{"id":229450,"date":"2026-11-01T17:23:19","date_gmt":"2026-11-01T17:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-stop-intimidating-state-election-officials-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-11-01T17:23:19","modified_gmt":"2026-11-01T17:23:19","slug":"judge-orders-trump-administration-to-stop-intimidating-state-election-officials-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/judge-orders-trump-administration-to-stop-intimidating-state-election-officials-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Judge orders Trump administration to stop intimidating state election officials – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

A federal judge said the Trump administration has engaged in a \u201ccampaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce\u201d election officials ahead of the midterms.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom set letters to four U.S. District Court judges in the state today, warning them that the Trump administration may try to seize ballots cast in the midterm election.
\u201cI have grave concerns federal agents will seek search warrants to seize ballots and ballot materials before the election results are certified,\u201d Newsom wrote.
Newsom cited letters sent to local election officials<\/a> from the Justice Department in recent weeks that warn of potential legal consequences if they do not comply with the federal government’s demands regarding alleged voter fraud. He also noted federal grand jury subpoenas<\/a> that were sent to Los Angeles County election workers earlier this week.
He wrote that DOJ officials have “explicitly threatened via social media posts criminal prosecution against elections officials who process ballots that have been cast by individuals whom the United States asserts may be non-citizens.”
Citing California’s laws and protocols to protect ballot and ballot materials, Newsom wrote, “there is no legitimate law enforcement reason to seize ballots, ballot materials, and equipment needed to process and tabulate ballots.”
“Indeed, the only reason to do so would be to interfere in a State\u2019s lawful counting of ballots and certifying the results of the election,” he added. “The well-documented weaponization of the United States Department of Justice to serve the partisan and personal ends of the current President support legitimate concerns about further attempts to disenfranchise voters and undermine election integrity.”
The governor included resources on search warrants for election materials from legal experts in the letters.
A GOP super PAC launched a new TV ad<\/a> denouncing Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola over allegations that her campaign recruited a candidate with the same name as GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan to run in the Alaska race.
“It’s shocking. An investigation revealed Mary Peltola and national Democrats scheme to try and rig our election. Their goal: Put a decoy Dan Sullivan on the ballot and trick you into picking the wrong one,\u201d a narrator says in the ad, paid for by Last Frontier PAC.
The ad centers on allegations in a recent New York Times report<\/a> that Peltola’s campaign was involved in recruiting Senate candidate Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher with no prior political resume.
Peltola has denied<\/a> that she knew of any plan to place Dan. J Sullivan on the ballot.
Earlier tonight, Sen. Sullivan ripped into Peltola’s denial of any involvement in the second Sullivan’s candidacy.
“There’s no way Peltola doesn’t know about this,” he said in an interview with Fox News. “It’s deception. But at its worst, it’s disdain for us Alaskans. Think about what they did, they’re trying to make sure that Alaskans throw away their vote.”
Trump dialed in to six tele-rallies from Mar-a-Lago today, boosting GOP candidates running in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Michigan and Florida while he takes a day off from his in-person midterm rallies.<\/a>
The tele-rallies come just three days before Election Day, with the president pledging to do \u201cquite a few\u201d more \u201ctelephonic rallies\u201d on Monday.
Tomorrow, Trump will attend rallies in Kansas and Iowa, events that were rescheduled <\/a>less than a day after the president canceled them Thursday.
In the Oval Office on Friday, the president told reporters, \u201cSo, I wanted to see if I could do tele-rallies because I\u2019m very successful.\u201d
\u201cI do them well, and it\u2019s a great instrument,” Trump said. “It only seems to work for me because other people call and nobody gets on the phone.”
At a rally in Florida<\/a> yesterday, Trump told the crowd that he had thought it would be his last rally of the midterm campaign blitz, but he scheduled the two events on Sunday after requests by GOP campaigns in Kansas and Iowa. Trump has spoken at rallies across the country for 12 consecutive days, with his last day off from the campaign trail being Oct. 18.
