‘We’re Not Going to Stop’
Newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche made headlines over the weekend for other, arguably, more alarming remarks and actions than what I am about to unpack. During an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Blanche refused to say that the Justice Department would act independently from the White House. On Friday, he and FBI Director Kash Patel openly campaigned for a Republican midterms candidate alongside President Trump.
But during his sprint of weekend public appearances, Blanche also acknowledged that he might take the Justice Department’s obviously-failing effort to seize election administration rights from states all the way to the Supreme Court. During an interview with Kristin Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Welker asked whether Blanche would be willing to take his campaign to seize voter roll data from states to the Supreme Court. The DOJ’s efforts to sue for states’ voter roll data has been hit with 22 district court losses thus far, most recently in Nevada.
“We’ll see what happens,” Blanche said when asked about involving the high court in the floundering campaign that began under fired Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Absolutely, it’s a possibility.”
As TPM’s Khaya Himmelman has been tracking for months now, the Justice Department is trying to force states to hand over unredacted voter roll data ostensibly to purge states’ voters rolls of supposed noncitizens, whom President Trump has claimed are illegally voting en masse for Democrats in federal elections. This is a widely debunked myth that Republicans and Trump tend to elevate when it is politically convenient for them, but the truth is, noncitizens voting in federal elections is vanishingly rare, in part because it is illegal and the consequences for doing so are already incredibly harsh.
That said, the Justice Department has sued 30 states overall to try to exert authority over state’s constitutional right to administer elections. It wants this data so it can run it through a faulty database — known to mistakenly identify eligible voters as ineligible — and purge supposed noncitizens from the rolls, which states already do on a regular basis to clean up voter rolls ahead of elections.
When NBC’s Welker asked Blanche if it’d suffered enough legal defeats to give up the crusade, Blanche said, “we’re not going to stop.”
“We’re relying on a statute passed by Congress that allows us, in the right circumstances, to review and get those voter rolls,” said Blanche. “So, no, we’re not going to stop doing what I think every American should expect us to do.”
So far, not one single federal judge has sided with the Trump Justice Department’s argument for why it should have access to the data — and we’re talking about judges who have been appointed by Democratic and Republican administrations alike. As Khaya has reported for TPM:
The data the DOJ is after includes sensitive information like drivers licenses and Social Security numbers — personal identifying information that the federal government is not entitled to.
To make its case, the DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to argue it is allowed to seize the information. But, as the courts have found time and time again, none of these statutes give the federal government the authority to demand state’s voter rolls.
Fox News Host Makes Fun of U.S. Sailors Experiencing Mental Health Crisis
Amid reports of both a lack of supplies and food, and a deteriorating mental health situation onboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln where multiple service members have tried to jump overboard, a Fox News host and former Marine made fun of the sailors, saying, “how weak are you?” The ship is stationed in the Arabian Sea, supporting the U.S.’s military operations in Iran and has not made a port call for over 200 days.
“I just do not understand the mentality,” Fox host Joey Jones said. “If this is a representation of who our military is now… we’re just Rome sitting here waiting to burn. We’ve got nothing left.”
Joey Jones on concerns of service members on the USS Lincoln: pic.twitter.com/Va2npYmA9x
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 15, 2026
Trump Defends Decision to Cut Exercises With South Korea
After directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to “substantially reduce” the U.S. military’s ongoing drills with South Korea, citing his “very good relationship with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un,” Trump defended the decision in the Oval Office today. Trump argued that the U.S. should not be engaging in joint military exercises with South Korea if they’re not willing to help aid the U.S. in Trump’s ongoing, unpopular war with Iran.
“He said, ‘No, thanks,’” Trump said. “And I said … we have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong Un, your next-door neighbor, and you’re not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran? … I see. Well, why are we involved in helping you?”
“We’re guarding them from a country … that’s costing us billions and billions of dollars to protect not only them, but other countries,” he continued. “Look at NATO. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars protecting Europe from Russia, hundreds of billions, mostly from Russia, but from other things, too. And then they say, well, they don’t want to get involved with guarding the strait where they get most of their oil.”
If You Read One More Thing From TPM Today, Read This
Sarah Posner reports on the evangelical community as it looks for the Christian right’s next political leader when Trump’s term is up in 2028. They’ve somehow set their sights on … Mike Huckabee: Evangelicals Think They’ve Found Their Post-Trump Era Leader in … Mike Huckabee?
Yesterday’s Top Story
Let’s Take a Look-See at What ‘Far Left’ vs. ‘Far Right’ Candidates Actually Want
What I’m Reading
Planned Parenthood to spend more than $600,000 against Susan Collins in Maine
Burnham exchanged messages with impersonator of top Trump aide
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We are all on the decoy plane.
Good evening everyone,
Is the 90 day moratorium on voting rulings still a thing, are we in the time period before the mid terms, etc.
Also, I think all the ‘28 talk is keeping GOP candidates from getting any kind of campaign going.
Per the calendar we are well within the 90 day period. I think the issue now is more if the 90 day window is actually a law or just an agreement. And we all know the Orange Idiot’s track record with agreements. Or they might say that the voter rolls are somehow not covered by the agreement tho that seems a losing argument. But with the current SCOTUS none of it may matter.