BREAKING: 25 Losses and Counting for Trump DOJ

0:00This has never happened before. Five players, 26 cases each, one million dollars on the line for every player. On September 25th, Yamavarizor and Casino at Sandman Well makes history with Deal or No Deal live hosted by me, Howie Mandel. Plain September for your chance to take the stage at Yamavar Theatre and answer the ultimate question. Deal or No Deal? Details at Yamavar.com must be 21. Please gamble responsibly. Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at Instagram.com slash teen accounts. So a normal president, what is important is making sure there is prosperity and health and safety among the American people. For Donald Trump what matters is that he can put in place his anti-voting agenda.

1:01And the reason why he wants to do that other than ideological is because if he doesn't successfully get this put in place for 2026, Democrats are going to win control of Congress. We have breaking news and a major update in the fight for free and fair elections with just a little more than 40 days to go. Donald Trump's Department of Justice has just lost its 25th straight case in which it was trying to get access to your sensitive voter data. Now look, as a lawyer and a litigator and the founder of the law firm had just handed them this 25th defeat, I couldn't be prouder. But as a citizen and as the founder of democracy docket and someone who advocates for pro-democracy causes, this is a monumental step forward in preventing Donald Trump from taking control of the 2026 midterms. Because it's not just that he lost this 25th case. It's not just that they haven't won any of these. But this is just the latest in a series of defeats that they have suffered. I mean, they couldn't pass this a back.

2:02Their rule that they tried to get the Postal Service to adopt that would have turned the U.S. Postal Service into a voter suppression war machine for the Republican Party and the Trump administration. Well, that got blocked by the Supreme Court. I mean, even less term, you know, in the spring, the Supreme Court ruled against them in a critical mail-in voting case that I was happy that I and my law firm litigated. And one, so look, in this episode, we're going to walk through these court victories. We're going to talk about what the threats are and how they have been fought back against and won. But we're also going to discuss the reality that when Donald Trump loses, he doesn't give up. In fact, he gets more dangerous. So it's going to be a bit of a journey. So I want you to sit back and grab a drink and get ready. But before we start, I need to ask you a personal favor. I found a democracy docket in 2020 to be a resource of information for exactly moments like this. It doesn't have any venture capitalists or private equity. There's no corporate overlord.

3:03It is entirely dependent on people like you subscribing for free or if they can afford $10 a month or $120 a year, becoming premium members. Either way, signing up is the single best thing you can do to help democracy docket succeed. So please click on the link in the description of this episode or in the one above or go to democracy docket.com slash YouTube right now and sign up. I'd appreciate it. When Donald Trump came to power, I think he knew that he was not likely to be a very popular second term president. Because almost immediately he started taking steps to try to control elections that at that point were frankly almost two years away. In March of 2025, like literally within two months of him coming into power, he was already telling Republican members of Congress that the federal government was in charge of vote

4:03counting that the states were merely their agents. He was already embracing the save act and other voters' pressure measures. He was already attacking voting by mail. I mean, the first anti voting executive order he issued was actually in the spring of 2025. People forget that, right? We're all focused on what's happening now, but going all the way back to the spring of 2025, he was already attacking voting by mail. And around the same time, he and his administration launched an initiative to try to collect sensitive voting information on every single American. In all 50 states, plus the addition of Columbia, they wanted to get access to the state's unredacted voter rolls. Sometimes referred to as a voter file. Now this has a wealth of information in it, and I've done whole episodes about this. But for this purpose, what you need to realize is that if you have access to all of this data, you have the fundamental building block to register people to vote, to turn out people

5:06to vote, but also to draw new district lines and gerrymender. And to engage in widespread voter suppression. You see, because no matter what you want to do in politics, you need access to a file of detailed information about every individual who you may want to help or you may want to hurt. So they made it a priority early in the administration to get access to this data. But here's the thing, the federal government doesn't have any legitimate reason to have it. Like the federal government doesn't administer elections, states administer elections. In fact, the Constitution is quite clear about this, that the time-placed manner of elections is set by the states. Now Congress can override the states in many instances, but they can only do that by enactment a law. And they haven't done that. And even then, it's not up to the president, right? The president is not Congress, the president is not the states. So the president has, in the words of several federal courts, no role, no role in the administration of elections in our country.

