Friday, January 2

THIS WEEK

New DOJ voting lawyer worked on Georgia fake electors plot
Unsealed order suggests DOJ retaliated against Abrego Garcia
Rural mail ballots at risk as post office finalizes postmark changes

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

New DOJ voting lawyer worked on Georgia fake electors plot

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is continuing its push to repopulate its emptied ranks by recruiting from the shadowy bowels of the anti-voting world. It recently added two new hires with dubious credentials to its voting section: Christopher J. Gardner and Megan Frederick.

The two lawyers appear to fit the department’s new objectives. Gardner represented Trump in a Georgia lawsuit seeking to prevent state officials from certifying the 2020 election. Now, he’s representing the DOJ in litigation that could reopen the issue of Georgia’s 2020 results.

Frederick has worked closely with Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting network. She now leads the federal lawsuit demanding Washington, D.C.’s unredacted voter rolls.

The department has been decimated under President Donald Trump’s leadership. By May, the voting section was down to just a small handful of attorneys.

David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Democracy Docket that the head of the division “is now openly begging for applicants on social media, and after losing hundreds of years of law enforcement experience, the division now appears to be fast-tracking the hiring of lawyers based solely on loyalty and commitment to debunked conspiracy theories.” Read more about the DOJ hires here.

RETALIATION

Unsealed order suggests DOJ retaliated against Abrego Garcia

A newly unsealed order from U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw revealed even more disturbing information about the DOJ this week: Top department officials moved to press charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man who was illegally sent to a notorious Salvadoran megaprison as part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown — after he won a court victory that ultimately brought him back to the United States.

That suggests the immigrant smuggling charges Abrego Garcia faces were retaliation for the fact that he fought his removal to El Salvador — and won.

Crenshaw wrote that a review of over 3,000 documents provided by the government indicated that the decision to charge Abrego Garcia “may have been a joint decision” between federal prosecutors in Tennessee and “others who may or may not have acted with an improper motivation.”

Crenshaw concluded Abrego Garcia was entitled to a review of certain internal DOJ communications and a hearing in which he could present evidence on why his case should be dismissed due to vindictive and selective prosecution. Read more about the order here.

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VOTING

Rural mail ballots at risk as post office finalizes postmark changes

A new postal service rule could result in mail ballots getting tossed out – and those consequences could be magnified depending on how the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rules in an upcoming case.

SCOTUS is poised to decide soon whether a mail ballot must be received by Election Day to count, or whether it merely must be sent by then.

Meanwhile, the United States Postal Service (USPS) just finalized a rule clarifying that postmarks are applied at a regional processing facility, not when the USPS takes possession of the mail – a change stemming from a cost-cutting move to eliminate evening mail pickups at post offices more than 50 miles away from a regional processing facility.

The bottom line is that mail sent in rural areas will be postmarked and delivered at least one day later than before. And at the same time, SCOTUS might end the grace periods that allow those late-arriving ballots to be counted. Read more about the changes here.

OPINION

“60 Minutes” Obeyed in Advance

When CBS News pulled a “60 Minutes” segment about migrants illegally sent to the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, the decision wasn’t terribly surprising for anyone who knew that the network had installed Bari Weiss as its new conservative editor-in-chief. Social media was flooded with outraged reactions.

But there’s no hiding from the truth, as miserable as it is. As Marc put it: “The ‘60 Minutes’ we have known is dead. The fearless program that many of us grew up with was strangled by corporate titans seeking favor with the Trump White House. I don’t know what is next for the storied franchise, but it will never be the same.”

The solution isn’t to keep watching CBS, or to switch to another compromised network, but to support independent news outlets like Democracy Docket, Marc wrote. Read more here.

NEW EPISODE

GOP strategy backfires | This could save democracy

A surprising legal principle from conservative Supreme Court gun cases could help restore the right to vote as a first-class constitutional right. Drawing on his experience arguing his fifth case before the SCOTUS, Marc shows how voting has been wrongly treated as a second-class right—subject to balancing tests and state convenience—while other rights receive strict protection, and argues that the Constitution, history, and modern technology all support stronger, uniform safeguards for free and fair elections. Watch on YouTube here.

What we’re doing

Monitoring the strange characters of the online far-right isn’t for the faint of heart – but it’s important work that ensures we all know what’s going on out there. (Shout out to Democracy Docket reporter Matt Cohen, who spends a great deal of time in the far-right trenches and hasn’t yet lost his mind from it.) Democracy Docket reporter Jen Rice recommends listening to a recent episode of This American Life that does a remarkable job offering a surreal tour of the right wing livestreamers who have set up shop covering protests in Portland – a bizarre media ecosystem (it’s even weirder than you think) with direct links to Fox News and Trump.