A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
That Didn’t Take Long
The top election official in Los Angeles County has done a preliminary review of the Trump DOJ’s purported list of alleged noncitizen voters and found it to be … shoddy. Surprising absolutely no one.
Out of DOJ’s list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters in California, more than 7,000 had Los Angeles County addresses. Dean C. Logan’s office took a sample of 200 of those L.A. voters and found that 1/4 may have been born in the United States, nearly 1/2 were cancelled or inactive voters, and nearly 3/4 had never voted, according to a new court filing:
It’s critically important to frame this properly: Election administrators must always balance making sure ineligible voters don’t vote with assuring that eligible voters aren’t wrongfully denied their right to vote. Make voting rules and regulations too strict and the risk goes up of excluding legitimate voters and not counting their votes.
It’s a balance that Trump and Republicans refuse to strike in their jihad to vilify noncitizen voters and elevate a vanishingly small problem into a reason to distrust election results. It’s telling that they voice more apparent concern about what they call “vote dilution” by noncitizen voting than they do about outright denying U.S. citizens the right to vote and have their vote counted.
In the California case, the shoddy list makes even more stark the incredible demand the Trump administration is suing to impose on the state. It wants California — with voting already underway — to introduce new additional steps into the vote tabulation process: review DOJ’s crap list, segregate all the ballots cast by people on that list, and run a real-time review to confirm whether those voters are citizens. Then — and only then — can California count those ballots.
Note on whom the burden falls here: The Trump administration can supply a flawed and unreliable list, then California — while already conducting a live election — has to run around and jump through the extra hoops that the administration has created for it.
Here’s how a top Los Angeles County election official put it in her own declaration in the case:
Because the County results must be submitted by December 3, 2026, and certified by the State by December 11, 2026, ballots held pending an open-ended federal review may, in practical effect, never be counted. This process would risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered. The process the DOJ seeks to have the Registrar undertake jeopardizes that core right for potentially thousands of voters, not to mention the finalization of election results, confidence in election results, and the ability to allow new elected officials to be instated in their positions.
I should mention that the administration has offered to “help” California and work together in cooperative fashion to vet the administration’s crappy list, but it’s too precious an offer to need its own debunking:
“We’re not perfect and that’s why we’ve asked California to cooperate with us,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said in a Monday press conference, anticipating exactly what happened yesterday. “These are the ones where we’re kind of the most confident that they are noncitizens.”
“Kind of the most confident.”
You get it.
Dems Sue Trump for Election Interference
Various Democratic entities filed a new federal lawsuit in D.C. to try to block the worst of President Trump’s attacks on the midterm elections, including his demands to purge voter rolls and not count ballots, his threats against election officials, and his interference in state-run elections:
The Corruption: $50M Woman Edition
Where to even start with this?
The recently remarried Alina Habba, who now goes by Alina Mildon, landed a guaranteed $50 million deal to serve as general counsel of a brand new corporate entity tied to Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, the NYT reports. Among the lowlights:
- The company — Concord Partners, LLC — was formed in Florida on Oct. 22, 2025 by Isabela Herrera, 27, the billionaire’s daughter and a U.S citizen.
- The deal was for $10 million a year for four years, plus bonuses, bringing the total guaranteed compensation to $50 million.
- Mildon “finalized the deal” while she was still the acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
- Mildon’s start date was Jan. 1, 2026. By then, Mildon was a senior adviser to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, the role she took after being disqualified as U.S. attorney in New Jersey.
- President Trump pardoned Julio Herrera Velutini on Jan. 15, 2026.
Mildon denies having any role in the pardon.
The timing of this revelation may be connected to the epic ongoing feud between Mildon and Ric Grenell that has produced a sleazefest of competing allegations of off-the-charts corruption.
Russia’s Failed Attack on Germany
This still hasn’t broken through in the U.S., but over the summer, Russia intelligence launched a drone attack on a cargo plane carrying military assistance to Ukraine while it was parked at an airport in eastern Germany. It was the most dramatic of Putin’s provocations against NATO countries which have been on an uptick since that failed attack.
The WSJ offers a comprehensive overview of that incident and its significance:
The attack was part of a broader effort to position agents, explosives and weapons across Europe to strike targets supporting Ukraine and sow chaos that could strengthen political opposition to military aid for Kyiv, according to investigators and intelligence officials.
Investigators have uncovered networks smuggling explosives, drones and weapons into the EU, along with safe houses and concealed underground caches near airports, arms manufacturers and other potential targets.
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about whether World War III is already underway. I think that’s overdetermined, but it’s also true that we probably won’t notice until we’re deep into it.
‘Mongoloid Moron’
The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg writes about being targeted by President Trump as a “Mongoloid Moron” in the Oval Office yesterday — an outburst that the White House happily touted on social media.
Who Gets to Define We the People?
Jamelle Bouie: “[T]he drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be ‘the people’ of the United States.”
The Most Rancid Racism
In the racist rants of President Trump and his enablers, Somali Americans are both primitives who eat your pets and ingrates who are undeservedly “living the high life” at your expense:
The only consistency is the rancid appeal to every base human emotion.
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Today’s Heather, Paul (2) and Tim:
Timothy Snyder
I have been trying to think of what Trump’s hideous “ballroom” project reminds me of — and I finally have it — it is Nicolai Ceausescu’s infamous and unfinished House of the People in communist Romania, which also brought awfulness to a lovely downtown. It features a huge ballroom with niches for portraits of the dictator and his wife and a sliding roof so that a helicopter can enter and exit. The building also had a nuclear bunker. The aesthetic sense of the two men is much the same but Trump’s construction will probably be even worse.
And some good advice from Sean:
“We have to think about collapsing Trump poll numbers and Rs turning on him the same way we’d think about finally being able to corner a rabid raccoon in your garage. Good news: he’s out of options. Bad news: he’s a rabid raccoon.”
Sean Casten
And a tautology from Betty:
If you think a test for dementia is an IQ test, you have dementia. If you don’t realize you have been given a test for dementia because your physician suspects you have dementia, you have dementia. If you think being able to tell a giraffe from a whale makes you a genius . . . you have dementia.
Betty Bowers
(post deleted by author)
Who needs the list, when you can go door to door, questioning and threatening people?
I could be tempted to watch Stephen Miller’s execution.