Voters decide four runoff contests for Superior Court seats on Nov. 3, choosing who will preside over criminal and civil cases across the region.
Seat 131
The candidates
Donna Tryfman, a deputy public defender, serves in the major cases unit, where she handles homicide and other high-profile defendants. She also has extensive experience in juvenile cases.
David Ross is an alternate in the Torrance branch of the public defender’s office and also works in Bellflower and Long Beach. He claims to have represented more than 10,000 clients at hearings and in trials.
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The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. rates both attorneys as “qualified” for office. Ross said his mix of legal and life experience and his time as a journalist, when he “listened to real people, gathered the facts and told objective stories,” provide a unique perspective. Tryfman has served as a Superior Court judge pro tem, handling traffic and small claims cases. She has proctored teen courts at Dorsey and Hamilton high schools.
Seat 64
The candidates
Maria Ghobadi is an L.A. County deputy district attorney. As a child, Ghobadi fled Iran with her family during the Islamic Revolution and settled in Southern California. She joined the L.A. County district attorney’s office in 2015 and has handled misdemeanors, felonies and domestic violence cases. She’s spent seven years in the gang homicide division.
Rhonda Haymon is an L.A. County deputy public defender. She grew up in Southern California and became an attorney in 2001. She started in the Orange County public defender’s office before moving to L.A. County, where she’s spent 23 years as a deputy public defender. She has been assigned to a restorative justice drug court and consulted on police misconduct cases.
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The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. ranked Ghobadi as “well qualified” and Haymon as “qualified.”
Seat 87
The candidates
David DeJute, who defended President Obama against the so-called birther claims, spent a decade as vice president of litigation at Sony Pictures Entertainment. He now works in litigation at a private firm. An adjunct professor at Pepperdine’s Caruso School of Law, he’s taught ethics, antitrust, copyright and patent law. After last year’s wildfires, he returned as director of the disaster relief clinic, where he instructed students who provided pro bono legal services to victims of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
Anthony “A.J.” Bayne’s background includes nearly two decades serving in the Compton Courthouse, where he for a time served as deputy in charge. He’s now handling serious felony cases at the Torrance branch. Bayne is an inventor, with patent-pending applications for artificial intelligence tools that automate legal workflows. One helps with closing arguments; another uses court reporter transcripts to generate cross-examination questions.
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DeJute is rated “qualified” to serve by the Los Angeles County Bar Assn. Bayne is rated a notch higher, “well qualified.”
Seat 65
The candidates
Justin Allen Clayton is in charge of the Inglewood branch of the public defender’s office and has defended three cases with life sentences. Clayton said a priority is improving court efficiency through pretrial preparation and “firm but fair enforcement of deadlines.” Clayton said running a public defender branch office gives him a “comprehensive understanding” of the courtroom.
Anna Slotky Reitano represented juvenile and adult clients, many of them accused of felonies, before joining the county counsel’s office. Reitano focused on mental health diversion and treatment, aiming to support rehabilitation when possible. A former child actor, she volunteers with local schools and, according to her website, mentors “future lawyers” through moot court competitions.
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The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. considers both qualified to serve.
Already accused by his wife of sexually assaulting her, Marcellus Wiley is the defendant in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that he raped a 22-year-old USC student in 1999.
Wiley, a former NFL defensive end and longtime sports media personality, also has been accused by three women of sexual misconduct when he was a student at Columbia University in 1994 and by four additional women of similar criminal behavior from 1995 to 2009.
Those filings support a motion-seeking class-action status against Wiley and Columbia by one of the accusers, who filed her initial complaint in 2023 alleging that Wiley raped her in his Columbia dorm room in November 1994 after inviting her to study. She claimed university officials discouraged her from going to the police and handled the matter internally.
The filing Tuesday alleges that “Jane Doe” met Wiley in February 1999 and went on two dates with him. The lawsuit states that she told Wiley — who had just completed his third season with the Buffalo Bills — that she was sexually inexperienced and not interested in a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, she accompanied him to a L.A. nightclub and agreed to spend the night in his hotel room. Doe alleged that Wiley raped her after she fell asleep fully clothed.
