It’s been a big 24 hours for Donald Trump. Yesterday, he sued the Treasury Department and IRS for $10 billion over an employee’s leak of his tax returns. Then, late last night, the Justice Department, clearly fulfilling Trump’s wishes, arrested former CNN anchor Don Lemon on charges that he violated federal law when he live streamed a protest at a church in St. Paul. Then, this morning, the president announced his nominee for chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, in what’s seen as the next step in his efforts to influence the ostensibly independent body.

So, there you have it. Our institutions are crumbling. Our First Amendment rights are going wobbly. We’ve brought charges against a journalist covering the protests in Minneapolis while we still don’t know the names of the officers who killed Alex Pretti. And the president is sucking up all the taxpayer money he can. Happy Friday.

It’s the Elections, Stupid

by William Kristol

As I write this morning, there are two processes whose outcomes are unknown: We don’t know how the Senate funding deal is going to play out in the coming weeks, and we don’t know how Donald Trump’s efforts to manipulate and corrupt the 2026 elections are going to play out in the coming months. The two may seem distinct, but they are in fact closely related.

On Wednesday, Kash Patel’s FBI seized 2020 voting records from the elections and operations hub in Fulton County, Georgia. This operation was allegedly justified by a law requiring election records to be retained for a certain amount of time. But Fulton County was already retaining those records under a state court–ordered seal. A hearing in less than two weeks’ time was scheduled in state court to arrange for the transfer of records to parties in a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election. So the preservation-of-records rationale for the FBI operation was entirely pretextual.

The other statute cited by Patel’s FBI to justify the operation is a prohibition on intimidating voters or producing false votes or false voter registrations. These statutes have criminal penalties.

The purpose of the FBI’s action in Georgia was to establish a precedent for further federal intervention in state and local elections to ensure Trump’s version of “election integrity,” and to intimidate state and local officials from resisting such efforts.

And of course Trump’s Justice Department has been trying all year to get unprecedented federal access to state voter rolls. They’ve lost court cases in this effort, but are by no means giving up. Thus the already notorious letter from Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz suggesting there could be some pullback of ICE activities in Minneapolis if the state handed over sensitive voter registration records to the federal government.

But it’s not just the FBI and DOJ that would be instruments for the Trump administration’s intervention in elections. Remarkably, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the FBI’s ballot-seizing. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Gabbard has been mobilizing the intelligence community to find support for Trump’s allegations that the 2020 election was stolen with the help of foreign governments.

Two officials told the Journal that Gabbard’s effort is designed to shape the midterm elections. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt basically confirmed this: “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort.” The Office of National Intelligence spokesperson further explained that DNI Gabbard “has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation” and “to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”

Along those lines, Trump has been reposting various kooky claims of foreign election interference in 2020 to help lay the groundwork for the big push in 2026. Late Wednesday night, he reposted a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden.

Trump is laying the predicate for claiming not just massive domestic fraud but foreign interference in our elections, requiring dramatic intervention by the national security apparatus of the federal government.

Which brings to the national security agencies with the troops—the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

In December 2020, Trump was captivated by Sydney Powell’s and Michael Flynn’s plan to use the military or federal law enforcement to seize voting machines in several states. They even presented Trump with draft executive orders they claimed would grant him the authority to do so. Trump’s aides managed to block the plan, despite the president’s repeated expressions of interest.

Earlier this month, Trump said that he regretted ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines. But, he explained, he was doubtful the Guard was “sophisticated enough in the ways of crooked Democrats, and the way they cheat, to figure that out.”

This time Trump presumably intends to have at his disposal a Pete Hegseth–directed military “sophisticated” enough to ensure he or his chosen success