“DOJ Voting Section Has Just Three Lawyers Left, Watchdog Estimates”

Department of Justice

Democracy Docket:

The voting section of the U.S. Department of Justice has only three attorneys left on staff, according to an estimate provided by a group working to support the department’s remaining staff.

It’s a severe reduction in the voting section since the start of the Trump administration in January, when it had an estimated 30 attorneys assigned to enforce voting rights laws.

According to the group, Justice Connection, staff attorneys in the voting section either resigned as part of the deferred resignation program, or were reassigned to another department in the DOJ. Justice Connection said it obtained its estimate from employees within the civil rights division, of which the voting section is a part.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the steep reduction in the voting section’s workforce. 

But it comes amid reports of other drastic changes in the section, including reassigning senior managers to other divisions and a new mission statement shifts the section’s focus from enforcing voting rights laws to targeting voter fraud.

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“Disputed North Carolina race offers playbook for beaten candidates, experts warn”

election subversion risk

Sam Levine for The Guardian:

A disputed North Carolina state supreme court race that took nearly six months to resolve revealed a playbook for future candidates who lose elections to retroactively challenge votes, observers warn, but its ultimate resolution sent a signal that federal courts are unlikely to support an effort to overturn the results of an election….

Although the North Carolina state board of elections was not willing to entertain Griffin’s challenges in the future this time around, North Carolina Republicans wrestled control of the state elections board from Democrats, and might be more willing to entertain efforts to disenfranchise voters.

Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California Los Angeles said the episode sent “two conflicting signals, and it’s hard to know which one is going to dominate”.

On the one hand, he said Donald Trump has created an atmosphere in which Republicans are “increasingly willing to believe” elections are being stolen and embrace efforts to overturn them.

“On the other hand, the fact that you have pushback, at least from the federal courts, should give some people pause,” he said.

Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said he believed the saga “closed the door” to similar challenges in the future.

“Certainly it is a shame that it took six months to get here, but the end result here is a reaffirmation of the fact that the federal courts aren’t going to stand for changing the rules for an election after it’s been run,” he said. “Will other people try this? Maybe. But I think the lesson that should be learned from this is actually this won’t work.”…

But Griffin’s efforts may have “only failed because the federal courts that oversee North Carolina happen to be free of partisan corruption”, Mark Stern, a legal reporter, wrote in Slate.

“But what if a Republican candidate loses by a hair in, say, Texas, where state and federal courts are badly tainted by GOP bias,” he wrote. “Griffin has laid out the blueprint for an election heist in such a scenario, with Scotus standing as the lone bulwark against an assault on democracy.”…

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“Auction to Dine With Trump Creates Foreign Influence Opportunity; When the bidding stops Monday, the top buyers of a Trump family crypto coin will win a tour of the White House.”

bribery, chicanery, conflict of interest laws

NYT:

The sale of face-to-face access to President Trump using the Trump family’s own cryptocurrency has done more than benefit him financially, though it has certainly done that.

Mr. Trump announced last month that leading buyers of a digital coin his family is marketing would be rewarded with a private dinner with him at one of his golf courses and that the very top bidders would win a tour of the White House.

The auction, which ends Monday, has set off a spectacle that has drawn bipartisan criticism, triggered a suspicious trading pattern, and left a sitting United States president wide open to attempts to corruptly influence him.

Since the announcement, crypto investors around the world have raced to expand their holdings of $TRUMP — a digital currency called a memecoin, which is typically treated more as a novelty investment than an actual currency.

ertain buyers, in interviews and statements, have said they bought the coins or entered the dinner contest with the intention of securing an action by Mr. Trump to affect United States policy.

The contest has pushed up the memecoin’s trading price, adding billions of dollars, at least on paper, to the value of a $TRUMP stash controlled by the Trump family and its business partners. And in a matter of weeks, the Trumps and their partners have reeled in more than $1.3 million in fees, taking a cut every time the coins changed hands, according to Chainalysis, a crypto data firm.

Certain other large traders, sensing an opportunity to cash in, have moved quickly to sell their $TRUMP holdings, exploiting the run up in price caused by Mr. Trump’s promotional push as new money poured in from people enticed by his offer of “the most exclusive invitation in the world.”

But the blitz of profit-seeking by Mr. Trump and his family is also provoking a backlash.

Last week, it helped derail a major piece of crypto legislation pending in Congress, as the sale prompted objections from crypto industry executives and lawmakers, including some Republicans.

“It does give me pause because it complicates our work here,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, said in an interview last week after some Democrats began to balk on the crypto bill over Mr. Trump’s involvement in the industry. “The optics are challenging.”

Trading records examined by The New York Times show that a flurry of purchases of the $TRUMP token started the day before the coin’s backers disclosed the contest. Information had leaked about the upcoming promotion, allowing certain parties to make early bets that the market price was about to jump, the records suggest.

The aggressive effort by Mr. Trump and his partners to promote the dinner has also drawn scrutiny from former securities regulators, who assert that Mr. Trump may be violating federal securities laws. However, he would almost certainly not be targeted for investigation, now that his administration has curtailed crypto enforcement efforts at both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.

“This absolutely would have triggered an initial investigation,” said John Reed Stark, an enforcement attorney who spent 18 years at the S.E.C., including as chief of its unit that examined cybercrimes. “Or at least it certainly would have under norms from prior Republican and Democratic eras.”…

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Who Wins or Loses in Louisiana if the Supreme Court Strikes Down LA’s Congressional District as a Racial Gerrymander?

Uncategorized

As a practical matter, the issue in Louisiana v. Callais is not whether LA will have a second Voting Rights Act (VRA) district, in which black voters will have an equal opportunity to elect their candidate of choice. The issue is where in LA that district will be located. And if the Court invalidates the current district, that will cause significant political headaches for Republicans in LA and in Congress.