“Jane told Wiley to stop and repeated ‘Please stop’ several times and told him, ‘You’re not listening to me,’” the lawsuit states.
While driving Doe to her dorm room, Wiley suggested that she be tested for a sexually transmitted disease because he “had the clap,” according to the filing. She claims they never spoke again.
Doe wrote that she filed a police report after a rape kit tested positive for Wiley’s semen. More than a month later she claims the district attorney’s office informed her that Wiley denied Doe’s allegations and that, “therefore, no charges would be filed.” Doe is suing Wiley for sexual battery, assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Wiley responded to the lawsuit by pointing to MenTooProject.org, a digital advocacy movement and platform he launched in August after the State of Florida declined to file charges against him following a July 4 domestic dispute with his estranged wife, Annemarie Wiley. She alleged that he poked her in the face and threatened to kill her in front of their 7-year-old daughter. Wiley denied the allegations.
The project, a spin-off of the #MenToo awareness campaign that gained widespread traction in India in 2019, invites men to “join us in the fight for truth, fairness, and justice,” Wiley wrote on the website. “My grandmother told me the truth always outruns a lie. She taught me not to chase the lie, just give the truth time to catch it.”
Wiley, 51, frequently addresses the allegations against him on his YouTube channel, “Dat Dude TV.”
“Pick a date, pick the encounter, pick the allegation. For every one of them, I either saw, communicated through email, text, phone, was invited by these individuals after these dates to engage, to be intimate, or all of the above, after the dates that are in question,” Wiley said in a May 2006 episode.
In a court filing two months later requesting a temporary restraining order, Annemarie Wiley accused him of raping her four separate times. The first alleged instance occurred in 2012 when they were dating and the other three allegedly took place in January 2026. Annemarie, a nurse anesthetist and former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” was granted the order as well as full custody of their children. She filed for divorce the same day.
In Sepember, a judge granted her request to extend the restraining order for three years. The July 4 episode that triggered the restraining order resulted in Wiley’s arrest, but a month later the Orange County State Attorney’s Office dropped criminal charges, stating that testimonial evidence lacked corroborating physical or other evidence required to pursue a conviction.
Wiley, who grew up in Compton and played 10 years in the NFL including three with the Chargers, defended himself publicly through a long social media post that read in part, “I owe it to my children to truthfully document what they and I have endured. To do that, I must address the lies Annemarie has told about me by telling the truth about her and our marriage.
“Over the years, I have compiled videos, photographs, text messages, emails, and other evidence that directly contradicts those baseless claims and provides a factual record of our family and the events leading to this unfortunate divorce,” he wrote.
Wiley has repeatedly lamented that the allegations, lawsuits and media reports could have a negative impact on his young son and two daughters. He pointed out on social media in May that three sexual assault claims were dismissed in New York County court in September 2025, while suggesting that his son, Marcellus Wiley Jr., could suffer from the allegations.
“To me, it’s about my son’s name, that he will one day Google and think this is about him, but he’s gonna know it’s about his dad,” he said on “Dat Dude TV” in May. “And how dare you stain the brain of my child.”
A MUCH-LOVED Italian holiday destination is set to charge visitors £25 just to enter the city.
Venice is looking to raise its tourist entry fee to €30 (£25.13) as well as increasing the time frame for when it applies.
Venice is planning to raise its entry fee for day visitorsCredit: Getty
Venice’s budget and taxation councillor Michele Zuin told Reuters that the current €5 (£4.19) to €10 (£8.38) fee is no longer deterring excessive visitor numbers.
As a result, there are now proposals to raise the fee in 2027.
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The proposed new fee of €30 (£25.13) would cost more than some flight tickets to Venice from the UK.
For example, one-way flights in November and December cost as little as £13 per person.
