Justice & Legal

ONLY IF HE LOSES

Attorney general declares Alaska's Senate race unfair; ballots challenged: zero, with nine days until the vote

By SterlingThe Ownership Desk · the afternoon edition, 25 October 2026

You will want the name of the harm, and there is not one yet. The election is nine days off. The Department of Justice has asked a court to stop Alaska certifying its Senate race should the Republican lose — should the Republican lose, and not otherwise. An exquisite contingency. Relief quia timet: a court moved to act because a party fears a thing, in advance of the thing. Ballots challenged: zero. Zero, mind you, and no precinct named in the complaint either. What is pleaded is confusion, two men named Dan Sullivan on the Senate ballot, one the sitting senator, one a retired schoolteacher.

The words came in sequence. On the ninth of October the system was "stupid." Five days later it had become "Damn bad cheating," with an appeal to Alaskans to repeal it. Saturday brought "corrupt," and the senior senator "The Republicans' Worst Senator, by far." Sunday, the attorney general: the president does not hold the race to be "a fair fight."

Do note the sixth of October. A handicapper at the University of Virginia moved the seat from "Toss-up" to "Leans Democrat" ... and the pleading followed, not the ballots. Someone will say a court may refuse it. A court may. Alaska's certification is what a lost seat costs.

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ZERO BALLOTS

Attorney general calls three hosts misleading, crazy, and not a real question; the one from Trump remains unanswered.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 25 October 2026

I went down about a parking permit, got sent to a window for something called "owner verification," which isn't a department I knew existed, and when I finally got to the right one the woman behind the glass took one look at my form and said somebody downstairs should never have told me to come upstairs — I don't want to say crazy, but that's the word I'd already written in the margin before she said it.

I was standing there with the pen still out when it came to me — not the permit, the other thing, the thing I'd meant to look up before I left the house. I keep a few pages folded in my coat for just this. Here. On the sixth, before anybody had voted anywhere, people who'd pushed the 2020 fraud claims started making fresh ones about this one. On the seventh, the NAACP sued the administration over a plan to send what a federal civil rights official called a historic number of election monitors to the polls. Had any ballot anywhere been challenged yet at that point? On the ninth the president asked, in public, how stupid Alaska had to be, running three Republicans against one Democrat for governor. On the fourteenth he called the state's ranked-choice ballot "damn bad cheating" and asked voters to repeal it before they'd used it again. On the sixteenth the two Senate candidates debated, and the paper's own list of takeaways put corruption third, after fish and oil. On the twenty-second — I have this one twice, because I didn't believe it the first time — the attorney general was asked whether his department would weigh in on how a state certifies its results. Did he name one, or did he just say there were "scenarios we could all come up with"?

Then Saturday, the twenty-fourth, it stopped being a scenario. The department filed — not against a ballot, not against a precinct, but against a result, and only the one result: if the Republican, Senator Sullivan, loses. The president told reporters, "I'm the one that said do it." The next morning, on two separate programs, did the attorney general say so too?

He did not, on either one. On the program with Margaret Brennan, he called her description of the suit "misleading." On the program with Dana Bash, he cut off a question about a repeat of January sixth: "That is not a real question."

I keep an old claim form in the glovebox from a policy I never ended up buying, one that only would have paid out if I lost the car on a day I also lost something else. I never bought it, because nobody sells that — an insurer who wrote a payout contingent on the customer's own loss would be out of business by the next renewal. So when the filing says certification gets blocked only if the Republican loses, I keep going out to the garage to check whether any paper I actually own works that way. None of them do. Has a single ballot, anywhere, been challenged to make this claim necessary?

Oh — one more thing, before I forget, since you've been patient. That question about January sixth, the one he told Dana Bash wasn't real — earlier in that same interview, asked about the very same possibility, did he call it unlikely, or did he call it, in his own word, crazy?

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France deploys 70,000 police to guard a headcount two papers still cannot agree on.

