While administration officials went from side-stepping the question to openly embracing the potential that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers might be being deployed (illegally) to polling places in November, President Trump himself has yet to speak on the topic — whether by design, as ICE’s popularity plummeted earlier this year, or not.
On Tuesday, Trump finally directly answered a question about sending armed federal law enforcement to the polls in the fall. PBS Newshour’s Liz Landers asked Trump if he planned to send the National Guard or ICE agents to voting locations.
“I’d do anything necessary to make sure we have honest elections,” Trump said. “We have to have honest elections.”
The remarks come after he posted on Truth Social over the weekend, ominously foreshadowing the deployment of some sort of “Election Integrity Army” of his allies for the midterms.
“During my Historic Election in 2024, when I won every single Swing State, and decisively won both the Electoral and Popular votes by wide margins, the Republicans had an Election Integrity Army in every single State to preserve the sanctity of each legal vote,” Trump wrote. “We will be doing the same again in 2026, but it will be much bigger and stronger.”
It was not clear what any of this might mean — or, crucially, how seriously to take it. The Republican National Committee provided one possible explanation on Tuesday, stating that it would be sending RNC staff out to at least 17 different states to serve as “poll watchers” and “election observers” during the midterms. They’ve described that plan in similar terms as Trump, saying it’ll function as a nationwide “election integrity” operation.
Though poll watchers and election observers are a normal component of U.S. elections, “election integrity,” as we all know by now, means a very different thing when Trump and his allies are using the term. Since 2020, the term has been weaponized as a catchall phrase for whenever Trump loses elections and Republicans want to blame his loss on whatever version of the rampant, widespread voter fraud myth is most politically advantageous to them at the moment — whether it be spreading conspiracy theories about suitcases of ballots being shipped in to key counties that are typically Democratic strongholds or blaming electoral losses on chimerical voting by undocumented immigrants.
RNC Chair Joe Gruters confirmed on Tuesday that the work that this supposed election integrity team does on the ground, in a still-unspecified 17 states, will be a lot more than robust than just serving as traditional poll workers. Per Democracy Docket:
In comments Tuesday, RNC Chair Joe Gruters confirmed the party has already placed staff on the ground in targeted states tied to competitive House and Senate races.
“You know, we’ve already deployed field staff and we’ve hired state directors and election integrity directors,” Gruters said. “And I think [in] 17 states we’ve deployed people already.”
The RNC has not named the 17 states, but Gruters described the deployment as part of a broader strategy to maintain Republican control of Congress after 2026.
“We focus on the big picture. We focus on winning. We have a plan. We’re executing the plan,” Gruters said.
South Carolina GOP Won’t Carve Up Clyburn’s District
The above remarks from Trump come against the backdrop of an absolutely brutal and devastating race in red states across the South to gerrymander Black voters out of electoral power in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling. You can catch up on our live coverage of the flurry of actions in the immediate aftermath of the SCOTUS decisions that obliterated the Voting Rights Act here, but one small bit of positive news on this front, from my colleague, Kate Riga:
South Carolina Senate Republicans became the first to buck President Trump’s demand for a post-Callais redraw Tuesday, sinking the amendment that would have tacked redistricting on after the official end of the legislative term.
Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey (R) gave a floor speech arguing against a redraw on both political — it might endanger Republican seats — and moral — it’s an abuse of power against the minority — grounds. He said that he’d spoken to Trump, but still opposed the effort.
Raskin: Todd Blanche Orchestrated Payouts to Problematic FBI Agents
In a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, alleged that Blanche used his “office to improperly shower government cash on Donald Trump’s political operatives and sycophants” — including a number of FBI agents who had faced discipline for improper conduct.
“The record definitively shows that the agents were not disciplined for making protected disclosures to Congress or for the imaginary offense of being a Republican,” Raskin wrote. “They were disciplined for reckless misuse of classified information or serious episodes of professional misconduct that endangered national security.”
Raskin alleges that Blanche oversaw large payouts and reinstatements to “former FBI agents who were suspended, fired, and had their clearances revoked for criminal activity, major breaches of national security, or violations of the standards of conduct and professionalism required of law enforcement agents.”
Some of the payouts and reinstatements Rasking described had a clear political valence. One agent, Raskin said, “was removed from the FBI for misconduct for failing to participate in an operation investigating a violent white nationalist group, Patriot Front, claiming falsely that the investigation was politically motivated.” Another, per his letter, “disclosed classified information regarding a criminal investigation into Project Veritas, taking screenshots of his computer and sending them to third parties.”
Raskin made it clear that should Democrats take back the House in the midterms, the alleged settlement payouts would be the topic of intense oversight from his committee.
Palate Cleanser
Can’t imagine this going over well with his base of supporters, but fool us once with underestimating the depth of their sycophantic allegiance.
