Two things occur to me about President Trump’s overnight attack on Iran. The first is one we’ve discussed many times. The issue with this attack or war isn’t just the lack of consultation with Congress or any congressional authorization. The issue is more global: The White House hasn’t given any explanation of why any of this is even happening. This is very much a presidential war in a way we’ve seldom seen before. It’s personal to him. Again, not surprising: I suspect the lack of a public domestic campaign is because it is none of our business. To him, his country, his army. He’s in charge.
The other point is that we’re hearing that the president means to overthrow the Iranian regime. But he’s encouraging the civilian population to rise up and overthrow the government. Those two facts say very different things.
Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms.
Election experts say that the meeting reflects an intensifying push to persuade Trump to take unprecedented actions to affect the vote in November. Courts have largely blocked his efforts to reshape elections through an executive order, and legislation has stalled in Congress that would mandate strict voter ID requirements across the country.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that activists associated with those at the summit have been circulating a draft of an executive order that would ban mail-in ballots and get rid of voting machines as part of a federal takeover. Peter Ticktin, a lawyer who worked on the executive order and had a client at the summit, told ProPublica these actions were “all part of the same effort.”
The summit followed other meetings and discussions between administration officials and activists — many not previously reported — stretching back to at least last fall, according to emails and recordings obtained by ProPublica. The coordination between those inside and outside the government represents a breakdown of crucial guardrails, experts on U.S. elections said.
“The meeting shows that the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 election have only grown better organized and are now embedded in the machinery of government,” said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy organization. “This creates substantial risk that the administration is laying the groundwork to improperly reshape elections ahead of the midterms or even go against the will of the voters.”
Five of six federal officials who attended the summit didn’t answer questions about the event from ProPublica.
A White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said federal officials’ attendance at the gathering shouldn’t be construed as support for a national emergency declaration and that it was “common practice” for staffers to communicate with outside advocates who want to share policy ideas. The official pointed to comments Trump made to PBS News denying he was considering a national emergency or had read the draft executive order. “Any speculation about policies the administration may or may not undertake is just that — speculation,” the official said.
Mitchell did not respond to questions from ProPublica about the summit. A spokesperson for Flynn responded to detailed questions from ProPublica by disparaging experts who expressed concerns, texting, “LOL ‘EXPERTS.’”
The 30-person roundtable discussion on Feb. 19, at an office building in downtown Washington, D.C., was sponsored by the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a conservative think tank. Afterward, activists and government officials dined together, photos reviewed by ProPublica showed.
Flynn, the institute’s chair, told a social media personality why he’d arranged the event.
“I wanted to bring this group together physically, because most of us have met online” while “fighting battles” in swing states from Arizona to Georgia, Flynn said to Tommy Robinson on the gathering’s sidelines. Robinson posted videos of these interactions online. “The overall theme of this event was to make sure that all of us aren’t operating in our own little bubbles.”
Flynn has repeatedly advocated for Trump to declare a national emergency and posted on social media after the event addressing Trump, “We The People want fair elections and we know there is only one office in the land that can make that happen given the current political environment in the United States.”
In addition to Olsen and Honey, four other federal officials from agencies that will shape the upcoming elections attended the event. At least four of the six attended the dinner.
One is Clay Parikh, a special government employee at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence who’s helping Olsen with the 2020 inquiry. A spokesperson at ODNI said Parikh had attended the summit “in his personal capacity.”
Another, Mac Warner, handled election litigation at the Justice Department. A department spokesperson said that Warner had resigned the day after the event and had not received the required approval from agency ethics officials to participate.
The department “remains committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” the spokesperson said in an email.
A third administration official who attended the summit, Marci McCarthy, directs communications for the nation’s cyber defense agency, which oversees the security of elections infrastructure like voting machines.
Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was a featured speaker. Lake worked with Olsen and Parikh in her unsuccessful bid to overturn her loss in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election.
Lake said in an email that she “showed up to the event, spoke for about 20 minutes about the overall importance of election integrity, a non-partisan issue that matters to all citizens — both in the United States and abroad. I left without listening to any other speeches.”
“Elections should be free from fraud or any other malfeasance that subverts the will of the people,” she added.
At the meeting, activists presented on ways to transform American elections that would help conservatives, according to social media posts and interviews they gave on conservative media, such as LindellTV, a streaming platform created by the pillow mogul Mike Lindell. They said the group broke down into two camps: those who wanted to pursue a more incremental legal and legislative strategy and those who wanted Trump to declare a national emergency.
Multiple activists left the meeting convinced Trump should do the latter, a step they believe would allow the president to get around the Constitution’s directive that elections should be run by states.
Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, a prominent funder of efforts to overturn the 2020 election, told LindellTV that Trump has “played nice” so far in not seizing control of American elections. “But at some point,” Byrne said, “he’s got to do something, the muscular thing: declare a national emergency.”
Byrne responded to questions from ProPublica by sending a screenshot of a poll that he said suggested “2/3 of Americans correctly do not trust” voting machines, which the proposed national emergency declaration aims to do away with.
Will Huff, who has advocated for doing away with voting machines, told a conservative vlogger that Olsen, the White House lawyer, and other administration representatives would take the “consensus” from the gathering back to Trump. “It’s got to be a national emergency,” said Huff, the campaign manager for a Republican candidate for Arkansas secretary of state.
In response to questions from ProPublica, Huff said in an email that Olsen and Trump would use their judgment to decide whether to declare a national emergency.
“The President has been briefed on findings of shortcomings in election infrastructure,” Huff wrote. “I believe there are steady hands around the President wanting to ensure that any action taken is, first, constitutional and legal, but also backed by evidence.”
McCarthy, the cybersecurity official, expressed more general solidarity with fellow attendees in a post on social media about the summit. “Grateful for friendships forged through years of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, united by purpose and conviction,” she wrote. “The mission continues… and so does the fellowship.”
Last week’s gathering was the latest in a string of private interactions between conservative election activists and administration officials, according to emails, documents and recordings obtained by ProPublica. Many have involved Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network. Before taking her government post, Honey was a leader in the Election Integrity Network, ProPublica has reported, as was McCarthy.
Previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica show that just weeks after Honey started at the Department of Homeland Security, she briefed election activists, a Republican secretary of state and another federal official on a conference call arranged by her former boss, Mitchell.
“We are excited to welcome her on our call this morning to hear about her work for election integrity inside DHS,” Mitchell wrote in an email introducing presenters on the call.
Honey didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica about the call. Experts said Honey’s briefing gave her former employer access that likely would have violated ethics rules in place under previous administrations, including the first Trump administration — though not this one.
The prior “ethics guardrails would have prevented some of the revolving door issues we’re seeing between the election denial movement and the government officials,” said Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center director. Those prior rules “were supposed to prevent former employers and clients from receiving privileged access.”
Immediately giving lie to Vice President JD Vance’s statement earlier this week that there is “no chance” any war with Iran would inspire “a Middle Eastern war for years with no end in sight,” President Trump overnight announced a massive operation in the region and encouraged the Iranian people to overthrow their government amid the attack. Israel and the U.S. have attacked, and Iran has retaliated against Israel and U.S. bases in the region.
As I run by armed National Guard troops gathered at my metro station, look across the river at the potentially soon-to-be-hijacked public golf course on Hains Point, pass the now-lopsided White House, I think about how easily these things could have been avoided.
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Trump-aligned activists are pitching the president on a draft executive order that would declare an “emergency,” relying on debunked claims of foreign interference in elections, to order a far-right wish list of changes to how elections are run in America.
That list is far-reaching. It would attempt to revolutionize elections just as President Trump and his allies search for ways to reduce the ease of voting in the run-up to the midterms later this year. Voting by mail would be banned, as would electronic voting machines.
President Trump’s Justice Department is doubling down on its months-long crusade to access sensitive voter information from red and blue states across the country. As it currently stands, the DOJ is suing 30 states — both Republican and Democrat alike — who have refused to succumb to the department’s unprecedented demands for voter roll data.
Over the past few months, certain moments in federal courthouses have lingered with me that I’ve been reluctant to share here because I haven’t wanted to over-personalize, or in some instances de-personalize, the stories of the Trump II presidency.
Yesterday it was Kilmar Abrego Garcia scarfing a Jimmy John’s sandwich in the hallway outside a Nashville courtroom while reporters, lawyers, and staff milled about during a break in the hearing on his claim of vindictive prosecution.
Last fall it was the pensive faces of James Comey’s wife and daughters and son-in-law stuck in the hall with a crowd of reporters and onlookers waiting for the Alexandria, Virginia courtroom to be unlocked for a hearing on his vindictive prosecution claim.
Last summer, it was Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer, coming down to DC and single-handedly defending the original Alien Enemies Act detainees in a historic case that pits the executive branch against the judicial branch, before packing up his things and walking alone out of the courthouse for his return trip to NYC.
What makes each of these moments linger is their essential smallness and the basic fragility of the effort to confront the Trump II presidency. What confounds me about them is the challenge of conveying them to you without valorizing the participants or reducing them to stale archetypes. But it goes a little deeper than that.