By MortThe Records Bureau · the evening edition, 25 October 2026

The headcount was born 18 October, when French police counted 1,800 arrests and NBC, counting the same Saturday, counted 1,200 — one weekend, two outlets, six hundred people's difference in whether they existed. It is dead this morning at seven days old.

It was preceded in death by the story it was built to measure: more than half a million people, by NBC's count, protesting rising living costs and poor conditions in the country's schools. On 21 October the Morning Star reported Emmanuel Macron accusing foreign leaders of exploiting that unrest for their own politics, a line aimed across the Atlantic at Donald Trump, who had already told a Kansas rally the rioters were migrants and communists carrying out what "the radical 'Dumocrats' want to do to America." The next day the Guardian watched Fox News and its allies fall in behind that framing, with Republicans' own former campaign manager calling the November map "ugly" and conservative media, in the Guardian's reading, hoping unrest abroad would move votes at home. From that point the headcount had a second job: not to count people, but to sort them into the right villain.

By today the number cannot do either job cleanly, because it no longer survives contact with a single Saturday's own coverage. Fox News reports nearly 1,000 arrested in France this weekend while the New York Times, covering the same Saturday, offers only "a huge number" and no figure of its own. Italy and Albania already supplied two of those capitals, Rome and Tirana; Belgium supplies nothing but its name, no capital attached, and joins the ledger anyway.

It is survived by six capitals, a seventh country with no capital on the ledger, and a French president promising payment on a tally no two desks can agree exists.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next wire story print one number, the method used to get it, and both at once.

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TRIGGER CLAUSE

DOJ sues to void an election only the Republican could lose, nine days before Alaska votes

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 26 October 2026

I had the registration renewal in my coat pocket — not for any reason, that's just where it's lived since August, the one that says if it's not mailed back by the fifteenth they can flag the plate — and I had it out on the counter at the corner store this morning, next to the coffee, when the radio behind the register started in on Alaska. I left the renewal right there on the counter the whole time I listened, which tells you something about my priorities, or maybe just about the coffee.

Here's how we got here, in the order it happened. On October 14th the President told reporters the Senate race up there had a "fake" Dan Sullivan in it — a longshot candidate he said was a Democratic plot to split the vote — and said his administration was looking into it. Two days later, on the 16th, the real Senate debate happened, Sullivan against Mary Peltola, and somewhere in that hour somebody on that stage said "let's have some decorum," which I only mention because decorum is a word you reach for right before you stop having any. Then this past Sunday, the 25th, Senator Thom Tillis went on television and said it was "appropriate to take a look at" the outcome in Alaska, where, he noted, there happen to be two men named Dan Sullivan on the ballot. The lawsuit he was defending — filed by his own Justice Department — asks a court to block certification of that race over "voter confusion," and here is the part I had to read twice: it only does anything if the Republican loses. If Sullivan wins, there's no confusion. When a reporter asked who ordered the suit filed, the Attorney General wouldn't say. The President, asked the same question, said, "I'm the one that said do it."

Now, I don't have a law degree, I have a glovebox, and I want to tell you what's in it. Two guys on my street are both named Dan — have been for eleven years, long as I've lived there — and the mail carrier sorts by house number, not name, and it has never once required a lawsuit. The bank does it by account number. The guy at the DMV does it by the number on the renewal that was sitting on the counter this morning. Is the Alaska Division of Elections using a different number than everybody else on my street? Does a ballot not carry one?

I was folding the renewal back into my coat, about done with the whole thing, when something else came to me — not about Alaska, about the renewal itself, which is the part I almost walked out without asking. If the suit only moves if the Republican loses, and the Attorney General won't say who ordered it filed, and the President says he's the one who said do it — is there anyone left in that chain of command who was asked and answered "no"?

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Senator calls California 'guilty' of ballot harvesting, names zero cases prosecuted under it

By MitchInvestigations · the evening edition, 26 October 2026

The Justice Department wants an appeals court to set aside twenty thousand ballots. The record behind that request runs back weeks before anyone filed anything.