“I thought this was going to be my last one,” Trump said at the Florida event. “I thought I could relax. Twenty-eight days in a row of this crap is lot, it\u2019s a lot. My voice is about operating at about 49.2%.”
Trump announced each of his tele-rallies on Truth Social <\/a>today, urging voters to “Answer your phones, and ENJOY!\u201d
The president took the calls from Mar-a-Lago after spending the morning at his West Palm Beach golf course. He is expected to attend an annual members-only Halloween Party at Mar-a-Lago tonight.
A federal judge in Washington warned this afternoon that the Trump administration\u2019s efforts to intervene in elections<\/a> could have a \u201cchilling effect,\u201d noting that letters the Justice Department has sent to local election officials have included inaccurate data.
\u201cThe government has made no secret of their determination to purge the voter rolls\u201d of individuals they believe to be noncitizens, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said during a rare Saturday hearing. \u201cPast efforts to do so have resulted in U.S. citizens being swept up into this law enforcement dragnet.\u201d
Chutkan said she was concerned people may not go to the polls if they\u2019re afraid they could be wrongly accused of noncitizen voting.
\u201cIt\u2019s an \u2018if,\u2019\u201d Elizabeth Shapiro, an attorney for the Justice Department, shot back.
\u201cIt\u2019s not,\u201d Chutkan said, citing Gustavo Gutierrez Gomez, who filed a declaration in the case, brought by voting advocates over what they call the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cVoter Data Collection Policy.\u201d
The League of United Latin American Citizens, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization, asked the judge to block the transmission of data about registered voters the administration claims are \u201clikely noncitizens\u201d to states and localities for the purpose of taking special action with those voters.
At today’s hearing, Chutkan pointed to several cases in Washington, D.C., and around the country where voting groups or immigrant rights groups are asking for similar relief, noting that Trump administration doesn\u2019t have a stellar track record of identifying actual noncitizen voters.
\u201cThe government\u2019s been wrong,\u201d Chutkan said. \u201cIn fact, they\u2019ve very rarely been right.\u201d
The judge noted the DOJ\u2019s efforts in Nevada to alert local election officials of 15,903 people it argued were noncitizen voters. There, officials ultimately confirmed that no one on the list was a noncitizen.
\u201cI cannot disagree with you the government has made mistakes,\u201d Shapiro said. \u201cThe government is not trying to make mistakes.\u201d
John B. Hill, an attorney representing LULAC, cited reporting from NBC News<\/a> that the Justice Department is considering bringing litigation <\/a>against more states in the lead-up to \u2014 or possibly after \u2014 the Nov. 3 midterm elections as part of its effort to compel states to comb through voter rolls for noncitizens trying to vote in federal elections.
Chutkan is expected to rule on the issue in the coming days.
Today\u2019s hearing follows a separate ruling<\/a> yesterday from a federal judge in California to block the Trump administration from threatening or intimidating election officials. That ruling was just the latest of several legal setbacks <\/a>for the Trump administration this week as it attempts to pressure local election officials<\/a> to comply with its demands ahead of Tuesday\u2019s elections.
A federal judge in Florida today permanently dismissed a defamation case Trump brought against The Wall Street Journal over an article it published in 2025 about a birthday letter <\/a>Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.
Judge Darrin P. Gayles wrote in his order<\/a>: “As President Trump has not plausibly alleged that each Defendant made defamatory statements with actual malice, the Amended Complaint must be dismissed. And because this is President Trump\u2019s second attempt to allege his claims, the Court finds that dismissal with prejudice is appropriate.”
Gayles referenced an earlier defamation case against The Wall Street Journal about the same article, which was dismissed<\/a> in April.
Virginia and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit in federal court Saturday in a last-ditch effort to stop the construction of the triumphal arch planned for Memorial Circle in Washington.
The Trump administration has said it plans to begin construction of the arch next week, on Nov. 5.