6:07So the fact that right out of the gate, he's talking about states being his agents, not true. He wants access to your voting information for some unknown reasons. And yes, he signed an executive order in March of 2025 as well that we challenged in court my law firm and I on behalf of the Democratic Party. And we won. The executive order was blocked by us and by other plaintiffs who brought similar losses. But the thing about Donald Trump, as I said, is he never gives up. It's not like he loses and then moves on to something else. And particularly when it comes to election and nihilism, this is his fixation. This is the unifying force that holds the Maga movement together. You see, you can have tariffs or not have tariffs and the Maga movement can stay intact. You can have vaccines or not vaccines and the Maga movement stays intact. You can have high prices or low prices and the Maga movement stays intact. In fact, as we've learned, Donald Trump can even wage a war in the Middle East having

7:12pledged that he would not do that. And fundamentally, the Maga movement stays intact. And that's because there really isn't a ideology behind Maga. It's personal to Donald Trump with one exception. And that's election and nihilism. The only thing in the modern Republican Party. The only thing in Trumpism or Magaism or whatever you want to call it that you cannot be is in favor of free and fair elections. You cannot say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. And that core principle that Joe Biden didn't win, that Donald Trump was cheated, that elections that he loses are rigged, that frankly, any election that any Republican loses is probably rigged. That is the ideology of the modern Republican Party. You know, Michael Watley, who is currently running for Senate in North Carolina and going to lose, became the RNC chair in advance of the 2024 election, replaced Ronald McDonald. Remember, she was the chair.

8:13She jumped through every hoop that Donald Trump answered. There was nothing that Ronald McDonald wasn't willing to do. I mean, allegedly, she changed her last name, which had been Romney. To McDonald, because Donald Trump apparently didn't like the name Romney. I wonder why. But she got replaced because she wasn't firm enough in his view on voter suppression election subversion. So Michael Watley, who's now a Senate candidate in North Carolina, got the job running on a platform that will be a better vote suppressor, I guess, a subversion election subverter, I guess, then Ronald McDonald. So this is what holds the Republican Party together. So it was not a surprise to me, though, to many others it was, that right after it came into office, he started embracing these rhetoric and these efforts. And that in particular, he wanted access to state voting information. He wanted to know if you watch in this video, our register is a Democrat or Republican. You want to know where you live?

9:14You want to know your social security number, your date of birth, copy of your signature in some places. Your racial data, your gender. You want to know whether you vote only in presidential elections or you vote in midterms. Whether if you're an independent, do you sometimes pull ballots for one party or the other in their primaries? Right, there's all of this information that these state voter records have, that the Trump administration was desperate to get their hands on. Oh, and it also includes whether you vote by mail or you vote in person. All right, so they wanted this information. They put out requests to the various states about half the states gave it to them because they are sick offense, the Donald Trump. That's 20 or so states 30 told them to go pound sand. Okay, so 30 states said, nope, we're not giving it to you. And that was basically every blue state plus a handful of red and purple states. And then the Trump administration threatened and threatened and threatened.

10:16And finally they sued those 30 states. And look, here's the thing is I'm not abundant. I am not like a professional analyst or commentator. I'm a lawyer. I litigate cases in court. I advise clients and I specialize in defeating Republicans and Donald Trump in their voter expression election subversion efforts. Many of you probably became aware of me because in 2020, I represented President Biden and the Democratic Party in defeating Donald Trump, well, more than 60 times in court. But you know, it didn't my career didn't start in 2020 and it's continued. Since then I am someone who Donald Trump hates, hates me by name. So the feeling is mutual because Donald I hate you too. Donald Trump sued me for racketeering along with Hillary Clinton and he lost. I didn't settle. We fought we won. He's called me a Democratic election stealing lawyer. He's called me I think a communist, a really bad person.

