Politico:

President Donald Trump’s retribution campaign against his political adversaries could soon hit the Senate — and lawmakers are already bracing for impact.

After securing the indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, Trump has his sights set on Sen. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who as a member of the House managed the president’s first impeachment trial.

If Schiff ends up indicted on allegations of mortgage fraud — a charge he has vehemently denied — or for any other claim, it would mark an unprecedented escalation for Trump to target an outspoken political adversary who is also a federal elected official.

As Schiff solicits dollars for a legal defense fund and builds an expansive political operation prepared to do damage control around any potential charges, Schiff’s Democratic colleagues in Congress are increasingly anxious about their own vulnerability. They are also frustrated with the unwillingness of Republican senators to speak out on Schiff’s behalf.

“I’ve spoken to a number of Republicans, and they are certainly disquieted, if not dismayed, by the increasing weaponization of the Department of Justice,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “Because it tears down the norms and rule of law that protects them and all Americans, as well as Adam Schiff and Democrats who may be targeted by Trump.”…

NYT:

Far-right influencers have been hinting in recent weeks that they have finally found a venue — Miami — and a federal prosecutor — Jason A. Reding Quiñones — to pursue long-promised charges of a “grand conspiracy” against President Trump’s adversaries.

Their theory of the case, still unsupported by the evidence: A cabal of Democrats and “deep-state” operatives, possibly led by former President Barack Obama, has worked to destroy Mr. Trump in a yearslong plot spanning the inquiry into his 2016 campaign to the charges he faced after leaving office.

But that narrative, which has been promoted in general terms by Mr. Trump and taken root online, has emerged in a nascent but widening federal investigation.

Last week, Mr. Reding Quiñones, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, issued more than two dozen subpoenas, including to officials who took part in the inquiry into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter….

Whether the subpoenas will lead to charges, much less to convictions, is impossible to know. But merely creating an aura of criminality around Trump foes by celebrating incremental prosecutorial moves is a trophy in itself to die-hard Trump supporters, who have said that naming and shaming targets is a legitimate aim of law enforcement.

“Justice is coming,” Mike Davis, an influential former Republican Senate staff aide who has prodded the Justice Department to use Florida as an arena for anti-Trump conspiracy cases, wrote on social media on Friday. His message was accompanied by a photo of himself with a smiling Mr. Reding Quiñones.

Mr. Reding Quiñones, a military veteran, has pursued his mandate to hunt down Mr. Trump’s foes with a gung-ho attitude that has endeared him to the president and the small but influential cadre of loyalists pushing hardest for prosecutions….

Sigh:

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers has claimed, at events in recent weeks, that a single van carrying ballots in Detroit “swung” his 2024 race against Democrat Elissa Slotkin, according to two videos of remarks reviewed by The Detroit News.

During a speech in Muskegon on Oct. 17, Rogers spoke about a van in Detroit “showing up” at about 5:30 a.m. on the morning after Election Day with ballots. When Rogers said the word “ballots,” he made an air quote gesture with his left hand…..

NYT:

When the Justice Department announced a week and half ago that it would send monitors to watch California’s elections, it didn’t say who exactly would be doing the monitoring.

For Orange County, a populous and ethnically diverse area south of Los Angeles, the administration tapped Michael Gates, a lawyer with a history of questioning the county’s voting procedures.

For years, Mr. Gates worked as the city attorney for the Orange County community of Huntington Beach, where in 2024 he helped pass the first local voter identification law in the state. When the California attorney general and secretary of state sued, saying that the city’s law conflicted with state election laws, Mr. Gates defended the city in court.

In February, Mr. Gates was appointed deputy assistant attorney general in the federal Justice Department’s civil rights division. Shortly afterward, the department sued election officials in Orange County, alleging that noncitizen immigrants were receiving mail-in ballots and voting. The Department of Justice filed the lawsuit after the county registrar refused to release unredacted voting records and registration information for alleged noncitizen voters.

Local election officials said this week that the Justice Department had informed them that Mr. Gates and an assistant U.S. attorney, Cory Webster, would be serving as election observers in Orange County. Mr. Webster was hired as a U.S. attorney late last year….

It was unclear precisely how Mr. Gates and Mr. Webster were observing the election in a county with nearly two million voters. But Democrats questioned Mr. Gates’s ability to be a fair and impartial monitor.

Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, said he planned to send his own monitors to guard against any voter intimidation. And the state Democratic Party sent out more than 2,000 of its own observers — a record number of volunteers in the role — and had about 150 lawyers stationed around the state. While some Democratic officials were worried about voter intimidation, several said that they were more concerned about what the federal officials would say after the election.

“If they so much as blink at anything like voter interference, they will find themselves in parking lot or in jail,” said Justin Levitt, who served in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration. “But I think they will continue to sow doubt without any evidence.” Mr. Levitt said that as a political appointee, he would not have taken such a role in monitoring elections….

NYT with the subhed: “Prominent conservatives, including the president, sounded familiar alarms about voter suppression and other efforts to manipulate the vote on Election Day, without presenting evidence.”