In covering the Trump II rampage, I keep bumping up awkwardly against a comforting notion that so many of us have long harbored as a way of making sense of this complicated, dynamic, sprawling world: Someone must be taking care of that. At best, we use it to project a sense of order onto things, an order that simply does not exist. At worst, we use it to distance and excuse ourselves from unpleasantness.
Take the AEA case. I feel certain that most of you take comfort in the notion that the ACLU is out there fighting the good fight, marshaling resources, and serving as the tip of the spear against the worst civil liberties abuses of the Trump II presidency. And if not the ACLU then some other advocacy group. It’s true as far as it goes, but it just doesn’t go very far.
Like every advocacy organization, the ACLU is under-resourced and stretched thin. It’s a minor miracle that it even got into court before the AEA flights took off last March. In seeking class action status for the case, it cast a broad net to try to protect all of the potential AEA detainees, but in most instances it didn’t know who exactly these far-flung, diverse Venezuelan nationals were, and it didn’t have the means to quickly find out. After the detainees were freed from El Salvador’s CECOT and flown home to Venezuela, the ACLU then had to try to track them all down, with limited success.
You might protest: But the ACLU has someone in charge of all that. They must have a system in place. Someone must be taking care of that.
I’m not picking on the ACLU. I’ve written about Justice Connection, the advocacy group formed early last year to support current and recently exiled DOJ employees. Former DOJer Stacey Young, its founder and executive director, joined me onstage for last month’s Morning Memo Live event. I feel sure that when I write about Justice Connection and hold Young out as an expert on DOJ politicization, it conveys that someone is taking care of that. But Justice Connection, with all respect, is a threadbare, brand-new organization, with a paucity of full-time staff. They’re doing what they can, but they’re not under any illusion about their own limitations.
Another of the panelists at last month’s event was former DOJer Kyle Freeney, who works for another brand-new organization: the Washington Litigation Group, a nonprofit legal firm trying to fill the void left as Big Law pulled back on pro bono work in the most controversial Trump II cases. It didn’t just spring into being. The people involved — lawyers, former judges, funders — recognized that no one was taking care of that. So they started it up last summer.
A year ago Abrego Garcia was a union sheet metal apprentice in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. A whirlwind year later — ICE detention, deportation to prison in El Salvador, U.S. detention on criminal charges, and further ICE detention before his eventual release — he is a Trump world pariah and an internationally recognized figure. But none of what unfolded after his initial deportation would have happened the way it did without a retinue of lawyers in his immigration and criminal cases leaping in to defend him. A mix of pro bono and advocacy group intervention turned his cases into causes célèbres. No one had to take care of that but someone did.
I’ve not been able to shake the feeling that most journalism, my own included, reinforces the notion that someone is taking care of that even as so much of it endeavors to sound the alarm that no one is taking care of that. It feels especially pronounced in the Trump II era as institutions crumble and the challenge before us is laid bare. It’s just us.
ICYMI
My report from Nashville on the testimony of too-credulous federal prosecutor Robert McGuire in the vindictive prosecution hearing for Abrego Garcia and more on what went down in court here:
David Kurtz Reports from Abrego Garcia’s Vindictive Prosecution Hearing by TPM
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That’s a Wrap from Nashville
I managed to catch a little live music last night in Nashville. So let me send you into the weekend with Chapel Bell, whose sound lured me in after a very long day:
Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.
It’s a cliché and more or less true that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” language can mean whatever Congress wants it to mean. That is not only because in this area Congress’ decision-making is certainly un-reviewable. It is because the Constitution’s writers were intentionally expansive in their definition. They were most focused not on statutory crimes but misrule. I wanted to take a moment to note that what we have unfolding in Minnesota is really a definitional impeachable offense.
I say this with no expectation that he will be charged with it, let alone convicted and removed from office, certainly not under Republican rule. But these are precisely the kinds of abuses of power, unconstitutional actions, that are most squarely within the impeachment mechanism’s meaning.
News came today that Warner Bros Discovery decided that Paramount-Skydance’s bid ($111 billion) to acquire the company was superior to that from Netflix ($82.7 billion). WBD told Netflix it had four days to up its offer. Little more than an hour later Netflix said it didn’t need four days. It was bowing out. The deal was no longer economic at the price Paramount was offering. An additional fact is that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was at the White House while these things were happening, apparently trying to see whether Netflix had the thing any major company needs for a merger in 2026: the personal approval of Donald Trump. Apparently they didn’t have it. That’s the autocracy playbook. And at the federal level, that’s the game we’re playing right now.
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE–The Trump DOJ has spent the last several months constructing a narrowly focused narrative that then-acting U.S. Attorney Robert McGuire of Nashville was the sole decider in seeking a human smuggling indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia last May while he was still confined in El Salvador, a victim of a wrongful deportation in violation of a immigration judge’s order.
