President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel are playing a “dangerous” game in their escalating war against Nevada voters, elections attorney Marc Elias said on Brian Tyler Cohen’s “Democracy Watch” podcast Tuesday.
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“This is a five-alarm fire,” Elias told Cohen. “What we know is this: the Department of Justice has sent the Nevada Secretary of State’s office seven different subpoenas concerning voters over the past three months … there is no reason for the Department of Justice to be subpoenaing an election office in advance of an election like this. There is certainly no reason why it should be issuing multiple subpoenas.”
This move follows the Trump administration’s efforts to sue dozens of states for highly confidential personal identifying information from their voter rolls.
“There is nothing normal about this,” said Elias. “And all we know is that in July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged in public that there were as many as 15,903 non-citizens registered in Nevada. That wasn’t true. They’ve had to walk it back in private meetings — it’s been reported that they are now talking about the potential of 185 non-citizens, potentially. So, literally in July you had the secretary recklessly saying there were nearly 16,000. Now they’re saying, well, maybe there are 185.”
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Combining all of this with Trump’s “irresponsible attacks on elections” and conspiracy theories, said Elias, plus “the willingness by Donald Trump and [Attorney General] Todd Blanche to use their Department of Justice for political aims. I mean, Brian, you’ve got to be willfully blind at this point not to see what is going on in this country with Democratic-run state election systems. And Nevada, I suspect, is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”
In many ways, Cohen speculated, Nevada is a test run for Trump’s larger plan.
“Is it that the White House is basically testing to see whether they can not just prosecute but really persecute [Secretary of State] Cisco Aguilar in Nevada, or any other election officials or state officials in Nevada, but send a message to other states by virtue of doing so in Nevada — that if you’re with us, we’re going to just drop the full weight of the DOJ on you, thinking that they won’t even have to issue subpoenas for the next guys because they’ll just fold, in very much the same way that we’ve seen law firms and tech companies and media outlets and universities all fold?” he asked.
Elias agreed, saying, “This is an all-out assault on democracy. This is a frontal attack on free and fair elections. And we all need to be prepared. We need to stand up against it. And it’s going to be a dogfight every single day between now and the midterms.”
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