At an earlier stage of this litigation, the federal courts held that Section 2 of the VRA required LA to create a second VRA district. The plaintiffs had identified areas of the state in which a reasonably configured, second majority-black voting-age population could be created. But the LA legislature has no obligation to draw that district in the area the plaintiffs had identified; as long as it creates a second VRA district, it has complied with its VRA obligation.

Prior to this holding, Republicans held 5 of the 6 congressional seats. With the obligation to create a second VRA district, which inevitably would elect a Democrat, that meant one of these Republican incumbents would lose their seat. If the Republican legislature designed that district in the areas the plaintiffs had identified, it would have had to jeopardize the seat of the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, or the Majority Leader, Steve Scalise, or Rep. Julie Lettow.

Instead, the Republican legislature decided to eliminate an incumbent less popular among the Republican Party leadership, Rep. Garret Graves, from the Baton Rouge area. That’s why the legislature drew the current district that’s before the Supreme Court through the middle of the state. Graves was unpopular for many reasons, some of which this local story highlights. He opposed the current Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, in the last gubernatorial Republican primary, who was surely not unhappy to sign the bill eliminating Graves’ district; he was also a Kevin McCarthy supporter who was viewed as insufficiently supportive of Steve Scalise’s failed bid for House speaker.

If the Court strikes down LA’s attempt to create a second VRA district, while eliminating its least popular Republican incumbent, the LA legislature is still going to have to create that second VRA district. That will put the legislature back in the political position it was trying to avoid, in which it will have to figure out whether there is some other solution for its desire to protect its most powerful and most popular (with the party leadership) incumbents while also meeting its VRA obligations. Of course, if the Court had imposed similar constraints on partisan gerrymanders as it has on racial gerrymanders — as I argued it should have done in Principled Limitations on Partisan and Racial Redistricting — LA would not be able to defend against a racial gerrymandering claim with the defense that it was engaged in partisan gerrymandering.

Two caveats: at oral argument, some Justices suggested they wanted to re-visit the underlying issue of whether the VRA requires LA to create a second district at all. I’ll be surprised, though, if a majority of the Court decides to re-open that question from the earlier stage of this litigation. Second, if the Court strikes down the current LA district, that will have implications for racial gerrymandering doctrine more generally. How significant or limited those implications might be can’t be said in advance, given the intensely factual mix of race, politics, political geography, and other factors involved in the case.

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“Trump administration poised to accept ‘palace in the sky’ as a gift for Trump from Qatar: Sources”

bribery, chicanery, conflict of interest laws

ABC News:

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar — a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

The gift is expected to be announced next week, when Trump visits Qatar on the first foreign trip of his second term, according to sources familiar with the plans.

Trump toured the plane, which is so opulently configured it is known as “a flying palace,” while it was parked at the West Palm Beach International Airport in February.

The highly unusual — unprecedented — arrangement is sure to raise questions about whether it is legal for the Trump administration, and ultimately, the Trump presidential library foundation, to accept such a valuable gift from a foreign power.

Anticipating those questions, sources told ABC News that lawyers for the White House counsel’s office and the Department of Justice drafted an analysis for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth concluding that is legal for the Department of Defense to accept the aircraft as a gift and later turn it over to the Trump library, and that it does not violate laws against bribery or the Constitution’s prohibition (the emoluments clause) of any U.S. government official accepting gifts “from any King, Prince or foreign State…..

Jonathan Adler at Volokh: Have you ever seen an emolument fly?

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“After Criticism, Harris’s $900 Million Group Tries to Lay Out a Future”

campaign finance

NYT:

Ever since Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election in November, a big-money group that had raised over $900 million to support her but ultimately failed in its efforts has kept a low profile — even as Ms. Harris’s advisers have publicly second-guessed its approach to the campaign.

But a closed-door conference this week hosted by the super PAC, Future Forward, at a luxury seaside hotel in California made plain that the group does not plan to fade away.

Future Forward drew some of the biggest names in Democratic politics to the Ritz-Carlton resort in Half Moon Bay, Calif., south of San Francisco, to brief donors on what it thought went wrong last year — and what could come next.

Attendees included potential future presidential candidates, such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and seven-figure Democratic donors, some of whom had questions about why Future Forward was unable to help Ms. Harris win.

At an event on Thursday with passed hors d’oeuvres like mini lobster rolls and short-rib tostones and a dinner featuring heirloom tomato carpaccio, beef tenderloin and seared sea bass, Chauncey McLean, the group’s leader, gestured to criticism of what he called the group’s “reputation” — a dependence on polling and testing and randomized trials.

“Those are all just fancy ways of saying we listen to voters and try to gauge whether any of the things we do actually work,” Mr. McLean said, according to a person in the room. The group declined to comment…..Top Future Forward advisers on Friday defended their approach to guests that included Minyon Moore, a longtime Democratic operative and a Harris confidante. They outlined that 96.3 percent of the super PAC’s spending was on advertising, as opposed to unrelated, overhead costs, and that its nonprofit gave $220 million to 73 progressive groups, according to two people in the room when the information was presented. Advisers also reviewed which of the group’s ads worked and which did not, based on data it collected.

Given Ms. Harris’s defeat, it has not been clear to well-heeled Democrats that Future Forward has a path forward. The group was founded during the 2018 election, and its leaders did not initially anticipate that it would become a long-term part of the Democratic establishment, though President Joseph R. Biden Jr. eventually made it the primary outside group supporting his re-election bid.

In recent months, Future Forward has held private conversations with donors to discuss what happened in 2024 and to express the group’s desire to remain active in politics, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

The group has said that since its founding it has raised $1.4 billion, but it remains to be seen whether it will be the leading group for a 2028 presidential nominee.

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