In Case You Missed It
NEW from Josh Kovensky and Emine Yücel: How the Trump Admin Tried to Turn Foreign Aid Funds Into Deportation Cash
Morning Memo: Trump Uses Leak Probes to Target Press Freedoms
Layla A. Jones has the latest on the Fed: Kevin Warsh Confirmed as Fed Governor as Powell Stays on the Board
Catch up on Kate Riga and Khaya Himmelman’s live coverage here: Redistricting Effort Fails in South Carolina after Five GOP Defections
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Supreme Court Unblocks Alabama’s Racially Discriminatory Map, Showing That Alito Was Lying
What We Are Reading
Iowa Is Ruby Red. A Democrat There Is Worrying Republicans Anyway.
Inflation hits 3.8%, outpacing wage growth for the first time since 2023
ICE at the polls will go over like a fart in a space suit. And it won’t help the American Nazi (I mean Republican) Party.
I am hopeful that the redistricting effort will blow up in their faces; it won’t create extra votes, and might discourage the ones they need while energizing the opposition.
Too many polling places, not enough ICE. And the usual response that they’ll concentrate on important swing states in Blue cities, runs into state governors and mayors who won’t put up with bullshit. It’s illegal under federal law for them to be anywhere near a polling place. The midterms may even be decided by mail-in votes. Thousands of Dem eyes will be on this.
OT? Great (Important) Read
Rachel Hurley ·
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Okay - I went DEEP on this - and I want everyone to PAY ATTENTION.
There will be a test.
So one network had two huge wins this week and the guy at the center of it isn’t getting named in either story.
Have you heard of Leonard Leo? The Federalist Society guy. The one who helped build the current conservative Supreme Court majority and advised Trump on who to put on it, then went off to do bigger stuff.
On April 29 the conservative Supreme Court majority he helped build handed down what voting-rights advocates say is the biggest rollback of the Voting Rights Act in decades.
On May 4 the Department of Education opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith College for admitting trans women. Totally different fights. Totally different agencies. Totally different legal frameworks. Nobody putting them in the same story.
But the same $1.6 billion dark money network is sitting behind both of them.
I had to dig into this one because honestly when the Smith news dropped I thought it was just another Trump trans panic move. Standard culture war stuff. Then I saw the complaint came from a group called Defending Education, and the name rang a bell from the parental rights school board stuff a couple years ago, and I started pulling on the thread.
Defending Education is run by Nicole Neily. She’s a Koch network lifer - Cato, FreedomWorks, Competitive Enterprise Institute, all the usual suspects. The group says it’s grassroots moms, which, lol.
According to IRS filings summarized by SourceWatch, the group paid Leonard Leo’s PR firm CRC Advisors $1,392,656 between 2021 and 2024 for “strategy” and “public relations.” Their legal work runs through Consovoy McCarthy, a firm that has worked extensively on conservative civil rights cases. Neily’s other nonprofit, Speech First, got $750,000 from Leo’s 85 Fund.
So Leo’s nonprofit hub gives money to one Neily group, and a different Neily group pays Leo’s for-profit firm. The money goes in a circle. The “grassroots parents” are a pass-through.
So when “a parents group” filed the Smith complaint, that’s not a parents group. That’s a Leo-network-aligned operation using a friendlier brand name.
OK let me explain how the money actually works because once you see it you can’t unsee it.
In 2022 an Illinois businessman named Barre Seid gave $1.6 billion to a Leo entity called Marble Freedom Trust. Largest political donation in American history.
That money flows from Marble through a donor-advised fund at Schwab Charitable, which then grants it to Leo’s main funding hubs, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund.
Those funds then grant it out to all the nonprofits doing the actual fights - judicial groups, parents groups, election groups, “free speech” groups.
Schwab in the middle is the anonymity layer. When the 85 Fund’s tax return says “we got our money from Schwab Charitable,” nobody can trace it back to Marble, which means nobody can trace it back to Seid. The donors stay anonymous.
A significant amount of Leo-network nonprofit money has flowed back to Leo’s own for-profit firm CRC Advisors - over $100 million since 2020, according to Court Accountability’s Lisa Graves. He owns three houses now including a $3.3 million Tudor in Maine that he paid cash for in 2021. The network’s nonprofit money also flows into his private consulting operation.
That’s the machine. Now the wins.
Win one is Callais. The case was about a Louisiana map that restored a second majority-Black district and led to the election of a second Black representative. A group of “non-African American” voters sued to kill the map. Alito wrote the 6-3 opinion holding the map was unconstitutional and substantially narrowed how racial-gerrymandering claims can be brought going forward. Critics say the ruling shifts the fight toward proving intentional racial discrimination, making Section 2 claims much harder to win.
Kagan in the dissent said it makes Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”
The conservative majority that wrote that opinion came through the judicial pipeline Leo helped build.
And the response was immediate.
