law

A VICTIM of rapist Russell Brand told a court she has lived with the never-ending trauma of the attack for the past 17 years.

The disgraced star’s youngest target met him when he invited her backstage at one of his stand-up comedy gigs.

He hand-picked her from a line-up of female fans at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2009.

He invited the woman, who was in her early 20s at the time, to his £2.3million home in Hampstead, North London, the following week.

He then anally raped her.

In a later text exchange she rejected his further advances, telling him: “You’ve pushed me far enough. You treated me like an animal.”

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In an emotional victim personal statement — one of four presented to Southwark crown court yesterday — the woman told how her life has been plagued by what she called the “lasting effects of trauma” from the attack.

She said: “The effects have been significant and continue to affect me today. Even now, I feel that I am living with the trauma of what happened. It is something I carry with me every day and it often feels never-ending.”

In her statement, read out by prosecutor Riel Karmy-Jones KC, she told the court that she felt humiliated and overwhelmed and moved back in with her parents because she did not feel safe alone.

She described becoming hyper-vigilant, adding: “I often felt on edge and avoided certain situations.”

She added that she was left terrified that she had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the comedian and TV presenter — and that also had a profound effect on her mental health.

In her statement, she said the thought of seeing Brand again caused her “anxiety and fear” and destroyed her career ambitions.

She told the court: “The defendant’s public profile had a significant impact on me.­

“Because of who he was and the influence he held, I did not feel confident speaking openly about what had happened.

“I did not know who I could trust or confide in.

“I felt that if I reported him, I would not be believed. His fame, wealth and influence created a power imbalance which made me feel powerless.

“I did not have the confidence to challenge someone who appeared so powerful, rich and influential.

“His public profile meant that he remained present in my life even when I wanted to move on.

“I would regularly encounter references to him in the media, which made it difficult to escape reminders of what had happened.”

The woman eventually came forward to police in 2025 after seeing he had been charged with attacking other women.

She told the court that Brand’s celebrity was a significant factor in her not contacting police about the rape for 16 years.

She added: “When I eventually reported what had happened, it was not simply because of the media documentary.

“By that stage I had become aware of the police investigation and felt that I was finally in a stronger position mentally to disclose my experience.

“Reporting what happened was something I had hoped I would eventually be able to do but it took a long time to reach that point. The investigation and criminal justice process have been extremely difficult.

“Providing personal records and access to my mobile phone felt highly intrusive and, at times, I felt as though I was the person being scrutinised and interrogated.

“Every update regarding the case brought back memories of the incident and felt like reopening old wounds.

“Rather than allowing me to move forward, updates often pulled me back into a painful period of my life.

“I have also been very anxious about attending court and being cross-examined. The thought of personal details being discussed publicly has caused me significant distress.”

The complainant also described the way Brand’s defence team labelled her an “obsessive fan” as deeply hurtful.

She responded: “That portrayal does not reflect who I am.

“I had my own ambitions, goals and aspirations.”

And she went on: “The media coverage surrounding the case has added another layer of difficulty.

“I was unprepared for the level of publicity.

“It has been extremely distressing to relive what happened and then see it discussed so widely across television, newspapers and online platforms.

“I have been worried throughout that my identity, or the identities of my family members, could become known.

“The intensity of media interest has created anxieties that are separate from the rape and has made it much harder to put the experience behind me.”

She went on: “My confidence and self-esteem have been badly affected. I regularly feel on edge and question my own judgment.

“I doubt my ability to make good decisions and no longer trust my instincts in the way I once did.

“I have lost trust in other people, particularly those I do not know well, and I often worry that I will not be listened to or believed.

“I also lost respect for myself following the incident and felt as though I had lost control over my own life. Looking back, I feel that I abandoned myself and my own needs.”

Concluding her victim personal statement, she told the court how what she called the “lasting and far-reaching” consequences of the attack had affected “almost every aspect of my life”.

She said: “Even now, I continue to experience anxiety, difficulties with trust, reduced confidence and the lasting effects of trauma.

“What happened is not something that I have simply been able to move on from.

“It remains a significant part of my life and continues to influence how I view myself, my relationships and my future.”

Brand — who clutched prayer beads in his hand — looked on emotionless as the prosecutor delivered the statement.

State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), a prolific lawmaker who has reshaped California policy on a host of fronts — from housing to transgender rights — will succeed House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi as San Francisco’s representative in Congress after San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan called Wiener on Wednesday to concede, her campaign confirmed.

Wiener, 56, who is gay and reviled by some on the far right for his progressive policies and staunch LGBTQ+ advocacy work, overcame Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan in the much-watched race between Democrats, and will be the first out LGBTQ+ person to represent the bright-blue city in the House.

“In Washington I’ll bring the same determination I showed in Sacramento every single day,” Wiener said in a statement. “It’s time to deliver a better tomorrow for our city and our country.”

Wiener’s win hands Pelosi — known for her deft political instinct and sweeping influence over the Democratic Party and donor base — a rare defeat in her home city just as her nearly 40-year career in the House concludes.

