US Attorney General Todd Blanche Talks Election Fraud Cases

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Myles Miller (0:08)

I want to start with the midterm elections, of course, they're just about a month away, and President Trump has made election integrity a major focus of this administration. And of course, your Justice Department has been announcing new election crime cases almost every week. Bloomberg News analyzed about 30 federal election crime-related matters that were filed from 2021 through about 2026, and we found a sharp concentration of those cases in the past two years. But most of the charging documents allege individual acts rather than sort of a coordinated scheme, and several of them involve allege voting from elections that were years earlier. So help me paint the picture here. What evidence have you uncovered about allege non-citizen voting, and why do you find that it's a significant problem in this upcoming election?

Todd Blanche (0:55)

Yes, so you're right. This is a priority of President Trump and this entire administration, and so we have charged nearly 196 individuals with some sort of illegal voting, whether they're here illegally in voting, or even if they have status here, but they're not citizens, so they're not allowed to vote. And you pointed out the focus of this administration. During the last, during the Biden administration, there were 13 charged over the course of four years. And so we have made it a priority. But you are also right that what we're doing right now is we're charging individuals. So these are men and women who we can prove, we believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, have illegally voted. In the case we announced earlier this week, some of them voted as recently as this year in the primary elections in 2026 And so this is a priority. Now, does that mean that there isn't a larger effort that we're investigating of organized groups to try to either get people on the voter rolls who are not eligible or to do other things to improperly influence our elections? Yes, we are investigating that as well. And by the way, you said that's President Trump's administration priorities and you're right about that. But we are not making this a partisan issue. The people that we have charged with illegally voting, I don't know whether they voted for a Republican or a Democrat.

The point here is that you can only be a citizen and vote. You cannot be here illegally. You cannot be an LPR and vote. And so it's a big focus of what we're doing and we're going to keep on doing it. And we're partnering with DHS.

And that's something that we've been doing since we started and we're going to continue to.

Myles Miller (2:31)

Let's talk about the scale of this problem, right? You say in looking at some of these cases, and especially in the cases that departments brought, how many of these ballots does DOJ alleged were unlawfully cast by non-citizens? Is it all non-citizens? Just talk about the scale of it, because I think people hear about this, they think about, as you were talking about, some of the investigations into whether this is widespread.

Paint the picture of how widespread you find this is.

Todd Blanche (2:59)

We have thousands of investigations ongoing. That does not mean that there are thousands and thousands of men and women that are going to be indicted, because for each one of these cases, we have to prove that the individual we believe voted, who's registered to vote, and we believe they're here illegally or not eligible to vote, we have to go and prove that. And so that takes work, that takes Federal agents, DHS, HSI agents working cases. And so it's a big problem. What frustrates me is when the media says, well, you only arrested 10 people. Well, we've only charged 96 people. Well, let's be clear, we have not caught everybody.

And even if we'd only charge one person, that should be something that matters to the American people. And so how widespread it is is we have a ton of cases and there's more to come, and we're going to keep on investigating. And again, elections are often decided by a very small percentage, even a few hundred, a few thousand votes. And so we view this as something that's a core part of our democratic function, and we're going to keep on doing it. You have other types of voting challenges. We charged a former postal worker last week who was caught just throwing away mail and it included several hundred mail-in ballots. So again, you have an individual in that district who potentially didn't vote because their ballot was thrown away and they didn't get to cast their vote. And so that is also about voter integrity. And so that's something we're not just looking at people who are voting illegally, but we're looking at all sorts of challenges with the system as it exists. And let me tell you something, that's why we talk about things like voter ID and putting some integrity around mail-in voting to make sure that you can minimize the chance of fraud and people not being able to vote.