Trump: California officials will ‘go to jail’ if state ignores DOJ voter roll suit

President Trump reupped the Justice Department’s (DOJ) warning that California officials could face criminal charges if they include the mail-in ballots of the over 200,000 people the federal government identified as potential non-U.S. citizens in their midterm election count.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday, sharing a copy of a letter the DOJ sent to the Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office.

The Justice Department sued California Thursday after providing state and local election officials with a USB drive containing voter roll citizenship data, giving the state 48 hours to compare 20,000 names the Department of Homeland Security flagged as non-U.S. citizens with its own data rolls.

The DOJ had sent a letter to these election officials earlier in the week, which included a handwritten password to access the files on the thumb drive. The department threatened legal action if they did not cross-reference the data.

“If California was unable to independently confirm the citizenship of people on that list, the Federal Government asked that California set aside ballots received from them until the person’s citizenship was confirmed,” the lawsuit says.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) criticized the suit in a written response , calling it a “sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day.”

“The courts have made clear that the federal government has no role in how a state carries out its election process, and now, in the middle of Californians voting, they have asked local officials — who do a damn good job defending democracy — to violate federal law,” Newsom added.

A voting rights group sent a letter notifying the DOJ Wednesday they would seek a temporary restraining order if the administration didn’t abandon its plans.

“Your clients’ actions in compiling the list violates established law; your efforts to employ this list to systematically purge voters, less than a month before the election, further violates the National Voter Registration Act, among other laws,” attorneys for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Voting Rights Project wrote in the letter.

In July, President Trump alleged California, along with three other states, collectively had 250,000 noncitizens on their voter rolls. Though a federal “preliminary review” of these lists, which DHS included in a letter sent to the states at the time, found less than half that number — 118,000 — matched the government had flagged.

The DOJ’s lawsuit comes less than 20 days before the November midterm elections.