And a return would only cost you a couple of quid more than the proposed fee, with £27 return flights in December from the UK.
Michele Zuin told regional news: “The current €5-10 charge is affordable for virtually everyone; the risk is that it no longer has the deterrent effect that this measure is supposed to have.”
There are even talks of the fee going up to €50 (£41.89) in the future.
The fee was originally introduced back in 2024 for day trippers entering the city.
The increase would mean it costs more than a one-way flight from the UKCredit: Getty
Visitors would be able to pay less if they booked in advance and there are a number of exemptions including for children under the age of 14-years-old.
This year, the fee was in place between April 3 and July 26, between 8:30am and 4pm each day.
The new fee would need to be agreed on by the government before being introduced.
The fee was originally introduced to battle overtourism in the city.
The fee and when it applies for 2027 will be announced before the end of the year.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is attempting to prosecute James Comey for what it calls a decade-old leak of classified information, an effort the former FBI director’s lawyers immediately dismissed as legally invalid and outside the legal time limit for when the Justice Department can file a criminal indictment.
The allegations from the Justice Department were revealed Monday in newly unsealed court documents that shed light on a closed-door fight that represents an unmistakable escalation in the administration’s targeting of Comey, a longtime critic and foe of President Trump who has faced two other criminal cases since the Republican returned to the White House last year.
The effort to prosecute Comey is also part of a series of politically charged investigative actions the department has undertaken in the run-up to next week’s midterm elections.
“Well, they’re back — again,” Comey said in a video statement Monday. “It would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice — one that we cannot become numb to. Nothing’s changed with me; I’m still innocent, I’m still not afraid of these people — and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary.”
The Justice Department said it had filed what’s known as a “criminal information” to extend the statute of limitations for charges in the case.
“Filing a criminal information to toll the statute of limitations is a widely recognized practice in federal court and has been approved by multiple Circuit Courts of Appeals. This is an ongoing criminal investigation, and we will not comment further,” a department spokesperson said.
Asked about the Comey case, Trump told reporters upon arriving back to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland late Monday following his rally in Mississippi that “I don’t know much about it. I just heard about it.”
He added, “He’s a dirty cop, James Comey. But I know nothing about it.”
An information can be filed without the approval of a judge or a grand jury’s finding of probable cause to a court. Comey’s lawyers made clear that they intend to fight the charges as invalid because the Justice Department did not file an indictment, which must be voted on by a grand jury, inside the 10-year statute of limitations required under the law.
“For the third time in little more than one year, the Department of Justice has attempted to charge Mr. Comey with a federal crime. Mr. Comey steadfastly maintains his innocence,” his attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, said in a statement.
The allegation was previously investigated
The latest allegation concerns an October 2016 New York Times story related to a secret court order that required Yahoo to scan emails for messages potentially linked to a foreign terrorist organization. The story cited two government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the order from a judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that Yahoo was barred from publicly disclosing.
Federal authorities, including prosecutor John Durham, began investigating the disclosure in early 2017. Durham, who later investigated the FBI’s conduct as it scrutinized potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, wrote a classified memo in December 2018 recommending no criminal charges against anyone in connection with the disclosure, Comey’s attorneys said in a recent court filing.
In January 2019, the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia opened a second investigation of the same matter under the code name “Tropical Vortex.” But that investigation was closed without any charges filed in February 2020.
“Both times the Government determined that no charges should be brought against anyone. Now, ten years after the article was published, the Government filed an “Information” against Mr. Comey that was not approved by a judge nor issued by a grand jury. It purports to charge Mr. Comey with crimes that he did not commit,” Fitzgerald said.
Prosecutors in a newly unsealed filing said investigators found evidence that Comey “sought to correct misinformation which had appeared in the press by way of Reuters the day before” that New York Times story was published, directed his staff to speak to a journalist at the newspaper related to accuracy concerns “and thereby illegally transferred classified information.”