From the body:

The reflex to declare interference shows how much the conduct of elections continues to animate Republican politics — at least in races where the party’s candidates could be headed to defeat.

Before the polls even opened on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called a vote in California to redraw congressional districts ahead of next year’s midterm elections, as Texas and other Republican-controlled states have done, “a GIANT SCAM.”

“The entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,” Mr. Trump declared without citing anything to support the claim. He suggested that Republicans were somehow “shut out” of mail-in voting, warning that a “serious legal and criminal review” was on the way. Mr. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting, but it was not clear what he meant by a review.

There is little evidence that significant voter fraud is, or has been, a problem in California. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization, lists only a single case in 2024 in its “election fraud map” and only 69 cases since 1982.

he White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters on Tuesday that the state’s practice of allowing everyone to vote by mail was “ripe for fraud.”

Asked at the White House for evidence, she cited, “fraudulent ballots that are being mailed in in the names of other people and the names of illegal aliens who shouldn’t be voting in American elections.” A White House official, when asked by email for examples, repeated many of the claims about potential, though not real, fraud, and cited a Department of Justice lawsuit against the state saying it reported finding more than two million duplicate registrations, while seven counties did not report duplicates. The lawsuit does not claim any of the duplicates resulted in duplicate votes.

Ms. Leavitt said preparations for an executive order on elections were underway but did not detail what review Mr. Trump referred to. The Justice Department sent election observers to five counties in California, but by midday there were no immediate reports of problems with voting. Polls have suggested that the redistricting measure, called Proposition 50, is likely to pass.…

WaPo:

President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat at the ballot box in 2020 is becoming a stark dividing line in the Georgia governor’s race, where Republicans who fractured into warring factionsover the failed push in the state are now facing off in a major midterm contest.

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones (R), a top Trump ally in trying to overturn the election, is running with the president’s endorsement and attacking his primary rivals as disloyal to Trump. One such opponent, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), rebuffed Trump’s extraordinary pressure to “find” enough votes to make up his 2020 deficit. Another, Attorney General Chris Carr, opposed a lawsuit challenging the results in Georgia and other states. Former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, who also pushed back against Trump and eventually quit the Republican Party, is running as a Democrat and plansto bring up the explosive chapter as he seeks his party’s nomination.

“Certainly I’m going to talk about it. It’s why I’m here. It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big reason,” Duncan said in an interview. “When your wife gets death threats because you’re sitting on TV just telling the truth about an election, that’s a problem.”

Duncan said the question of how politicians handled the aftermath of the 2020 election in Georgia is a litmus test for “how truthful someone’s willing to be.”…

Jacqueline Sweet & Marisa Kabas:

Jack Posobiec is very concerned about voter fraud. An influential MAGA voice and prominent conspiracy theorist, he’s perhaps best known for amplifying the 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy, which culminated in a man firing a gun in a D.C. pizza restaurant. In the years since, Posobiec has loudly espoused a range of debunked conspiracy theories. That includes the GOP theory—once semi-fringe and now thoroughly MAGA mainstreamed—that Democrats have won elections via millions of fraudulent votes. The Republican National Committee last fall enlisted him to speak to poll watchers about election security. Posobiec is particularly focused on Pennsylvania, repeatedly accusing the state’s Democratic officials of fraud, even spreading conspiracy theories that were followed by an RNC lawsuit.

The focus on voter fraud in Pennsylvania is particularly ironic because it sure looks like, and a trail of documentation suggests, that Posobiec is living in Maryland but voting in Pennsylvania. If so, that would be a violation of voting laws, experts say.

The 40-year-old Posobiec has voted in Pennsylvania elections from 2004 to 2024, both in person and by mail, according to a copy of his voting record viewed by Slate and the Handbasket. Until 2016, Posobiec used military and civilian overseas ballots. After resigning from his job as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer in 2017, he remained in Maryland while becoming a full-time influencer and political activist with groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. He continued voting in Pennsylvania via absentee ballots and, later, in-person on-demand mail voting, using his parents’ home address in 2018, 2022, and 2024, according to an official copy of his voter information file from Montgomery County obtained through a right-to-know request.

There’s nothing untoward about any of that, provided Posobiec actually lives in Pennsylvania. But the evidence is extremely strong that he doesn’t. Instead, it suggests that, despite growing up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, Posobiec has lived in Maryland for almost a decade….

The Guardian:

MyPillow founder Mike Lindell defamed the election technology company Smartmatic with false statements that its voting machines helped rig the 2020 presidential election, a federal judge in Minnesota ruled recently.

But US district judge Jeffrey Bryan deferred until future proceedings the question of whether Lindell – one of the country’s most prominent propagators of false claims that the 2020 election was a fraud – acted with the “actual malice” that Smartmatic still needs to prove to collect any damages.

The judge said there are “genuine fact disputes” as to whether Lindell’s statements were made “with knowledge that they were false or made with reckless disregard to their falsity”. He noted that the defense says Lindell has an “unwavering belief” that his statements were truthful….