Tennessee pulled off the most aggressive move. The day after Callais, Trump posted that Governor Bill Lee was going to redraw Tennessee’s map. Lee called a special session two days later.
The session opened May 5. On May 7 the legislature repealed a 1972 state law that had banned mid-decade redistricting for fifty years, passed an entirely new congressional map that carves Memphis into three pieces, eliminates the state’s only majority-Black district, and pushes toward a 9-0 Republican delegation.
Lee signed it all into law. Same day.
The NAACP filed a lawsuit within three hours.
They repealed a fifty-year-old law and passed a brand new map in three days. You don’t draw a map like that in a weekend. You don’t repeal a fifty-year-old statute in a weekend. Somebody had this ready.
Alabama filed an emergency request the day after Callais to bring back maps a lower court had already thrown out for being racially gerrymandered. Florida started redistricting immediately. Three Republican states moving in the same week, with more lining up behind them.
Win two is Smith.
Smith College is a 155-year-old women’s college in western Massachusetts. The kind of place that shows up in old movies as a stand-in for “smart, slightly intimidating young women in cardigans.” They’ve been admitting trans women since 2015, which is to say, for over a decade, on the simple logic that a women’s college admits people who identify as women. Nobody outside the school cared. It wasn’t a fight.
Then last spring Smith handed an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. You might remember Levine. She’s the trans former Assistant Secretary for Health under Biden, the first openly trans federal official ever confirmed by the Senate, and basically Trumpworld’s favorite person to put in attack ads. The Trump campaign featured her face in ads going after Kamala in 2024. Right’s been obsessed with her for years.
Smith invited her to commencement. Gave her a degree. That was the trigger.
Defending Education - Nicole Neily’s group, the one running money in a circle with Leonard Leo - filed a complaint with the Department of Education. On May 4, the Trump administration opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith for, and I’m quoting here, “admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams.”
The “victims” in the complaint are “biological women” who somehow got harmed by Smith admitting trans women. There are no actual women being denied admission. Smith takes any applicant who identifies as a woman, period. There’s no named student who came forward saying their rights were violated. No incident. No event. Just a policy that exists, and the possibility that someday, maybe, somebody could feel like their rights got taken away.
That’s the move. Sue over something that has not happened to anyone. Get the precedent before the harm exists, so by the time anyone could have actually been harmed, the door is already closed.
We’ve seen this play before. The clearest example is 303 Creative, the Colorado web designer who sued for the right to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. She had never been asked to make a wedding website for a same-sex couple. She did not have a wedding website business. The “request” she cited in her court filing turned out to be from a guy who was straight, already married to a woman, and had never contacted her.
The Supreme Court ruled in her favor anyway, 6-3, and carved a First Amendment loophole into public accommodations law over a customer who did not exist.
Now look at what the Trump administration is doing with executive orders. Designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization with no specific act tied to a specific person. Deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act based on tattoos that might indicate gang membership. The whole pre-crime architecture, where you get punished for what the government thinks you might do, not what you did.
The Smith investigation is the same logic applied to civil rights enforcement. Stop waiting for harm. Open the case on the possibility of harm. Let the threat of losing federal funding do the work of forcing the school to change its policy before anyone has actually been hurt by anything.
Listen. I’ve written about Leo before, mostly the climate cases - his network funds the lawsuits while ProPublica documents him paying for the justices’ vacations. The Smith case is the same playbook in a new costume. The lawyers are there. The plaintiffs are pre-built. The PR is pre-positioned. The federal agencies are now staffed by people from the same conservative legal world.
Leo’s network isn’t waiting for harm. They’re manufacturing the precedent in advance. Callais was queued for years. The Smith complaint sat at the DOE for ten months. Tennessee passed a brand new map and repealed a fifty-year-old law in three days. Alabama filed the day after Callais. None of this was improvised. They’re firing on all cylinders.
The press will cover Callais as a voting rights story and Smith as a trans story and nobody is going to put them in the same paragraph. But the donor map does. The money runs in a circle and the circle includes both fights.
If you’re a Black voter in Louisiana watching your district disappear, and you’re a trans student at Smith watching the federal government try to throw you out of your school, you don’t have the same enemy on paper. You have the exact same enemy on the bank statements.
And if you’re on the left and you’ve been watching this from the sidelines wondering why we keep losing, the answer is simple.
They’ve been planning all of this for decades. Now, they show up to every fight with the lawyers, the plaintiffs, the PR, the donors, and the federal agencies already lined up.
Time to stop watching and start taking notes.
Hopefully the Dems and other GOTV and activist orgs. can make lemonade from the “ICE at polling places” lemons. Treat election day as a kind of No Kings event, with showing up to vote as a “f#@k your gestapo” protest. I’d be up for it.
Translation: If I’m impeached and removed from office I could face prosecution. I don’t want to have my lifelong, scot-free crime-spree ruined by dying in jail.