11:20Right? He doesn't like me and I don't like him. Great. But he particularly doesn't like me because I stand up to him in court and because, well, I win. And so as I reported at the outset, the latest victory that me and my law firm had against Donald Trump was handing the Department of Justice their 25th straight defeat in their litigation efforts to access this voter data, right? The 30 states they sued and they are old for 25. This 25th case was from Washington state. The 24th case was from Vermont. And if you think I don't take pleasure each and every time there is a court ruling against the Department of Justice and this administration, well, you're wrong because I do take that pleasure. But it's not just these voting cases that they're losing. I mean, when was the last time you heard that the Department of Justice won a voting case? When was the last time you heard that the Trump administration won anything relating to

12:21voting? Right? Just review the bidding for this year. He's picked his entire legislative agenda on the safe act. Not gas prices, not affordability, not the war in Iran, none of those things, the safe act, right? Remember, he was like all in on the safe act. The act didn't pass. He issued an executive order to try to call up the postal service to get access to this data and also to basically fundamentally disenfranchised people trying to vote by mail, trying to make it impossible for states to even be able to in time send out ballots by mail, but fundamentally to disenfranchise voters, even those who were properly submitted on lists, you know, and were eligible to vote. It went all the way to the Supreme Court and when the Supreme Court ruled seven two against him, he had choice words about the Supreme Court. He criticized the justices because this is important to him. You see, to a normal president, what is important is making sure there is prosperity and health

13:26and safety among the American people. For Donald Trump, what matters is that he can put in place his anti voting agenda. And the reason why he wants to do that other than ideological is because if he doesn't successfully get this put in place for 2026, Democrats are going to win control of Congress. Like you can mark my words. If we have free and fair elections, we are all going to wake up the day after the Tuesday, following the first Monday in November, and find out that Democrats have not just taken control of Congress, but are taking control of the US Senate. And they want a whole bunch of governorships that nobody thought they were going to be able to. So he knows this. He acts in public like he doesn't, right? Like in public, he acts like, you know, the polls say I'm more popular than ever. And this is fake and that's fake. He's he's got people around him who know how to read a poll. Hell, he's got people around him who are taking polls and are telling him the outcome. So he knows that he's historically unpopular that Republicans are set up to lose the midterms

14:30and his only chance. His only chance is to get access to this voter data.

15:31Or get the postal services to his dirty work and and put in place a rule that makes it very hard to vote by mail, right? Like these are all just alternative ways in which Trump is trying to make it harder for you to vote and setting up a situation that it is easier for him to cheat. So you know, we've heard in the last few days, they are making more and more noises, for example, about criminal investigations and criminal prosecutions. But like look at the facts of what they're what they're tremping in and just assume for a moment that they are telling the truth. Now that is a big assumption, very big assumption. And you know, probably not one, I should give them, but just to assume that this is correct. So the Trump administration made a big show on Tuesday in a press conference with the Homeland Security Investigation Senior Official Matthew Mill Holland.

16:34Okay. They wanted to point out that they are tracking down and prosecuting a massive amount of fraud. And this is according to the Associated Press. The Trump administration's whole of government effort to find and prosecute non-citizens illegally on state voter rolls has resulted in about 1,600 voter fraud cases that have led to 160 arrests. 160. We're a nation of hundreds of millions of people. They are saying that there is massive amounts of fraud because they have made 160 arrests. To be clear, that's not 160 convictions. This is the like we think you did it and you should believe us stage of the process. So let's just assume for a moment all 160 were illegally registered, all 160 of them.

17:36That would not be enough voters to affect anything, anything. I'm not making excuses for it. There shouldn't be non-citizens registered. Full stop. But 160 people is not going to change the outcome of the midterm elections. There's not going to affect any particular House race, not going to protect the Senate race. So they are flailing. Flailing because as the AP points out, this is in their words a whole of government effort. In other words, they've got government basically just doing this. They're not lowering your prices. So they better be doing something. This is the thing they're doing. Donald Trump knows that this isn't going to do the trick. He needs something bigger. He needs these voter files. He needs these lists from the mail service. He needs the DHS or the FBI or ICE to do something really big.

18:43And so as we get closer to the election, the risk doesn't go down because he's less popular. It doesn't lower because he's losing in court. In the Bizarre world that is the Trump era of American politics, the more frivolous and desperate his litigation becomes, the more transparently political and discredited his lies are, the more danger he becomes. We've seen this play out over and over and over again. We saw this obviously play out in 2020, resulting in January 6th, but we've seen it play out in the way in which he's handled immigration. We've seen it play out in the way he's handled the war in Iran. Right? Like he just gets more and more desperate and more and more irrational and more and more dangerous. So here we are almost at the end of September.

19:43We are winning almost every case in court against the Trump administration. We are beating the Department of Justice like a drum on the case they care most about. They are announcing 160 years. Harmeet Dylan, who is the head of the Civil Rights Division, which oversees the voting section. I mean, every so often she's mentioned for potentially to move up with the Department of Justice. And I just keep asking myself, how many cases do you have to lose to actually move up in the Department of Justice under Donald Trump? Because that is her resume as the head of the Civil Rights Division. Is just losing case after case after case. But she announced that they're going to deploy 1000 monitors, DOJ monitors on election

20:44day in 2026. They're going to send them out. They're going to look. They're going to monitor. Now I've said before that I don't believe that they have 1000 trained people within the Department of Justice to do this. I could be wrong. Maybe they have found them somewhere. Maybe they have trained a whole bunch of new people. But I think that this is going to be a stretch for them. So just like ICE was sort of repurposed for a while. You remember this, to be TSA agent, remember this? The ICE people were at the airports. I am worried that the way in which DOJ is going to make these numbers up is by deputizing, non-loyers, non-DOJ trained people. The same people that you saw in the streets in Minneapolis are the people who I am worried.

21:44They are going to say are now the monitors from the Department of Justice. Now if they do that, they're going to get sued and they will probably lose. Right? This is the recurring theme here. As people say, Mark, are you worried about X? And I say yes, I am worried about X. And they say, oh no. And I say yes, but they're going to get sued and they're going to lose. And then people are like, OK, well, that's good. So does that mean we can breathe easy? And I'm like, no, because then there'll be another thing. Like, it's just one after another after another. And the challenge is that we have to basically win everything. Donald Trump and his cronies just have to win one big thing, one. They just had to win the mail-in voting. They just had to pass the save act. They just had to win these voter file cases. They just had to have the Republican National Committee's case in the Supreme Court trying to throw out hundreds of thousands of lawful votes in the Watson case.

22:47These are about postmarked by election they've received afterwards. They just needed to win that. Thankfully, they didn't win that and they didn't win these voter file cases. And they didn't win the Postal Service case. And they are likely going to get blocked by federal courts for any effort to deploy ICE or other armed federal agents at the polls. But I'd be lying if I didn't tell you that in the breaking news that is all good news, we started with it. And it's good news is also the reality that we have to keep winning. And we have to keep winning and we have to keep winning and we have to keep winning. And that is a very hard way to run free and fair elections. It's a very hard way to have a truly democratic system where only one side can afford to lose. And the other side can't. I know I do this podcast and I do these episodes because I think it's really important to help make sure everyone is aware of what is happening. What's going on in court?

23:48What's going on with the Justice Department? What is the pro-democracy movement doing to fight back? But I'll be honest with you, I'm not a professional pundit. I'm not like, you know, an analyst sitting at home, you know, figuring out my next take. I don't do these episodes to give you like speculation about what might happen based on what I read in the newspaper. I'm trying to give you insights as someone who is in the trenches, in the fight for free and fair elections every single day, on the front lines and courtrooms. And the only thing I'm asking you in return is to become a democracy-docket subscriber. It's free to become a subscriber. Now, I'll be honest with you, if you can afford $10 a month or $120 a year, it would be great if you became a premium member. Because democracy-docket relies on its premium members to function, right? To operate, to do all of the things it does. There are no corporate backers or venture capital or private equity.

24:52It's not on sub-stack, it's not on act blue, right? It's literally built for this moment where it cannot be leveraged by any corporate giant. But it does need your support. So if you can click on the link in the description of this episode, or on the link above, or go to democracy-docket.com slash YouTube and sign up now, I would greatly appreciate it. So if all this sounds like good news, but a lot of work, yeah, it's basically good news, but a lot of work. But there is another side to this that in full disclosure, I have to give you, which is what about the 20 states that turned over the rotifals? What about the places where the governor or the secretary of state or the AG are all three of them? There were Trump, their election deniers. What do you do then? How do you deal with it if it is not, you know, Mark Elias and his clients against the Department of Justice, or Mark Elias and his clients against the Republican National Committee,

25:55or some right-wing voter suppression outfit? What if it is Mark Elias against all those people plus the people charged with running the elections? That's a lot harder. But that fight is just as important. See, unlike presidential years where you can say, okay, let's just focus on six, seven, eight, ten states. In midterms, you've got to focus everywhere. I don't have the luxury to be like, you know what? It's not a battleground state for the presidency. I don't have to work. I mean, battleground states for the Senate and the House or states like Texas and Iowa, Florida. So like, you've got a lot of red states where you're going to have to win for Democrats to take control of Congress. I should have added Alaska and Kansas and Ohio. Right, I can go on and on and list all of the places where Democrats have a real shot of winning, but where, you know, the people on the ground, the people in positions of power probably agree more with Donald Trump than agree with me.

