Election fraud claims are unsurprisingly fake, and brace for more guns

For this week’s roundup of the injustice being meted out by the Trump administration, we’ve got some old friends like T. Elliot Gaiser showing up to wreak stupid havoc. We also have election fraud shenanigans, and as a little treat, because we deserve it, a former Trump White House attorney gets his comeuppance. 

This isn’t election fraud. It’s just laziness.

The Trump administration finally found a big-deal mail-in ballot fraud case! Over 300 ballots in Utah were stolen by the deep state! Or undocumented immigrants! Or the Democrats! 

You will probably not be surprised to learn that it was none of these things. Yes, several hundred mail-in ballots meant for Utah voters went on a walkabout, but that walkabout ended in a dumpster, courtesy of a mail carrier who allegedly decided to lighten his load by tossing a bunch of ballots and advertising materials into the nearest trash. In his interview with prosecutors, he told them outright he wasn’t motivated by anything partisan, just by laziness. 

Nonetheless, the Department of Justice is hyping this like the crime of the century, somehow proof that we need to let President Donald Trump wreck mail-in balloting entirely. It isn’t at all clear how having the complicated, comically unworkable system the administration demanded, where there would be approved voter lists and a portal where states had to upload everything and envelopes with individualized trackable barcodes would have stopped a dude from just being a lazypants and tossing things out. 

But who cares about little details like that when the DOJ can use this to screech about voter fraud? Gotta keep finding ways to destabilize the midterms so that the GOP can blame the coming votepocalypse on anyone except themselves and their terrible standard-bearer, Trump.

T. Elliot Gaiser comes through again

Man, this kid is clutch. 

Gaiser, a former clerk for Justice Samuel Alito, now heads the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and he’s become a one-man permission slip machine, cranking out opinions that negate decades of settled law in favor of One Weird Trick that lets the administration do whatever it wants. 

This time, it’s that somehow, all along, it’s been unconstitutional to stop people under 21 from buying handguns. So great that we’re going to be even more awash in guns than before, with even younger people able to access them. Truly what the founders intended, right? There are going to be no gun regulations left standing when this administration is done. 

Well, this flamed out nicely 

Former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino just found out that the whole scream-defamation-and-sue approach that works for Trump does not work quite as well for others. 

A federal judge just tossed Passantino’s defamation claim against MS NOW analyst and former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann. Weissmann, without naming Passantino directly, said that the lawyer “coached” former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to lie to Congress and, well, kinda turns out he did? 

Here’s what U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan had to say about it: “Ms. Hutchinson’s statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie. For example, Mr. Passantino’s advice included telling Ms. Hutchinson that ‘Your go-to, Cass, is ‘I don’t recall,’ even when she asked about answering ‘certain questions that [she] would recall.”

Yeah, it’s not defamation if it’s the truth, buddy. They teach that in the first year of law school. Perhaps Passantino missed that day?

Another collusive little legal effort from the administration

One of the neat tricks the DOJ likes to deploy these days is cooperating with a party in a lawsuit that is supposed to, theoretically, be an adverse party. The most high-profile example of this is the insurrectionist slush fund, where Trump put himself on both sides of the deal. But why not deploy that little stunt elsewhere, right?

Which is why the DOJ is telling a federal appeals court that it basically agrees with the churches suing the government because, well, it does. 

Neither the administration nor conservative churches like the fact that the Johnson Amendment exists. It prohibits churches from participating in partisan politics lest they lose their nonprofit status, but conservatives want that sweet tax exemption and to have their preachers do politics from the pulpit as well. So, the administration whipped up a little agreement with some churches that sued over this, an agreement that fundamentally sidesteps the law. 

A lower court threw it out, likely because you can’t write an agreement to ignore a law, but the DOJ is now at the court of appeals saying it’s totally fine. 

No, it isn’t normal for the government to write briefs siding with the parties it is ostensibly opposed to, but we’re far, far past normal now.  

The Florida AG gets as Trumpy as can be 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn’t the only high-level official in the state who wants to be just like the fascist toddler trashing the White House. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is also a straight-up cavalcade of bad-faith garbage, and now he’s brought a straight-up bad-faith lawsuit against The New York Times, just like Dear Old Daddy Trump. 

This one is a ridiculous reach, even by straight-up bad-faith garbage standards, but hey, you gotta swing big if you want to get noticed by the worst people in the world. So Uthmeier followed through on his threat to sue The New York Times over his allegation that they somehow are not complying with their own editorial standards, and have instead “weaponized” them for wokeness or something. Uthmeier’s theory, such as it is, is that somehow this hurts the value of the Times’s stock shares and is therefore somehow worthy of a lawsuit on behalf of shareholders. 

What this really is, of course, is a way for Florida to try to get in on the Trumpian efforts to suppress the free press.