The criminal information was filed under seal on Oct. 5, 10 years after the 2016 story was published. “But,” Comey’s lawyers said, “the applicable statute of limitations explicitly demands an indictment within 10 years of the offense; an information does not suffice.”
They have asked a judge to dismiss the information, a request that is still pending.
Trump and Comey have a long and uneasy history
The first criminal case against Comey, filed in federal court in Virginia, accused him of having lied to Congress in 2020 but was dismissed by a judge who concluded that the prosecutor who brought the charges was illegally appointed. A separate pending indictment charges the former FBI director with threatening Trump through an Instagram photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47,” a case Comey has sought to dismiss.
The prosecutions are part of a Trump retribution campaign that has even extended to Comey’s daughter, Maurene, who was fired from her job as a Justice Department prosecutor in New York last year in a termination that a federal judge on Monday ruled was illegal.
Comey was the FBI director when Trump took office in 2017, having been appointed by then-President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and serving before that as a senior Justice Department official in President George W. Bush’s Republican administration.
But the relationship was strained from the start, including after Comey resisted a request by Trump at a private dinner to pledge his personal loyalty to the president — an overture that so unnerved the FBI director that he documented it in a contemporaneous memorandum.
Trump fired Comey in May 2017 amid an FBI investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s campaign. That inquiry, later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller, found that while Russia interfered in the 2016 election and the Trump team welcomed the help, there was insufficient evidence to prove a criminal collaboration.
The two men have been bitterly at odds ever since Comey’s firing.
Comey in 2018 published a memoir, “A Higher Loyalty,” that painted Trump in deeply unflattering ways, likening him to a mafia don and characterizing him as “untethered to truth.” Trump, for his part, has repeatedly claimed that Comey should face charges for “treason” — an accusation Comey dismissed as “dumb lies” — and called him an “untruthful slime ball.”
The Justice Department has made a series of splashy moves in recent weeks , including a criminal complaint last Friday charging two former FBI officials with lying to Congress about their participation in investigations concerning Hunter Biden, and the search by federal agents of the Washington home of Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
Tucker, Richer and Kunzelman write for the Associated Press. AP writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.
At the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles late Monday, several green card holders arrested in a crackdown on alleged California voter fraud expressed confusion over the charges — with some saying they had no recollection of registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.
Among them was Ana Domínguez, 60, a native of El Salvador living in Long Beach as a lawful permanent resident. Federal authorities accused her Monday of fraudulently registering to vote in July 2006 and then lying about it in her naturalization paperwork in March 2026.
Domínguez said she did not have any memory of registering to vote.
Another man accused of the same crimes as Domínguez said the same: He wasn’t aware of ever registering to vote, as federal prosecutors claimed he had.
Both were among the 28 people charged with federal election-related crimes Monday, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application. Federal prosecutors and high-ranking Justice Department officials had touted the arrests during a news conference hours before as proof that California elections are corrupted by noncitizen voters — as President Trump has long alleged.
State officials said the isolated instances of noncitizens voting, if accurate, are not evidence of widespread voter fraud. They also raised questions as to whether the charges could be trusted to be accurate — citing similar accusations being disproved elsewhere in the country.
Election experts have said many instances of noncitizens registering to vote are a result of administrative error or confusion on the part of the immigrant — not intentional criminality.
“We know from past experience that sometimes people register to vote accidentally, as when there is a mistake at the DMV,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote Monday in a blog post. “There is only a crime if the government can prove willful violations of federal law.”
Four of the defendants charged Monday had initial court appearances later that afternoon. Beforehand, more than a dozen of their loved ones milled around the federal courthouse in downtown L.A., antsy and clearly worried.
One woman, her baby and young daughter in tow, struggled to find the right courtroom. Another woman — Domínguez’s daughter — cried in the hallway as she waited for her mother’s case to get called up. When Domínguez moved to stand before the judge, she blew a kiss to her husband and daughter in the second row. She wore a black back brace and her legs were cuffed.