That month, the press surfaced a DHS operation its own staff called the Unlawful Voter Initiative: hundreds of agents working state voter rolls, hunting noncitizens. Three weeks later, on September 25th, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court's block, 6 to 3, clearing DHS to screen those rolls against a database called SAVE — one with a public record of flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens by mistake. The tool built to catch illegal voters comes with a documented defect: it also catches legal ones.

On October 20th, the Department of Justice charged twenty-eight green card holders in California with fraudulently registering to vote; eleven went into custody. Three days later, the department asked the Ninth Circuit to order California to set aside twenty thousand mail ballots before they could be counted at all, filed as an emergency.

The court gave it a hearing — on a Sunday, which is itself rare — and did not give it an easy one. Judge Mark Bennett told the government's own lawyers, "I don't see how we have jurisdiction." The panel spent the session asking the Justice Department to justify an order it wanted before a single ballot in question had been tabulated.

The same weekend, the top federal prosecutor for Los Angeles said the election was at risk of being "corrupted." And on that same Sunday, on television, Senator Thom Tillis called California "guilty" of running a ballot-harvesting system "ripe for abuse."

All together now: the senator's quote, on the record, carries one case number. Zero. Not a single prosecution is named in it — not in his sentence, not anywhere in the item that quotes him.

The next morning, with the Ninth Circuit's skepticism still fresh, this city's other paper published its verdict anyway: Voter ID is "the only cure" for California's election system. The cure arrived before the court it was citing had even ruled.

Twenty thousand ballots. Six to three. Zero cases named for the "system ripe for abuse" a sitting senator said, on a Sunday show, the state is guilty of running. Every other number in this story is on the record. That one is missing from it, and nobody on the record was asked to produce it.

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THIRD PROSECUTION

Third Comey indictment rests on a 2016 leak the government investigated and declined to charge

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

Let me put the dates down first, flat, because I keep losing the order and my handwriting is no help.

October 2016: a story runs in the New York Times. May 2019: the Justice Department charges Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, seventeen counts, including conspiring to obtain, receive and disclose national defense information. September 25 this year: a judge delays the first Comey case, the one about seashells, to early 2027, motions still pending, one of them asking her to throw it out as driven by the president's animus. October 5: a new case against the same man starts moving under seal. October 24: federal authorities arrest a contractor, 42, for allegedly passing national defense information to his girlfriend. October 26: a judge rules the administration illegally fired Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor, who believes she lost the job because of who her father is. The same day, the documents unseal. Two counts. Disclosing information related to the national defense. 2016.

That's the order. I'm not drawing anything from it. I just like the dates in a row where I can see them.

Now, the notebook. His lawyers — hold on, I had this — here. They say the case centers on an issue "that had already been investigated and had not led to charges." That's the Times, quoting them, about a leak to the Times. Investigated, no charges. NPR has them adding it's outside the time limit. A decade-old leak, is the phrase.

I'm sorry, I keep coming back to 2016, but it's the year the whole thing hangs on. Ten years. This one has had ten years and two previous tries at it.

One more thing about that year and then I'll move along. The Guardian says the filing "provides few details" about what was actually leaked, and that he conspired with a person the government doesn't name. So what's in hand is a year, two counts, and an unnamed person.

Here's where I get stuck, and it isn't clever, it's a box.

I keep a box of papers in my garage. Summer before last I sat out there on an upturned bucket and went through every sheet in it, and when I finished I wrote on the lid with a marker: checked, nothing here. My dog sleeps on that lid now. Twice since, I've moved the dog, carried the box across the yard and into the house, and gone through it again — once when the car needed a fan belt and I was sure the receipt was in there, once because I'd forgotten I ever wrote on the lid.

That's me, with a bucket and a marker, and it costs me an afternoon. Forgive me for circling, but what I can't put down is that somebody in that building walked to a drawer, pulled the 2016 file, carried it across a room, set it on a desk, and read the part where it says the matter had not led to charges. And then the counts got typed. Somebody carried that file across a room.

Excuse me — before you go, there's one page left and then I'm out of your way.

