SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
pam bondi
Trump DOJ Sues California Over Redistricting Initiative
"These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court," vowed a spokesman for California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Nov 13, 2025
The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a lawsuit against California over its new redistricting plan, which was approved overwhelmingly by voters in the state last week.
The DOJ joined a lawsuit filed by the California Republican Party that alleged the state's new redistricting plan is racially discriminatory because it intends, in addition to other "racial considerations," to give preference to Latino voters, who have traditionally voted for Democrats.
"Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50—the recent ballot initiative that junked California's pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines," the complaint alleged.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi, in justifying the DOJ's intervention into California's mid-decade redistricting, described the effort as "a brazen power grab that tramples on civil rights and mocks the democratic process" and vowed that "Governor Newsom’s attempt to entrench one-party rule and silence millions of Californians will not stand."
Brandon Richards, a spokesperson for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, hit back at the DOJ's allegations and vowed that the state would not be backing down.
"These losers lost at the ballot box and soon they will also lose in court," he told CNN.
California decided to commit to a mid-decade redistricting plan in response to President Donald Trump's unprecedented push to get Republicans across the country to redraw their states' maps to help the GOP maintain control of the US House of Representatives in next year's midterm elections.
Trump's gerrymandering push, which began in Texas and subsequently spread to Missouri and North Carolina, has been hit with several setbacks, including California's redistricting plan, as well as a district court in Utah nixing a Republican-drawn map in favor of one in which Democrats are seen as heavy favorites to pick up an additional seat.
Dave Wasserman, a senior elections analyst at Cook Political Report, wrote in a post on X on Tuesday that the Democrats’ victories in Utah and California, as well as reported plans to redraw maps in Virginia, have “pushed the mid-decade redistricting war closer to a draw.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
DOJ Suspends Prosecutors Who Accurately Described January 6 as a ‘Riot’ by a ‘Mob’
"The Trump administration is explicitly pro-January 6," wrote one critic. "You can get suspended from your job as a federal prosecutor for even acknowledging that there was a riot at the Capitol."
Oct 29, 2025
In the Trump administration's latest attempt to rewrite the history of the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt at the US Capitol, the Department of Justice has suspended a pair of federal prosecutors who referred to the attack as a "riot" carried out by a "mob."
The Washington Post reported that assistant US attorneys Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White were told they were suspended on Wednesday, "hours" after filing a sentencing recommendation against Taylor Taranto, a Washington state man accused of participating in the attack on the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of President Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 election.
Taranto allegedly entered the building and fought with Metro police officers as they tried to control the crowd, as well as other riot participants.
The case was not related to Taranto's actions at the Capitol in 2021—the charges against him were dropped after Trump issued blanket pardons to more than 1,500 people who took part in the riot.
Taranto was instead being sentenced for a "hoax" he perpetrated when he returned to Washington, DC two years later: He livestreamed himself making threats to several high-profile individuals, including former President Barack Obama, whose address he'd driven to after Trump had posted it to social media. He claimed—falsely, it turned out—that he'd outfitted his van with a car bomb that he planned to detonate outside the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The sentencing document recommended that Taranto serve a 27-month sentence. However, what appears to have drawn the ire of the DOJ and led to the suspension of the prosecutors is how the document referred to the events at the Capitol, which it mentioned in passing as part of the case's factual background:
On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, DC, by entering the US Capitol Building. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the state of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.
As Politico reporter Kyle Cheney noted on social media, this description of the events of January 6 is "flatly accurate." Numerous pieces of video evidence show rioters using physical force and violence in an attempt to occupy the Capitol building.
As the New York Times described at the time, it was "perhaps the most widely documented act of political violence in history." Participants were recorded bashing through doors and windows. They were shown beating police officers with objects from flagpoles to fire extinguishers and attacking them with chemical irritants. They were also heard chanting for the execution of members of Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who'd refused to take part in Trump's effort to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
A report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office released in 2023 found that the attack resulted in the injury of 174 law enforcement officers, while DOJ and Capitol administrators say it required over $3 million worth of cleanup and repairs.
According to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, White and Valdivia's description of these events as a "riot" and its participants as a "mob" resulted in their near immediate punishment.
They were told they were being furloughed due to the government shutdown and would be placed on administrative leave once it ended. According to ABC News, the pair of prosecutors was also locked out of their government-issued devices.
