Asked how it identified suspects, Justice Department responds with criminal subpoenas instead of an answer.

…(cont) Two weeks after that, October 1st, I read that the people whose actual job was chasing foreign interference and domestic threats to the vote — that effort got closed down. Not reassigned anywhere I can find in what I've got, just closed, the same month the noncitizen project was getting all the attention instead. So here's a question I keep circling back to, and I apologize for it: how many investigators does that foreign-interference unit still have, the one that shut down October 1st? I don't have the number. I don't think anybody's printed it.

October 9th, a federal judge said no to the method — the collecting of state voter rolls the way the department was doing it. October 22nd, a federal judge said no again, to a related piece of the same effort, and the order itself described what it was chasing, noncitizen voting, as vanishingly rare to begin with. I don't know if that's the same judge from the 9th or a different one — I don't have a name on this page, so I won't guess.

Same week, the secretary of state up in Washington State put out a statement calling the department's list "profoundly disappointing," on account of the errors their own office found just checking it. I wrote that phrase down because I liked it, and because I don't get to use "profoundly disappointing" about my own work without somebody taking it personally.

Monday the 26th, the president posted that anybody who reports voter fraud, past elections or the one coming up, gets a million dollars, paid out once there's an arrest and a conviction. I wrote the number down. A million dollars is real. A conviction is a thing that has to happen first.

I wrote the question down word for word. I haven't found the answer anywhere in what I've got.

And the very next day, the department didn't answer it. It sent grand jury subpoenas to the same election officials, over the same list, which means the civil demand a judge had just finished doubting got promoted overnight into a criminal one.

I'll tell you what I do when the reader at the toll plaza flags my car for a plate that isn't mine. I don't go argue with the reader. I go find out whose plate it actually is before anybody gets a bill. I don't know if that's how it works over there.

Actually — hold on, one more thing before you go. Of the people on that list, the ones the department is now investigating criminally instead of civilly, how many have been charged with anything — out of the twenty thousand?