Justice Department officials dance around Trump’s unsupported claims of California election fraud

By Tierney Sneed, Paula Reid, Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — When President Donald Trump made claims of Democratic vote-rigging in the Los Angeles election, his top appointed prosecutor in the city took to the cameras to validate those beliefs while hinting his office may never be able prove that kind of grand conspiracy.

The Justice Department has launched no new criminal cases connected to how the city administered last week’s contest, according to a source familiar with the matter, even as the president said on social media last week that such an investigation was underway.

The agency’s leaders have been quick to tout the potential for fraud prosecutions. Front and center in the current media cycle is First Assistant US Attorney Bill Essayli, the Trump appointee leading the Los Angeles US Attorney’s Office.

“We’re doing the work, we are doing the best we can in the circumstances, I expect people will be charged,” Essayli said this week on “The Glenn Beck Program,” where he was asked whether the department had seen a scale of fraud that would have changed the results.

“We are looking for any sort of wide-scale conspiracies,” Essayli said, while promoting the department’s tip line. “Right now, I would say, our investigations lean into more individual actors.”

Essayli in recent days has promised prosecutions in California were only a matter of time — while also suggesting his office needed whistleblowers to come forward. He’s acknowledged that the department hasn’t found the kind of fraud that would impact electoral outcomes, but he’s blamed California for a system that, he says, makes such evidence nearly impossible to find.

The playbook is a familiar one — both for Trump, who faced criminal charges for his schemes to overturn the 2020 election, and now for the Justice Department leaders whose standing in the administration depends on keeping the president happy. They have seized on long-standing gripes about how long it takes California officials to report election results.

But without providing evidence of a sweeping plot to steal elections from Republicans, DOJ officials are instead hyping singular cases they have prosecuted dealing with illegal voter registration or single-digit noncitizen voting, while accusing Democrats of getting in the way of their investigations.

The dust has yet to settle at the department from Trump’s ouster of former Attorney General Pam Bondi in the spring, as it has been made clear that officials’ ability to deliver for the boss is the difference between a firing and a promotion. On Trump’s election fraud fixations — as well as his desire for revenge against his political foes — federal officials are left tap-dancing around what he wants and what can practically be achieved.

In the meantime, their willingness to feed into Trump’s claims — without offering any proof of criminal wrongdoing that would sway elections — could undermine public confidence in the vote, election veterans told CNN.

“This has just created this environment where you’re tearing away the very fabric of the trust that has built up for decades for local county officials and city officials,” said Neal Kelley, a Republican who ran elections in Orange County, California, for nearly two decades before his 2022 retirement.

Essayli’s office declined to comment for this story.

“The Department of Justice has statutory authority to enforce our nation’s election laws, including through requesting state voter rolls and monitoring returns when candidates for federal office are on the ballot,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CNN in a statement. “The Department’s investigations into voter fraud in California are in line with this authority and will continue despite the state’s unwillingness to comply and reassure voters that their elections are in fact free, fair, and transparent. Protecting election integrity is a top priority for the Trump Administration.”

Blaming ‘the system’

In their media appearances, Justice Department leaders have walked the line between promoting the work they’re doing to find election fraud, while attempting to manage expectations that they will actually be able to deliver a case that alleges widespread voter fraud in a Democratic district.

“The system is not designed to protect or prevent fraud. The system sucks,” Essayli said Thursday on CNN, in an appearance just after the Trump post suggesting his office was probing Los Angeles’ vote.

Nonetheless, a few days later, Essayli expressed confidence on Glenn Beck’s podcast that charges would come in 1 to 2 months, once the primary was certified.

Election officials in Los Angeles and California have defended their handling of the vote, and county officials granted a DOJ request last week to observe the ballot processing at the L.A. counting site.

“The key here is that election officials are welcoming the transparency,” said David Becker, a former DOJ voting section attorney who now advises election officials as head of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “As usual, the election officials are showing their work. The federal officials — who, without evidence, are claiming fraud — are once again hiding the ball.”

Scrutiny of California’s election laws

The Justice Department has already been grappling with vows by Trump that DOJ would bring prosecutions for the 2020 presidential election, which Trump still falsely claims was stolen from him. Sweeping moves by the Justice Department to obtain 2020 ballots in Georgia and audit materials from Arizona’s election that year have unnerved election officials, but the administration has yet to show it’s found any evidence that would prove fraud was to blame for Trump’s loss.

Earlier this year, as he told Fox News that there was “a ton of evidence that the election was rigged,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that those engaging in the fraud were “very good at hiding up misconduct and hiding what they’re doing.”

A handful of prosecutions related to illegal voting or registration by foreigners are what the administration has produced instead, having poured significant resources into finding noncitizens on voter rolls.

In another case, which Essayli and others at the department repeatedly cited, prosecutors charged a California woman with illegally paying people — some of them on Los Angeles’ Skid Row — to register to vote as part of a scheme to maximize compensation she was receiving in petition drives. The woman pleaded guilty to one count in the case, which included the allegation that on “several occasions” she had homeless people use her own former address on the registration forms. Prosecutors are also looking at whether she worked with any organizations that could also be charged with a conspiracy, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Still, the DOJ has not put forward evidence in the court proceedings that the illegal registrations resulted in fraudulent votes. Essayli and others have nonetheless used the case to criticize California’s universal mail voting system, under which every registered voter receives a mail ballot, while criticizing its lack of a photo voter ID requirement and how the state allows outside groups to collect and submit mail ballots.

Much of the flak California election officials are getting now is focused on the pace of the ballots count. But the process that election officials must go through to verify that mail ballots are authentic is partly why California’s results take time to report.

“They’re complaining about the speed of counting when what the election officials are doing right now is checking voter ID, confirming integrity, making sure there’s no fraud,” Becker said.

The time it takes for the results to be finalized is the fault of the state legislature, Kelley said, because of the election rules that allowed Californians turn in their ballots at the last minute, creating a bottleneck in the canvassing process for election officials.

“You’ve given them the opportunity to wait, they’re going to take it,” Kelley said.

Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, US Attorney Jay Clayton, was grilled on CNBC this week on the distinction between state laws that make California’s vote tabulation a slow process and actual evidence of fraud.

“There’s a great phrase, ‘opportunity for fraud,’” Clayton said.

Pivoting to a fight over confidential voter files

Justice Department officials have also used the California spotlight to rail against election officials for resisting its demands for the state’s unredacted voter rolls, in a legal battle that the administration so far has lost not just in Golden State, but also in seven others.

The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is currently examining a federal judge’s ruling that the DOJ could not force California to turn over its confidential voter registration files. The administration has brought 31 lawsuits in total against both Democratic and Republican election offices that have declined to comply with the voter registration data requests, which sought normally confidential information about voters, such as their Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. The Trump administration has not won a favorable ruling in any of those cases, and district courts in eight of them have thrown out the lawsuits. Several appeals courts are now weighing the matter.

The DOJ’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, is leading the voter data collection effort, as her division includes the department’s voting section. She has vowed to take the issue to the Supreme Court.

Essayli highlighted the work Dhillon was doing to obtain California’s rolls in a social media post laying out the election-related work the department was doing in California.

“Teamwork/dreamwork,” Dhillon said in her own response to the post on X.

CNN’s Abigail Roedersheimer has contributed to this report.

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