Notably, Trump's own handpicked US Attorney, Jeanine Pirro—a former Fox News host renowned for her undying loyalty to the president—also signed off on the document. However, unlike White and Valdivia, she has not reportedly received any punishment.
The DOJ has not issued a public comment on the decision, and it remains unclear whether the suspension of White and Valdivia will affect Taranto's sentencing. But it's not the first time the DOJ, headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has sought to punish those who prosecuted January 6 insurrectionists.
Dozens of the top prosecutors and FBI investigators who worked on cases against January 6 defendants and against Trump for inciting them have been fired.
Early in Trump's second term, the DOJ also demanded that the FBI turn over the identities of the more than 6,000 agents and other employees involved in investigating the attack. After Brian Driscoll, then the acting FBI director, attempted to resist the order, he was pushed out, and the identifying info was handed over.
Trump, meanwhile, has openly embraced the insurrectionists, describing them as "patriots," and attempted to push false theories attesting to their innocence—including that hundreds of agents placed by the "Biden FBI" started the insurrection, a claim that his own FBI director, Kash Patel, would refute.
On Wednesday, just hours before news broke of White and Valdivia's suspensions, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the "thugs" at the FBI who investigated Republican lawmakers over their roles in allegedly supporting the insurrection "should all be investigated and put in jail" and called Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who investigated the case against him for inciting the mob, "deranged" and "a criminal."
"The Trump administration is explicitly pro-January 6," wrote Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, on social media. "You can get suspended from your job as a federal prosecutor for even acknowledging that there was a riot at the Capitol."
Keep ReadingShow Less
As Trump Weaponizes DOJ, NJ and California Poll Monitoring Called Election Interference
"Deploying these federal forces appears to be an intimidation tactic meant for one thing: Suppress the vote," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Oct 24, 2025
With a majority of Americans now recognizing that President Donald Trump is weaponizing the US Department of Justice, the DOJ's Friday announcement that it will send election monitors to California and New Jersey is generating alarm.
Republicans in both states had written to the DOJ, requesting monitors for the November 4 general elections in which Californians will vote on Proposition 50, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom's answer to Trump's mid-decade gerrymandering in GOP-led states, and New Jersey residents will pick their next governor.
While the DOJ's statement noted that its Civil Rights Division "regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with federal civil rights laws in elections in communities across the country," and US Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that her department "is committed to upholding the highest standards of election integrity," legal experts have accused the Trump appointee of "serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice."
The head of the Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has also faced scrutiny, including for gutting the Voting Section—which, as the DOJ pointed out Friday, "enforces various federal statutes that protect the right to vote, including the Voting Rights Act, National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, and the Civil Rights Acts."
This DOJ deployment of poll watchers targets New Jersey's Passaic County and five California counties: Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside.
Newsom's office said on social media Friday that "this is not a federal election. The US DOJ has no business or basis to interfere with this election. This is solely about whether California amends our state Constitution. This administration has made no secret of its goal to undermine free and fair elections. Deploying these federal forces appears to be an intimidation tactic meant for one thing: Suppress the vote."
Rusty Hicks, chair of the state's Democratic Party, said that "no amount of election interference by the California Republican Party is going to silence the voices of California voters."
Democratic New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin was similarly critical, saying in a statement that "the Trump Department of Justice's announcement that it is sending federal 'election monitors' to Passaic County is highly inappropriate, and DOJ has not even attempted to identify a legitimate basis for its actions."
"The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the primary responsibility for running elections, and our state's hardworking elections officials have been preparing for months to run a safe and secure election," he added. "We are committed to ensuring that every eligible voter is able to cast their ballot and make their voices heard."
Early voting in New Jersey begins Saturday. In the gubernatorial race, former Republican state legislator Jack Ciattarelli is facing Democratic Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill. As the Associated Press pointed out earlier this month, "New Jersey is one of two states, along with Virginia, electing governors this fall—and the contests are widely seen as measures of how voters feel about Trump's second term and how Democrats are responding."
Democracy Docket reported Friday that "already in recent months, voting rights advocates and leading Democrats have warned that the administration is laying the groundwork to deploy troops or law enforcement to the polls in key cities next year and in 2028. Friday's announcement has intensified those fears."
After the DOJ's election monitoring announcement, journalist Keith Olbermann said on social media: "Trump has started his direct assault on local elections. This fascist interference must be prevented."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular