The Department of Justice is turning up the heat on Los Angeles County election officials, demanding they clean up their voter rolls after federal investigators identified 20,000 “likely non-citizens” registered to vote in the nation’s most populous county.
The warning came in a letter, first reported Friday night by Fox News’ Matt Finn, signed by Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter. In it, the DOJ cautioned county officials that “the legal consequences for either facilitating or ignoring a federal crime are significant.”
President Donald Trump reposted the letter and issued a blunt message of his own on Truth Social.
“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” the president wrote Friday, vowing that anyone who counts the votes of non-citizens would be locked up “for a very long period of time.”
McCotter joined Kayleigh McEnany on “Saturday in America” the following morning, where he said Los Angeles officials have been stonewalling federal efforts to address the problem.
“Well, we sent them an encrypted drive with all the names, personal information, identifying information,” McCotter said. “And I don’t know whether you saw their response, they said they wouldn’t even attempt to open the drive because they weren’t sure it was secure. They seem to care more about their network I.T. security than the security of their own voter roll. If they just opened the drive, they’d see the evidence.”
McEnany appeared stunned.
“Wait, you gave them evidence? They didn’t open the file?” she asked.
“Yeah, they said they weren’t sure the encrypted drive was safe,” McCotter replied. “They take willful blindness to another level here, right?”
“I think so,” McEnany said.
McCotter said the numbers keep climbing every time the DOJ digs into the issue, and he took aim at critics who insist non-citizen voting doesn’t happen.
“Yeah. It’s funny, they said it never happens,” he said. “We had about a dozen, they say, oh, it’s just a dozen. We have 50, oh, it’s just 50. Now we have 20,000 likely noncitizen voters, oh, it’s just 20,000. I think they’re pretty — they’re coping pretty hard here.”
“Every time we get a bigger number, magnitudes bigger each time, they try to deny that it happens,” he added.
According to McCotter, the DOJ has spent months trying to get California officials to cooperate, with no success.
“We’ve been writing to them for months, practically begging them to let us help them clean up their voter rolls,” he said. “Dozens of other states have done it, including Democrat-run states. It helps protect the vote of people who are citizens. California has my phone number. Nobody’s called me.”
Los Angeles County election officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Los Angeles findings follow a larger claim made in July by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who said his agency had found 250,000 non-citizens registered to vote. The administration has so far been unable to prove those claims.