The Associated Press had yet to call the race in Wiener’s favor as of late Wednesday.

But Chan, a progressive backed by labor, announced she was conceding the race in a statement, writing, “After reviewing the results and the ballots remaining to be counted, while we expect the margin to narrow significantly, we do not have a clear path to victory. I congratulate Scott Wiener on his election and wish him success in serving San Francisco.”

Chan said she was “deeply grateful” to Pelosi “for her trust and for four decades of extraordinary service that have strengthened San Francisco and our country.”

Pelosi in her own statement said Chan “brought courage, conviction and a deep love for San Francisco” to the campaign.

“As a working mom, a public servant, and an immigrant, she gave voice to families whose struggles she knows firsthand,” Pelosi said. “I was proud to support her, and I am so proud of the campaign she ran.”

Pelosi also congratulated Wiener. “Representing San Francisco is an extraordinary honor and a profound responsibility. My office stands ready to assist in the transition, and I wish him success in service for the people of our city,” she said.

Wiener thanked Chan for a “spirited and hard-fought campaign,” his campaign team, volunteers, supporters and donors for their hard work, and Pelosi — whom he hailed as “the greatest Speaker in modern American history” — saying he is “humbled to carry forward the powerful legacy of this seat.”

He also thanked San Franciscans for placing their trust in him — and making history by sending their first queer representative to Congress, something he said he never could have imagined when he first arrived in the city’s Castro neighborhood as a young man and “fell head over heels for this city.”

“San Franciscans voted for results, and we have so much work ahead: Building the millions of homes we need; moving toward true universal health care; investing in clean energy, public transit, and high-speed rail; standing up for science, education, and immigrants; making sure people — not massive corporations — decide what works for this country, including on AI; and ensuring the rule of law applies to everyone, including the President,” he said.

He said it “won’t be easy” but that voters nationwide had “delivered a powerful mandate for Democrats in Congress” to get it done.

The race, which ratcheted up when Pelosi bypassed Wiener to endorse Chan in May, just before the June primary, had divided the Democratic Party.

Chan — who immigrated to the city from Hong Kong at age 13 and has deep ties to its large Chinese and immigrant communities — was a community and legislative aide for years, including for then-Dist. Atty. Kamala Harris, before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2020. She has served as budget chair since 2023.

In addition to Pelosi’s imprimatur, Chan had received endorsements from major labor groups including the California Federation of Labor Unions and the California Teachers Assn.; a host of Congress members, including Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.); various progressive organizations; fellow and former supervisors; former mayor and S.F. power broker Willie Brown; and Saikat Chakrabarti, the third-place finisher in the primary.

Wiener, a former deputy city attorney and local Democratic Party chair before being elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2010 and to the state Senate in 2016, was endorsed by the state and local Democratic parties; state leaders including California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, state Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara) and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister); various queer organizations; labor groups including AFSCME; more than half the city’s supervisors; and various members of Congress.

Many of Wiener’s supporters cited his legislative effectiveness — he’s the author of more than 100 laws, including some of the state’s most progressive laws on LGBTQ+ rights — and his willingness to fight hard battles, which they said is needed with President Trump in the White House.

Wiener has pushed progressive laws backing safe injection sites, extending bar hours until 4 a.m., decriminalizing psychedelic drugs, and limits on federal immigration agents in California. He has pushed for housing deregulation and development near transit hubs statewide to solve the housing and affordability crises, and pushed for artificial intelligence regulation while seeking buy-in from wealthy tech leaders — some of whom backed his campaign.

He also has passed laws protecting net neutrality, capping prescription drug costs and mandating mental health parity, ending mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, and requiring that corporations disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.

Wiener ran on his experience as a lawmaker who would be able “to fight in a smart way, and to fight in an aggressive way, to defeat Donald Trump and to lower the cost of living.”

“This is a race to succeed the most effective and operational member of Congress in modern American history,” Wiener told The Times in September. “San Francisco should send someone who actually has a track record, a proven track record, of being able to deliver.”

In backing Chan, Pelosi made a point of noting that she had spent much of her political career backing fellow women in office, and said she believed Chan — an immigrant woman — would make a mark in Congress, particularly given the political atmosphere under the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Pelosi cheered the election of other women across the country — even if not her own chosen successor.

“When I came to Congress in 1987, there were only twelve Democratic women. We made it our mission to change that. Today, we celebrate the election of more than 100 Democratic women to the House — a tremendous joy and source of pride,” Pelosi wrote on X. “When women succeed, America succeeds!”

Australian jockey Ethan Brown has ridden Point Of Law, a horse previously owned by King Charles, to victory in this year’s Melbourne Cup, the country’s most prestigious race.

Point of Law, which was bought from the King earlier this year for an undisclosed sum, was considered an early favourite.

Brown pushed Point Of Law from the middle of the pack to take the lead with just a few hundred metres to go.