A third defendant — Omar Muñoz, 72, a lawful permanent resident from Belize whose arrest at his home in Commerce was captured by photographers in images transmitted around the world — shuffled into a court room shackled at the waist, his feet cuffed, still wearing the red and black pajama pants he’d been arrested in.
Homeland Security Investigations task force officers escort a suspect accused of illegally registering to vote to a processing facility at Federal Building in Los Angeles on Monday.
(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo)
Muñoz was charged with fraudulently registering to vote in September 2019, and then voting in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his application to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, when he claimed to have never falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen in the past.
In the court room, Muñoz held a hand over his heart as he waved to his family in the first row of the gallery.
Hasen, the UCLA expert, wrote that the government’s blasting out images of Muñoz being arrested was clearly “meant to convey that the problem of noncitizen voting in California is both pervasive and serious, crimes that are undetected by willfully ignorant California election officials.”
But the reality, he wrote, “is likely far different,” with voter fraud limited to isolated cases, some with less nefarious intent.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said Monday that the cases represent strong federal work to ensure that noncitizens aren’t negating the votes of eligible U.S. voters — a problem he said California officials have refused to recognize despite federal authorities providing the proof.
Essayli dismissed the idea that those charged may have been unaware of what they were doing. “You have to go out of your way to register to vote, it’s not something that just happens to you,” Essayli said.
José Antonio Bañuelos-Díaz, 42, a Mexican national and West Adams resident, appeared in court wearing a reflective vest with the name of a landscaping company, blue jeans and boots with the American flag on them. He’d been on his way to work when he was arrested.
During the hearings, the defendants only spoke to acknowledge that they reviewed and understood the charges against them. In every case, the federal prosecutor said the government was not seeking detention.
The magistrate judge ordered the four released on personal recognizance and said they were not required to be under supervision. They are all set to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on November 9. Their deputy federal public defenders did not respond to a request for comment.
Lliani Orantes, Muñoz’s daughter and a nurse who was born in the U.S., said her father had been hauled out of the family home by federal authorities after they swarmed and cordoned off the block. She said the family was rushing to figure out what happened, including whether Muñoz could have been confused with younger relatives of the same name, including a U.S.-born son who is a registered voter.
Orantes also expressed frustration with the handling of her father’s arrest — to which federal authorities had clearly alerted some media, who were brought along for the raid.
She said her father is recovering from cervical surgery, rotator cuff repair on a shoulder and a double knee replacement, and that he was pulled out of the family’s home “like he was a dog” as part of what she described as a “political ploy, an example used for the operation” — which federal authorities dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote.”
“They’re trying to instill fear in society,” she said.
“We have so much more in the world to be dealing with, do we really need to focus on these little things that could be taken care of in a different fashion? In a different way? Like, hey, somebody from immigration visit the home,” she said.
Acting United States Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter speaks at a news conference Monday to announce charges against 28 people in California accused of illegally registering to vote as noncitizens.
(David Butow/For The Times)
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta — who is defending the state and top election officials for the state and Los Angeles County against a lawsuit from the Justice Department alleging they are not treating alleged voter fraud by noncitizens seriously enough — said Monday that voting illegally is wrong and “one off, isolated incidents” of it should be prosecuted.
But Bonta denied that there is widespread voter fraud in the state, called 28 cases brought out of the 23 million registered voters in California a “drop in the bucket,” and said he’d be watching how those cases play out in court.
“We’ll see what the facts show, and whether they’ll have to drop charges or whether they’ll be able to prosecute,” he said.
About 3 p.m. Monday, the four defendants at the downtown courthouse were released and exited the court room, some to family members waiting in the hallway to hug them.
Domínguez wiped away tears as she recounted her arrest, showing bruises on her wrists from the handcuffs.
“They were accusing me of voter fraud since 2006,” she said. Domínguez said the accusations don’t even make sense considering she has never voted.
“If I would have committed all those frauds about voting registration and whatever they’re saying, since 2006, wouldn’t you imagine that I would have been voting all these other years?” she asked.
