Senator WARNS ME About NEW Trump ELECTION THREAT…

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Scott McFarland reports. Here at the Capitol, no whitewashing, no saneashing, no platforming lies or misinformation.

[00:00:07]Trump's plan to potentially deploy armed ICE agents at the polls in November could end up being a big loser for him in two different ways. He could lose on the ICE side and lose on the election side. First off, my interview with Joyce Vance, former US attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Vance says if they try to put those armed ICE agents at polling places, judges are going to knock it back and it's going to be taken down.

[00:00:33]>> You also seem pretty bullish on the idea that if ICE were to be deployed any that it would get knocked down or turned away. Why why are you so confident that a red state governor wouldn't say, "Hey, that's fine. Put them at the >> A red state governor can say whatever they want, but there's federal law that says that the president can't do it."

[00:00:52]Right? And so, you know, in our constitutional system, and one has to give great credit to the founding fathers who had an enormous amount of foresight for folks noodling these problems back in the late 1700s, they anticipated a despotic president. And so they and they also had a very healthy fear of standing militias, right? And so they decided that federal folks, armed federal folks, couldn't be deployed to polling places. That was something that was discussed back then. and border security, which was such a positive for the president's polls in early 2025, has gone negative. He is now underwater on issues involving immigration and border, perhaps due in no small part to the killings by immigration agents in Minneapolis. And we heard through the course of this week on Capitol Hill, increasing concerns about what ICE is doing and how they're doing it. a blocking this bill because they will not allow any funding any funding for the Department of Homeland Security to move forward unless it also includes funding for ICE and CBP without any new protections against the misconduct that the American people are demanding. They are demanding these protections. These agencies are in dire need of serious reform to build back public trust that has been lost. We all have seen the footage of the brutal and senseless killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Prey. We have seen our cities terrorized communities afraid and terrorized by ICE and CBP. 44 detainees have died in ICE custody since President Trump took office, including 25 in this fiscal year alone.

[00:02:36]>> California Senator Adam Schiff in an interview says ICE is a political liability right now for the administration and Democrats know it.

[00:02:45]>> Your state has a southern border with Mexico. Your state presumably has people who are accustomed to Customs and Border Protection and immigration and customs enforcement. What's the feedback you're getting about ICE? its popularity in California and the administration's border security efforts in California.

[00:03:04]>> Well, the the reaction in terms of ICE and Border Patrol is almost universally negative. Uh part of the problem in terms of border patrol is you took all those people from the border and you put them in Los Angeles or you put them in Minneapolis, you gave them missions of doing these immigration sweeps that had nothing to do with what they were trained to do. when we've seen I think some of the worst abuses come from not ICE but the border patrol agents operating far from the border. So getting those border patrol agents back to the border I think is hugely important. Um you know we've I think uh recognized the imperative of reforming ICE and reforming Border Patrol. uh basically calling on both of those agencies to behave in the same way we demand of our local police departments and that is you don't use excessive force. You don't break into people's house without a warrant. You don't arrest people based on what they look like or where they work or how well they speak the language or whether they speak another language.

[00:04:13]Basically, you abide by the law and it shouldn't be too much to ask our federal agents to do the same thing. Now they're hiring people hand over fist, particularly at ICE. A lot of people that couldn't get a job in a police department. A lot of people that couldn't get a job in law enforcement, period. They're giving them huge bonuses. Uh and you know, the result is not well trained, not wellqualified people, heavily armed. They've spent, we documented in my office, 144 million just in the first year to arm up ICE agents and border patrol. So, it's been a very toxic mix and and the people in California recognize that they don't want our National Guard abused this way. We really have a great relationship with the California National Guard. We venerate them.

[00:05:00]They're there for us in times of natural disaster. and to see them used for immigration enforcement um really breaks that trust between our people and our National Guard.

[00:05:13]>> More from Senator Ship in a moment, but first about the efforts by the Trump administration to impact the 2026 elections. You've noticed how the Trump administration's Department of Justice trying to get voter roles from states across the country have been pushed back by states who say, "No, you don't get our voter roles." Well, there are concerns that just asking for the voter roles could plant seeds of doubt the Trump administration can mechanize to try to overturn the results of the 2026 midterm elections. And there is a legal battle unfolding now by a group called Democracy Forward, a DCbased watchdog group led by Sky Perman trying to get the administration's records, trying to figure out what the game plan is or what the scheme is here by the administration with those voter roll requests. We talked with Sky Pam about it. We know that um one of the things he wants to do is to get voter data in order to create false impressions that there are people that are registered to vote who should not be registered to vote. There's never been any evidence of that. Um the first voter commission he created could not find a single evidence of fraud. You see members of Congress asking people like nobody has found evidence of widespread fraud and most of these commissions can't even find a single incident. but he wants to obtain this information to create um an impression that there are people that are voting that shouldn't be voting. And we believe he will want to do this in order to try to pressure states or to somehow through the federal government himself seek to purge individuals from voter roles through like intimidation tactics. Again, authority he doesn't have, but that is what we think is going on. Adam Schiff, who you'll recall was a member of the Trump impeachment, the impeachment prosecuting team at one point years ago, was also a former member of the House January 6th select committee, which investigated Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. I asked Senator Schiff how serious a threat Trump is posing to overturning whatever happens in November.

