The Dictatorship
The Justice Department is reportedly assembling an unprecedented national voter database
The Justice Department is reportedly putting together a gigantic and unprecedented data base of national voter information — and it could help President Donald Trump’s efforts to deny the 2020 election results or cast doubt on future elections.
Plenty of studies indicate that noncitizen voting is so vanishingly rare that it poses no threat to election integrity.
The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reports that the “Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.” The Times reports that the initiative has proceeded through efforts at both the Justice Department’s civil rights division and criminal division, “seeking data about individual voters across the country, including names and addresses, in a move that experts say may violate the law.”
Plenty of studies indicate that noncitizen voting is so vanishingly rare that it poses no threat to election integrity. For example, after the 2016 elections, the Brennan Center for Justice surveyed election officials in 42 jurisdictions with high immigration populations and found a suspected noncitizen voting rate of 0.0001%.
Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official who’s an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, likens DOJ’s efforts to Trump deploying the National Guard to handle domestic law enforcement. He told the Times, “It’s wading in, without authorization and against the law, with an overly heavy federal hand to take over a function that states are actually doing just fine.” He described the reported effort as “wildly illegal” and “deeply troubling” and said “nobody asked for this.”
In what appears to be a related effort to ostensibly identify noncitizen voting, NPR reports that election officials have checked the citizenship status and other information of more than 33 million voters through the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, expressed concerns about the SAVE searches in an email to BLN:
It is possible someone could manipulate or misinterpret the results of SAVE searches to peddle disinformation about voter fraud and undermine faith in our elections. It is also possible that the data could be misused. There is a reason we have a Privacy Act, which places requirements on the federal government before it amasses private personal data on American citizens. Recent reporting on errors by DOGE indicate the danger of that personal information getting into the wrong hands or being misused.
Trump, of course, doesn’t hew to the truth when he denies election results. But armed with more information, his efforts to cast doubt on election results or manufacture narratives about massive noncitizen voting could become more sophisticated.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.
The suspect in an attack at a synagogue near Detroit lost several family members in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon this month, according to the Islamic Institute of America in Dearborn and community leaders.
Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a 41-year-old U.S. citizen originally from Lebanon, lost his two brothers and a niece and nephew in the strike on their home, according to those sources. Whether that played a role in the motive for the attack remains unclear, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer deferred a question about it to the FBI on Friday, citing an ongoing investigation.
Authorities are looking at the possibility Ghazali may have had familial ties to Hezbollah in Lebanon, two law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation told MS NOW.
Ghazali died in the Thursday attack, in which authorities say he drove a car into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, injuring a security officer. Ghazali was a resident of Dearborn Heights, Mayor Mo Baydoun said in a Facebook post. Baydoun also said in that post that Ghazali “lost several members of his own family, including his niece and nephew, in an Israeli attack on their home in Lebanon” this month.
The Thursday attack in Michigan came as the U.S. and Israel wage a war with Iranwhich they launched on Feb. 28. Security around Jewish communities in places such as New York has been heightened since the conflict began.
Ghazali first came to the U.S. in 2011 on a spousal visa before being granted citizenship in 2016, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said.
In a phone interview with Fox host Brian Kilmeade, President Donald Trump appeared to blame former President Joe Biden for Ghazali’s entry into the country when asked about the Michigan attack and the deadly shooting at Old Dominion University in Michigan.
“They came in a lot through Biden, and they came in through other presidents, frankly, and it’s a disgrace,” Trump said.
Temple Israel describes itself as the country’s largest Jewish Reform congregation, and it also has an early childhood education center on site that more than 100 kids attend, Whitmer said. All children were safely evacuated following the attack, Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said.
“This is targeting babies who are Jewish,” Whitmer said. “That’s antisemitism at its absolute worst.”
The security guard who was injured was hospitalized but is expected to recover.
Whitmer on Friday thanked the synagogue’s security personnel, who she said “were selfless in their courage and they saved lives.”
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., added that if the synagogue’s private security, local law enforcement and first responders “had not all done their jobs almost perfectly, we would be talking about an immense tragedy here today with children gone.”
Andrew Bossone and Chris O’Leary contributed to this report.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Marc Santia is an investigative correspondent for MS NOW.
The Dictatorship
Missile strikes a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, Iraqi security officials say
BAGHDAD (AP) — A missile struck a helipad inside the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad, two Iraqi security officials said.
Associated Press footage showed a column of smoke rising Saturday morning over the embassy compound.
The sprawling embassy complex, one of the largest U.S. diplomatic facilities in the world, has been repeatedly targeted by rockets and drones fired by Iran-aligned militias.
There was no immediate comment from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. On Friday, the embassy renewed its Level 4 security alert for Iraq, warning that Iran and Iran-aligned militia groups have previously carried out attacks against U.S. citizens, interests and infrastructure, and “may continue to target them.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Four airports serving Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, Virginia, halted all flights on Friday evening for over an hour because of a strong chemical smell that was impeding air traffic controllers, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The ground stop affected Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington Dulles International Airport, Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Richmond International Airport, FAA Secretary Sean Duffy announced on social media Friday. The declaration caused flight delays to soar to roughly two hours across some of the busiest airports in the country.
Flights began to leave the airports after 7 p.m. ET on Friday, but the ground stop — which prevents planes from landing at an airport — remained in place.
The smell was coming from Potomac TRACON, Duffy wrote, referring to a terminal radar approach control facility that manages air traffic for the Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Virginia, and the Richmond-Charlottesville areas, according to the FAA website.
A spokesperson for the federal agency didn’t respond to an emailed question clarifying how the smell was affecting traffic controllers on Friday evening.
Between 25% and one-third of all flights departing from the four airports affected were delayed after the ground stop.
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