\u201cThe construction of the Arch will inflict immediate and irreparable harm on the District and Virginia,\u201d Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones and D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb wrote in the lawsuit. \u201cThe Arch is slated to be built on a busy traffic circle that abuts the border between the jurisdictions, at the center of a historic viewshed, in a river whose environment the District has a statutory responsibility to protect.\u201d
\u201cBoth the construction of the Arch and the completed monument will disrupt the operations of both jurisdictions, impair their ability to carry out their responsibilities under federal and local law, and require the expenditure of substantial resources to mitigate and address those impacts,\u201d they added.
Read the full story here. <\/strong><\/em><\/a>
E. Jean Carroll is urging the Supreme Court to reject President Donald Trump\u2019s bid to overturn the $83.3 million judgment a unanimous jury awarded her nearly three years ago<\/a>, arguing that he repeatedly waived his right to claim presidential immunity by choosing to litigate the case for years without raising the defense.
In a 64-page brief opposing Trump\u2019s petition, Carroll\u2019s attorney Roberta Kaplan argues that his defamatory statements about her stemmed from an alleged sexual assault that occurred when he was a private citizen and therefore are not protected by presidential immunity.
Kaplan also argues that Trump should not be allowed to reverse course after initially telling the court that Carroll was free to pursue her lawsuit once he left office and insisting he was not seeking to \u201cescape accountability.\u201d
The brief recounts how Carroll endured thousands of online attacks and threats of death and sexual violence from Trump supporters, which her attorneys say damaged her career and left her fearing for her safety.
\u201cWhile this President may want this Court\u2019s help, the Presidency does not need it,\u201d Kaplan wrote, arguing there is no reason for the justices to intervene simply to shield Trump from the consequences of his own litigation decisions.
Jason Turkish, Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens\u2019 fianc\u00e9, this morning said he\u2019s not sure whether the congresswoman would appear alongside Michigan\u2019s Democratic Senate nominee at a scheduled campaign event Sunday.
\u201cI\u2019m not sure. I don\u2019t know where that stands as of Saturday morning,\u201d Turkish told \u201cFox & Friends.\u201d
Stevens, who lost the Democratic primary to El-Sayed earlier this year, was supposed to appear alongside him tonight for the first time since the August primary.
But divisions between the two former foes over Israel and the war in Gaza erupted earlier this week <\/a>after Turkish told local news that he planned to vote for the Republican Senate nominee, Mike Rogers. Stevens has said she plans to vote for El-Sayed, but urged his campaign this week to denounce an ad funded by an outside group that Stevens said blamed high costs in the U.S. on Israel.
\u201cHaley has made it clear to anyone who will listen that she remains on Team Dem. That her only ask, small ask, was to say that we not blame all of society\u2019s high costs on one group of people,\u201d Turkish said this morning.
Democratic candidates in 2026 battleground races<\/a> are directly criticizing Joe Biden\u2019s handling of border security when he was president, seeking to neutralize a political vulnerability and signaling a new path for the party on the thorny issue.
Candidates are throwing the ex-president under the bus on border policy in key states that will decide control of the Senate and some battleground House races across the country.
\u201cI called out Joe Biden for failing us on the border,\u201d Texas\u2019 Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico says in a recent ad<\/a>airing in the closing stretch of his neck-and-neck race against Republican Ken Paxton. He also criticized Biden<\/a> in July for having \u201cfailed us on our southern border\u201d as he rolled out his own border security plan<\/a>.
He\u2019s not alone.
Read the full story here. <\/strong><\/em><\/a>
NBC News<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal judge said the Trump administration has engaged in a \u201ccampaign to intimidate, threaten, and coerce\u201d election officials ahead of the midterms.California Gov. Gavin Newsom set letters to four U.S. District Court judges in the state today, warning them that the Trump administration may try to seize ballots cast in the midterm election. \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":229451,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/229451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}