[00:07:07]>> You think Trump's going to screw with the 2026 elections, California or otherwise?

[00:07:12]>> Uh, absolutely. I I think he will certainly try. We have to make sure that those efforts are not successful. I had a conversation a couple months ago with Leader Schumer which was in many ways a echo of a conversation I had with Nancy Pelosi in 2020 in the six months prior to the midterm or prior to the presidential election in 2020. Um I had suggested the speaker that we put together a small group to try to anticipate everything that might go wrong. uh and we did and we came up with about a thousand contingencies and we kind of game them out and figured out our strategy to push back and fight back. We did not anticipate the one thing that really happened and that was a mass violent attack on the capital.

[00:07:56]Now we have to widen the aperture and anticipate a whole range of things. Some they're already doing, some that we have to expect that they will try. Among the things they're doing already is they are eviscerating all of the agencies who are in the business of protecting our elections. So the cyber security and in infrastructure security agency CISA those people gone. The foreign malign influence task force gone. The uh section of the national security council focus on this problem gone. So our defenses are gone. And now we have seen the Trump administration take a lot of people who were the election deniers in 2020 and put them in key positions of responsibility over elections for the upcoming midterms. So those are steps that have already been taken place. Of course the seizure of ballots in Fulton County, Georgia to lay a false predicate for declaring fraud in the midterms. Uh you're seeing efforts to use data at the Department of Homeland Security run through faulty algorithms to try to purge voter roles and suppress the vote.

[00:09:07]All these things are already happening.

[00:09:09]What more will happen? Um you know really the the sky's the limit. We have to anticipate they could create some provocation at a polling place to create a pretext to call on the military or to seize ballot boxes. uh and we're going to be prepared for whatever they throw our way through a combination of litigation, legislation, and mobilization. The very best thing we can do is to make sure that we turn out in such massive numbers that this election is not even close. That is the number one best way for us to prepare and defend ourselves is to make sure this election is not even close.

[00:09:46]>> One time for one last question, Senator, you investigated this. You put a lot of skin in the game. What do you think?

[00:09:53]What do you make of it when Trump denies the election still and denies January 6 was real?

[00:10:00]>> Well, I mean, this is a I think a mental failing of the president. Um, it shows I think just the degree to which he is divorced from reality.

[00:10:11]But what we have seen uh going beyond this is we've seen him pardon the leaders of these white nationalist movements that are involved in the attack on January 6, pardon all the violent attackers on January 6th. We've seen as every nominee who's come before Congress, uh we just had another one this week for a court of appeals position asked who won the 2020 election, none of them can answer truthfully.

[00:10:38]They have to dodge. They have to say, "Well, he Joe Biden was certified the winner." Okay, but did Donald Trump lose? Joe Biden was certified the winner. They cannot pronounce the words that Donald Trump lost the election because their their nomination will be withdrawn. So, telling the big lie, telling a form of the big lie is a prerequisite for the bench. It's a prerequisite for the Justice Department.

[00:11:03]It's a prerequisite for the Department of Homeland Security. Um, and this is where we are where lying for the president, joining in his fiction is a necessary part of getting any kind of appointment. Um, hard to overstate the dangerousness of that kind of a hiring practice.

[00:11:26]>> Thanks, Senator. I'm grateful for your time.

[00:11:28]>> Appreciate you're subscribing. You are helping to underwrite and support this form of independent journalism. And I also appreciate your comments on Substack getting a whole bunch of comments about our reporting earlier this week on Democrats attempts to mechanize the 25th amendment. One comment from Gabe said, "Republican representatives will never allow this bill to become law. Trump would never sign it." That being said, Democrats sure do feel comfortable talking about it publicly, an indication of where the political winds are blowing. And atha says it's like watching the downfall of a 250-year-old nation state right now.

[00:12:02]The matter of whether voters agree with that and whether they galvanize over what they're seeing ahead of November could be a very early test Tuesday in Virginia when they vote on a referendum to redraw the congressional district maps potentially flipping four Republican seats to Democrats. Perhaps a very good early sign what voters think about this nation at this moment in time.

[00:12:23]>> Really want to thank you for watching.

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