In a visual presentation at their news conference, federal authorities alleged that 21 of the 28 people charged had actually voted. Domínguez was not one of them.
Domínguez said she’s been a lawful permanent resident since the late 1980s, and that she applied for U.S. citizenship earlier this year. As part of the application process, she said she told an immigration agent that the only people registered to vote in her household were her husband, who previously became a U.S. citizen, and her daughter, who was born in the country.
Since then, Domínguez said she has just been waiting on the citizenship ceremony, “but it never came through.”
Instead, she was arrested Monday when she was about to leave for work as an administrative assistant.
“I never, ever in my entire life … thought this would ever happen to me,” she said.
Acting U.S. Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter stands next to a display showing photos of people charged with illegally registering to vote during a news conference on Monday.
(Jae C. Hong/AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Muñoz and his family gathered outside the courthouse. Muñoz, who declined to comment on the charges against him, said he’d been up to have coffee early that morning when he heard the commotion outside. Agents said if he didn’t open the door, they’d break it down.
He described seeing helicopters, at least eight cars and several agents from different agencies descending on his home, and recalled thinking, “What movie am I in?”
“That’s a lot of money. Taxpayers paying for that,” he said. “They could have sent me a letter saying report to the court.”
Muñoz — who said he came to the U.S. legally in 1975 and has “paid all my taxes” since — said he explained to the arresting agents that he’d had six surgeries recently and they “didn’t care.” He said he didn’t learn about the charges against him until four hours later.
Muñoz’s son, Omar Muñoz Jr., questioned why federal agents didn’t take his father’s age and ailments into consideration.
“We understand that there’s a procedure that has to be addressed at court. But 5 in the morning, handcuffed? It’s just the way everything was done, and what my mom had to go through. It’s not just an impact on my father’s health, but also on my mom,” he said. “There is a law, we understand that. But innocent until proven guilty.”
Muñoz’s wife, Esmeralda, echoed her son’s questions about why so many agents were deployed to their home.
“Seriously? All these people just to come for an elderly person,” she said she told a federal agent. “It’s unbelievable.”
Federal authorities have charged 28 people from across California with illegally registering to vote or casting ballots in federal elections despite not being U.S. citizens — again escalating an election battle between the state and the Trump administration just weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.
Authorities said 11 of the 28 were arrested as of Monday morning and that the 17 others “will be in custody in the near future.” Some of the 28, all of whom are lawful permanent residents of the U.S., are charged with lying about registering or voting on their naturalization paperwork, officials said; 21 of them are suspected of casting votes, some in multiple elections. None are undocumented immigrants, a favorite target of President Trump and a group he has accused of infiltrating U.S. elections in the past.
Those charged represent a tiny fraction of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” that the Justice Department alleged are on California rolls just last week, and an even tinier fraction of the more than 190,000 noncitizens the Trump administration alleged were on state rolls as recently as July.
State officials have previously warned, along with independent elections experts, that the Trump administration has badly overstated voter fraud claims in other states. In Nevada, for example, officials recently found that all 185 people the Justice Department flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens. The administration has repeatedly revised downward its estimate for how many “likely noncitizens” are on California’s rolls.
Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter cast the arrests during a Monday news conference as proof that California voter rolls are corrupted and need to be purged to prevent noncitizens from negating the legitimate votes of U.S. citizens, and that California officials who have rebuffed recent Trump administration efforts to purge the state’s rolls are willfully obstructing justice.
“This Department of Justice will not look the other way while non-citizens vote in federal elections,” McCotter said. “Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for California and L.A. County.”
State and local officials — some of whom are being sued by the Justice Department over their handling of the broader claims — said voter fraud should be taken seriously, but that isolated cases are not evidence of widespread problems and that any voting allegations from the Trump administration must be viewed with skepticism.
Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn referred to Monday’s arrests as “voter intimidation and a blatant attempt to undermine trust in our midterm elections.”