26:57And so we have to win in those states too. And we have to be prepared to litigate in those states. And we are. And that is part of the story that I don't think gets told enough. You know, we sued my law firm, sued Ohio because they passed a proof of citizenship law, just like the sayback that they tried to pass it to, at the national level, a bunch of states, Republican states adopted similar laws. And we've been suing them one by one. And in a lot of those cases were winning. We actually sued Kansas. And got them to have to count ballots, supposed marked by election day, but received afterwards. Right, not only did we preserve the ability, which is what we did in the Supreme Court, in that case. But in Kansas, we actually affirmatively created that right, striking down a law that that was recently passed that would that would disqualify those ballots. In Missouri right now, right now, we're in before the Supreme Court.

27:59As Republicans continue to try to disenfranchise voters in Missouri by trying to use a map for the midterm election to Congressional map that would steal a seat in violation of a state Supreme Court ruling. I've done episodes on that as well. So this is not just defending voters in blue states or defending voters in purple states. It is literally going into the most difficult political environments and some really difficult court environments and trying to come out with wins. You know, for everything people say about the Supreme Court, and I've been a critic of the Supreme Court. I mean, we have now won two cases involving Missouri on the on the Shatterdoch. One, just as Kamen Rider, even by the sending to the full court. The other appears to have been 90 in our favor.

29:00Obviously, there was the case in the US Supreme Court involving the mail-in voting executive order and US Postal Reg. In that, we filed an amicus brief. We were not the litigants of the case at Wencesburg Court. We did win our case in Washington, DC before the trial court, but the case that reached the Supreme Court was someone else's. Now, interestingly, in the case we won in Washington, DC, we took what was victorious in the Massachusetts case against the Supreme Court and expanded it so that it covered not just blue states or states that were resisting this executive order, but we actually extended it so that red states can't even voluntarily comply with the US Postal Services Rule. So there is a ton of work to do. There is a ton of work that is currently pending. My law firm and I believe 90 cases in 43 states.

30:02On Tuesday, we filed another lawsuit in North Carolina because the North Carolina state board of elections decided to adopt a last-minute rule that will disenfranchise voters. Every day, there's something. I mean, it's something that the Trump administration are doing or Republican state is doing. Or in this case, the state board of election in North Carolina is controlled by Republicans. So this will continue every single day from here until election day. And then you get into that question of like, how do you figure out on election day and in the aftermath election, how do you tackle all of the issues everywhere in the country, all at once? And on top of that, potentially have Donald Trump do some kind of crazy, aggressive, illegal, unconstitutional power grab like trying to seize ballots.

31:11September for your chance to take the stage at Yamavatt Theatre and answer the ultimate question. Deal or no deal? Details at Yamavatt.com must be 21. Please gamble responsibly. And so as I said, like we don't have a choice, right? Like it's not like we can be like, oh, well, we'll just take a pass on that, right? We have to win basically everywhere. They just have to win one big one. And we've got to stop it because if they do win that and they're able to take out the midterms and they're not free and fair and people believe that they were stolen. I don't mean like believe they were stolen in like the crazy mega sense, but like they were stolen.

32:14Putting that genie back in the bottle for 2028, it's going to be really hard. But look for right now, we've won. We handed Donald Trump's Department Justice their 25th straight defeat. Including by the way, eight cases that were heard by judges appointed by Donald Trump. 12 by Republican residents, but eight by judges that he appointed. And of course, the postal service reg that's dead and buried. That won't be around, but we still are facing the next fight and the next fight and the next fight after. So we've got to keep focused on that. What I've asked you to do is to support democracy docket. I'll also ask you to like this video. I'm to share it with a friend. And to subscribe to this channel and hit the bell to make sure you're alerted whenever there's new content posted. But in the meantime, we all just got to keep fighting and moving forward one day, one case at a time. Thanks. I'll see you next time.

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