The same Monday those counts unsealed, the judge ruled the firing of his daughter illegal. She worked the sex crimes case against the president's dead former friend. The wire gives one reason for her losing the job, and the reason is her father. Two counts, one defendant, one person the filing won't name: I count her name in that zero times.

So here's the last one, and the answer is on the page. Of the two counts the department filed Monday, how many name the prosecutor a judge said that same Monday was fired illegally — and what's the one year the filing does name? I'm sorry. I keep coming back to 2016.

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20,000 BALLOTS

DOJ, losing its California ballot fight for the fourth time, asks Washington to set aside hundreds more.

By MitchInvestigations · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

I read dockets for a living, which obligates me to note that the Department of Justice has now lost the same argument four times since September, and has filed it a fifth.

Start with the record, because the record is the whole story. The accusation came first and empty-handed: a senator called California's mail ballots a harvesting operation and could not point to a single prosecuted case. The Justice Department supplied one on October 19th — 28 green card holders charged with registering and voting, 48 voting-crime counts in all, the docket the accusation had been missing. That was last week's column.

This week the department tried to extend the same theory to the ballots themselves. On October 23rd it asked the Ninth Circuit to order California to segregate 20,000 mail ballots within 48 hours, on the theory that the people who cast them might not be citizens. On October 26th a three-judge panel answered, 2 to 1: no. Not on the merits — the majority found it lacked jurisdiction to grant the emergency order at all. California had already refused the 48-hour deadline; the court agreed it didn't have to comply with an order the court itself wasn't empowered to issue.

All together now — count the losses. September 10th, the First Circuit called the administration's mail-in voting order "likely unlawful." September 14th, the Supreme Court declined to enforce it before the midterms anyway. September 24th, the California Supreme Court ordered a sheriff who'd seized 650,000 ballots to give them back, calling the seizure unlawful under a statute that says ballots do not leave election officials' custody, ever. October 26th, the Ninth Circuit, 2-1. Four courts, four no's, one filing office.

The fifth filing came the same week as the fourth no. On October 27th, less than two weeks after the California demand, the department asked Washington state to set aside more than 400 ballots on the identical theory: suspected noncitizens, named by the government, unverified by any court. Washington has competitive House and Senate races. So did California's targeted counties. The document does not explain the coincidence. The document never explains anything; it just asks, again, for a bigger list, in a new state, before the count that decides who holds the chamber.

Four denials have not produced a different filing. They have produced the same filing with a new venue line. All together now — that's the whole case, clause by clause, state by state, and it still hasn't named one proven vote.

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DOJ charges Comey a third time over a 2016 leak it once declined to prosecute

By MitchInvestigations · the afternoon edition, 27 October 2026

I write the dates down because the order is the whole story. October 2016: a story runs in the New York Times, and in it is a disclosure the government says came from Mr. Comey. The Justice Department looks at that leak once, closes the file, and brings no charges. The case sits closed for years.

This week it reopens as an indictment — the third attempt at charging the same man — and the counts are new: two of them, under the Espionage Act, tied to that same 2016 story. All together now: the same leak, investigated once, declined once, now returned as a felony count twice over.

Mr. Comey answers in three words: "I'm still innocent." The sentence hasn't changed. Neither, really, has the leak underneath it.

What changed is the week it landed in. Days before the indictment, a federal judge rules that the Trump administration illegally fired Maurene Comey — a federal prosecutor, and the defendant's daughter — from her job. She believes, and the judge found enough in the record to agree, that she was let go for who her father is. The indictment and the personnel ruling are two different documents, from two different parts of the same department, about two people who share a last name, filed in the same week.

Read the counts against the ruling: a government that spent years declining to charge the father over a 2016 leak spent this week also losing in federal court over how it treated the daughter. Nothing in the new indictment is new evidence — the leak is the same leak the department already investigated and let go. Nothing in the firing was legal, on the judge's own finding. What is new is only that both documents carry the same surname in the same seven days, and both carry the Justice Department's letterhead.

I don't know yet what the Espionage Act counts will show a jury. I know what the week's filings show a reader: one leak, declined once, charged twice more since; one job, taken once, ordered given back.

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