“These arrests are being used to paint a picture of widespread voter fraud when we know that is not the case,” Hahn said. “California has laws in place to protect the integrity of our elections, and L.A. County is fully abiding by them.”
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said the 28 individuals charged Monday “represent a tiny fraction” of California’s 23 million registered voters, and that the Trump administration has not shown “evidence of widespread voter fraud, even if the allegations are true.”
Shifting claims
For months, federal prosecutors have been issuing grand jury subpoenas for voter records in California — suggesting a sweeping criminal investigation was underway.
In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin asserted in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that California may have more than 190,000 noncitizen voters on its rolls. Last week, McCotter wrote letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the ballots of about 20,000 voters the Justice Department said were “likely noncitizens.”
When Weber and Logan balked at the demand — arguing the Justice Department had provided no proof the voters were ineligible, had presented similar and inaccurate claims in other states and had made the request too close to the upcoming election — the Justice Department sued Thursday, asking a court to immediately intervene and force the state and L.A. County to comply with McCotter’s demands.
In a filing in that case Monday, federal authorities cited the latest charges as more reason for the court to intervene, and before the election, to segregate out the flagged ballots until those voters’ citizenship can be verified — again raising uncertainty as to their citizenship status despite alleging during their news conference Monday that all were permanent residents.
“This Court should order California to set aside vote-by-mail ballots from likely noncitizens in the federal election — including any ballots cast by the individuals charged with [federal election] crimes this morning — until the voter’s citizenship status can be determined,” federal attorneys wrote.
The Trump administration’s apparent uncertainty about the citizenship of the voters it has flagged — and even those it’s charged — has been a focus of state and local officials. Bonta and others have questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000 and repeatedly pointed to what occurred in Nevada, where federal officials initially flagged more than 15,000 potential noncitizen voters. Independent election experts have also highlighted those discrepancies.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote online Monday that the data the federal government relies on to find purported noncitizens are “unreliable.” He wrote that the Justice Department’s demands on California risk “disenfranchising thousands of voters, and from DOJ’s track record, the lion’s share will be eligible voters.”
David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said the 28 alleged noncitizens charged represent “.0001% of California voters,” and that the Trump administration charging 28 people days after flagging 20,000 “raises serious questions as to whether DOJ has any evidence at all supporting their claims on the other 19,972 on their list.”
McCotter said the original 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” while “20,000 is the floor” — with the larger figure representing individuals the administration had low, medium or high levels of confidence were noncitizens, and the smaller figure representing only those it has high confidence are noncitizens.
“So there’s not inconsistency between those numbers. They’re just looking at different levels of confidence,” he said.
McCotter also said the notion that a federal list of more than 15,000 alleged noncitizens in Nevada had resulted in zero noncitizens being found was a “false storyline,” in part because the larger group was never vetted by the state. However, he also acknowledged that the 185 that were vetted — and found to be citizens — were those the federal government had held “high confidence” in being noncitizens.
How the Justice Department further zeroed in on the 28 charged individuals also was not entirely clear.
U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian, the top federal prosecutor in Northern California, said prosecutors compared information from Homeland Security with voter information they subpoenaed from Weber’s office and various county election offices. Some of the criminal complaints said Homeland Security Investigations received investigative referrals from its Identity and Benefit Fraud Unit, which provided “relevant information regarding alleged voter fraud or related identity-based fraud indicators.”
Kevin Murphy, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, said the underlying investigations were not “based on assumptions or a single piece of information,” but required “thorough investigative work, coordination, and a commitment to ensuring that enforcement action is supported by the facts.”
Those charged include 13 people from the Central District of California, who live in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Rancho Palos Verdes, Anaheim, West Covina and other cities. They hail from a mix of nations, including Belize, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India and Mexico. Five others were charged in the Northern District of California, with one from San Francisco and others from the wider Bay Area; four in the Southern District and six in the Eastern District.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in L.A., dismissed the idea that such fraud is rare or that Trump officials are overstating the threat. “This is not a conspiracy theory,” Essayli said. “This is not made-up stuff.”
