cited entitled them to the information they were demanding. Indeed, I thought federal law precluded DOJ from amassing this information (at least until they do some more homework).
Now the Civil Rights Division is out with a new letter (as before, it’s not clear how many states were recipients, but it seems to be widespread, and perhaps national). The new letter is from the head of the Civil Rights Division, Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon (previous iterations were from the acting chief of the Voting Section). It cites some different statutes. But it’s not ultimately more persuasive on any of the points above.
It sure looks like the Civil Rights Division is trying to do what the Pence-Kobach Commission failed to do eight years ago: assemble a national voter file. (Why? I’m not sure. And that’s part of the problem. I’ve got guesses, but federal law says I don’t have to guess. Before the federal government does something like this, it has to explain itself.) I thought that was likely illegal then, and I think it’s still likely illegal now.
What follows takes a closer look at these new letters. (It’s a longer analysis, so I’ve tucked the good stuff away under the headers below.)
The NVRA and HAVA each require states to conduct general programs of list maintenance that make reasonable efforts to clean the rolls. (Here’s the NVRA version, here’s the HAVA version.) There are more specific provisions in each statute protecting against inaccurate overcleaning: list maintenance comes with a thumb on the scales for not tossing potentially eligible voters if you’re not sure. But the main point is that both statutes put list maintenance firmly in the hands of the states, and in that endeavor, both require reasonable maintenance procedures, not record-by-record assurance that every ineligible voter is removed.
The new letters offer a very different vision. “In charging the Attorney General with enforcement of the voter registration list requirements in HAVA and in the NVRA, Congress plainly intended that DOJ be able to conduct an independent review of each state’s list.” Not just a review of a state’s general program of list maintenance – a review of each state’s list. Each state’s list. That staggering assertion of federal intervention comes with no citation to any specific statutory provision, and is not supported by any that I’m aware of (nor any historical DOJ practice, nor any judicial precedent). But the Civil Rights Division thinks it so important that it copied the sentence twice, verbatim, in a 2½-page letter. Maybe they think repeating it makes it seem truthier?
If the Civil Rights Division were focused instead on the actual language of the statute, they’d recognize that the responsibility they actually have is reviewing a state’s general program of list maintenance. That means that it’s entirely legit to ask questions about state procedures for cleaning the rolls, and even to ask for statistics that might touch on those procedures’ efficacy. (While federal law puts some constraints on collecting personal voter information – see below – it’s entirely agnostic about DOJ questions on procedures and stats.) But data on particular individuals isn’t particularly helpful in enforcing the NVRA/HAVA provisions the letters cite. Knowing whether “Justin Levitt” is on the voter rolls in a particular state, and knowing Levitt’s Social Security digits, isn’t especially responsive to whether that state has or doesn’t have the general program required by statute.
Earlier versions of the gimme-all-your-data letter focused on the NVRA’s provision for public access to the voter rolls, which has been repeatedly construed to allow states to keep sensitive info (like Social Security digits) private even while requiring public disclosure of a lot of other material. The new letter makes clear that the Civil Rights Division wants all fields – which, again, the letter says twice, because then you know it’s serious. And the new letter cites a different source of authority: the Civil Rights Act of 1960. But that statute doesn’t do what DOJ wants it to do either.
The Civil Rights Act of 1960 has a provision that requires election officials to keep election-related records for 22 months. And it has a provision that authorizes the Attorney General to ask to inspect, reproduce, or copy any such record (which is cited in the letter), with a written note explaining the basis and the purpose for the demand (which is not cited in the letter).
There’s admittedly not a ton of caselaw on this provision, and what little there is was developed around Southern jurisdictions at a time when records involved less personal data and more blatant discrimination. But I’ve always thought of the retention provision like a litigation hold: election officials, don’t throw anything out for 22 months, in case there’s a problem. If DOJ has reason to believe there was a problem, it may come asking for specific records later. The litigation hold is for everything, but any particular DOJ request from that universe isn’t automatically coextensive with “everything”: each request has to have not merely a “purpose,” but also – and separately under the statute, lest it be mere surplusage – a “basis.” That’s a little like probable cause — it’s not terribly demanding (the articulation in an internal justification memo for opening an investigation in the first instance would normally more than suffice), and properly gives a lot of latitude to the government, but “I’m just curious” isn’t enough.
And this all makes sense, given the recordkeeping environment of 1960. If the Civil Rights Division had reason to believe that particular eligible voters had been denied the right to vote, it’s clear that this provision authorized the Division to go look up their registration cards and go look at the pollbooks to see if they checked in. But it’s just as clear to me that this provision didn’t authorize DOJ to collect copies of all of the registration cards from all of the states — “each state’s list” — to go fishing to see what they could find. Such a demand wouldn’t have the “basis” the statute requires.
Everything above is about why the statutes in the letter don’t authorize the Civil Rights Division to get what it wants. But there’s a different federal statute that I think affirmatively prevents the DOJ from getting what it wants, and the statutes above have to be read in light of that statute too.
That statute is the Privacy Act of 1974. It says that before the federal government collects records on individuals, the government has to facilitate a public conversation – a Federal Register notice and notification to congressional committees — about what information it plans to collect, why it needs the information, who has access, and the like. That’s 5 U.S.C. § 552a(e)(4) and 552a(r). Federal officials who collect info on Americans without this public notice are committing a federal crime. State officials who intend to help the Civil Rights Division blow past this notice requirement may be abetting that crime.
The new letters mention a totally different part of the Privacy Act, and otherwise make some noises about privacy, but those are mostly non sequiturs. I still haven’t seen any indication that the Civil Rights Division has done the homework the Privacy Act requires to collect the voter files. They’ve provided notices on some information the Division maintains in the course of regular enforcement work: enforcing civil rights means you’ll collect some info about victims and targets and witnesses. But none of those notices fairly flag that the Division plans to accumulate a national voter file, with the personal information (and First Amendment activity) of Americans who aren’t any of the above.
The Privacy Act isn’t just a process barrier of its own. It also provides important context for understanding the litigation-hold provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1960. Given increasing congressional skepticism of federal government acquisition of Americans’ personal data in 1974, it would be deeply weird (not to mention ahistorical) to read the 1960 statute to override the careful constraints in the Privacy Act, giving the Civil Rights Division the authority to vacuum up information on more than 155 million voters, without any individualized “basis” and in service of an invented federal power to double-check every state’s list. Instead, reading the two statutes together helps confirm that the Civil Rights Act authority is as we thought it was: authorizing the AG to get specific information where there’s reason to believe there was a particularized problem in an election within the last 22 months.