Essayli specifically highlighted the case of a 72-year-old Omar Munoz from Belize, who was arrested in a pre-dawn raid Monday at his home in Commerce. Federal authorities allege that he fraudulently registered to vote in 2019, voted in 2020, twice in 2022 and again in 2024. He is also accused of lying on his naturalization application.
In federal court downtown late Monday, Munoz’s daughter Lliani Orantes, a nurse born in the U.S., said the family was trying to figure out what happened, after federal officials swarmed their block and took her father, who is recovering from a recent surgery.
She said her brother, a registered voter, shares her father’s name, as does a nephew, and the family is wondering if it is all a mix-up. “Did the names get misconstrued,” she wondered.
McCotter said in the last seven weeks, the Trump administration has charged 113 people across 20 states with voting-related crimes. More than 154 million people voted nationally in the 2024 presidential election.
What’s ahead
Federal officials said their work — dubbed “Operation Protect the Vote” — would continue through the election and beyond.
Essayli said California’s own process for verifying voters’ citizenship, including requiring that they attest to being a citizen when they register, is insufficient. He said California election officials have “no idea who is a citizen,” but also know “they have noncitizens who are getting ballots as we speak” and several years ago admitted in an audit that noncitizens were being registered at the DMV.
“When we submit a list of 20,000 noncitizens to California that we are pretty sure are not citizens, it is outrageous that the response from the state is, ‘We don’t believe you and we’re not even going to look at it,’” he said. “That is not good faith actors. They are being complicit.”
McCotter said there “may be some names” on the list of 20,000 flagged voters “who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” He said federal authorities are “not perfect,” which is why they’ve asked California officials to work with them. “We could knock through most of these names pretty quickly, probably in a day or two, if California would work with us.”
He said the timeline — amid an ongoing election — was due to state officials refusing to cooperate sooner. “It’s an emergency of their own creation.”
Australia’s modern Test side remain a fascinating one to unpick.
Viewed by many in England as there for the taking in last winter’s Ashes despite a 4-1 win, they are also labelled too old by many observers at home.
The victims of recent shock defeats by West Indies and Bangladesh, they are still unbeaten in their past nine Test series.
But while their struggling batting line-up was bailed out by Matt Renshaw across the first two days of the first Test in Durban, they took control over South Africa on day three in an all-too familiar way.
Nine years after they first appeared together as Australia’s bowling quartet, Mitchell Starc, Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Nathan Lyon produced their latest relentless performance to dismiss South Africa for 284. There was even some magic from Steve Smith thrown in too.
Cummins took three wickets, Starc, Hazlewood and Lyon two apiece, in doing so brushing off any doubts about their effectiveness at the start of a run of Tests against the world Test champions, in-form New Zealand, India and England.
Police say the incident is not connected to ongoing investigations at the RAF Fairford airbase.
Published On 8 Oct 20268 Oct 2026
Police in the United Kingdom say they have arrested and charged a member of the Royal Navy accused of working with an unnamed foreign power after an investigation by counterterrorism police.
Teddy Young, 24, was charged with two offences under the National Security Act for allegedly obtaining protected information and preparing to transfer it for the benefit of a foreign power.
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In a statement, authorities alleged that between November 2024 and May 2025, Young “obtained, copied, recorded or retained protected information, intending the conduct to benefit a foreign power… contrary to section 1 of the National Security Act 2023″.
Young is due to appear at London’s Westminster Magistrates’ Court later on Thursday.
“These are very serious charges against a serving member of the armed forces,” Commander Helen Flanagan, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said in a statement.
“We have worked extremely closely with relevant operational colleagues within the Ministry of Defence as our investigation has progressed to ensure appropriate measures could be taken to mitigate any potential risks linked to this matter,” she added.
UK media reported that the officer was arrested at his home in Bedfordshire on Tuesday before he was taken into custody in London.
The police clarified that the case is not related to the ongoing investigation into an incident at the RAF Fairford airbase.