The Melbourne Cup has run in Australia since 1861, often referred to as the “race that stops a nation”. With a prize of A$10.2m ($7.04m; £5.3m), it is the country’s third richest race.

“Don’t wake me up,” said Brown, in the post-race interview.

“Just stay cool, stay patient,” Brown said, recalling his thoughts as he pushed Point Of Law to overtake Royal Supremacy from a dozen lengths behind on the home stretch.

This is a breaking news story – we’ll bring you more details as we get them.

WASHINGTON — Next week’s elections are widely seen as a referendum on President Trump, his team and his party, with most voters telling pollsters they seek a check on his power. But the midterms will also serve as a reckoning for one of the least productive sessions of Congress in a century.

A stunningly low 10% of Americans approve of the job performance of Congress, which has passed fewer bills and conducted less oversight than any of its predecessors in modern history, according to scholars of the legislative branch.

The biggest achievement of unified Republican control has also become one of its biggest liabilities. Deeply unpopular when signed, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act has only grown more controversial, with most Americans still unclear on what’s in it — and those who do know largely disapproving of the law, which cut taxes for businesses and billionaires while adding trillions to the national debt.

A summer Politico poll found that just 8% of Americans believe the law has improved their bottom line. The bill cut billions of dollars for food stamps and over a trillion in health programs and Medicaid.

Two other significant bills passed by this Congress — the Epstein Files Transparency Act and a housing reform package targeting corporate purchases of single-family homes — ultimately became law over Trump’s opposition, leaving Republicans little credit for bipartisan wins.

“It’s not a partisan statement to say that the current Congress will go down in history as one of the most ineffective in history,” said Charles Stewart III, director of the Election Data and Science Lab at MIT. “It may not be the most ineffective, but it’s down there.”

Norman Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that congressional performance can be measured by several criteria, including the quantity and quality of legislation, its oversight of the executive branch, investigations of government and private-sector failures, and its defense of congressional powers and ethical standards.

By all accounts, he said, “the 119th Congress is an abysmal failure, perhaps the worst I have seen in well over five decades of immersion in the legislative branch.”

Senate pages walk through the halls outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol on Oct. 1, 2026. The Senate had completed its last votes in the middle of the night before going on recess through Nov. 9.

(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

A recent Fox News poll found that government corruption is voters’ top concern this year, surpassing even the economy. Yet the Republican-controlled Congress has failed to deliver meaningful oversight. The enrichment of Trump, his family, allies and aides has gone uninvestigated, while Senate Republicans continue to block legislation targeting insider trading by members of Congress.

It has been a running theme from Democrats working to unseat Republican incumbents, with Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York — slated to become speaker of the House if Democrats win control of the chamber — repeatedly characterizing the current session as a “do-nothing” Congress.

Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola speaks at a campaign event Oct. 29, 2026, in Juneau, Alaska.

(Chloe Anderson / Associated Press)

In Alaska, Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee for Senate, accused her GOP opponent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, of doing nothing to stop Trump’s tariff policies or his war with Iran. Democrat Sherrod Brown in Ohio has attacked the Republican incumbent Jon Husted for his procedural attempts to end debate over legislation on the Epstein files. And Democrat Adam Hamilton has targeted Republican Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas for voting for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that jeopardized funding to rural hospitals.

Defending the record of his majority, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has highlighted a decline in prescription drug prices, the elimination of “wasteful spending” on various federal programs and bipartisan housing reform. Only so much can be accomplished with a razor-thin majority in the chamber, Johnson has said.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) listens as U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) lends his support at a campaign rally on Oct. 29, 2026, in Platteville, Wis. Van Orden is in a rematch from 2024 with Democrat Rebecca Cooke for the state’s 3rd District seat.

(John Moore / Getty Images)

Trump has vowed on the campaign trail that, if kept in power, a Republican Congress would pass a $5,000 dividend to each American, despite its thin record to date.

Critics of the speaker say Johnson’s deference to Trump — and relinquishing of congressional authority to the executive branch — has unilaterally ceded power, souring voters on unified government.

But Stewart, who also co-directs a voting technology project with Caltech, said Congress’ problems run deeper than its current record.

Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.) speaks during a campaign stop at the Palmetto State Armory on Oct. 30, 2026, in Columbia, S.C. Graham is running about even in the polls against her opponent, South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews.

(Win McNamee / Getty Images)

“Not only is Congress not pushing back against the administration, or even innovating in policy, but its members also don’t seem especially interested in serving their constituents on the small-ball aspects of representation,” Stewart said.

“It’s hard to say members of this Congress are connecting with their constituents as they did in decades past,” he added. “We’ll see if that lack of constituency connection will have an impact on the results.”

A federal appeals court for the second time Friday denied a Trump administration request to block 20,000 ballots from California voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens — ruling that the administration had failed to show that “such extraordinary relief, during an ongoing election, is clearly required by law.”

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — ruled 2-1 that the U.S. Constitution gives the state and Congress the power to decide how elections are run, and that allowing the Trump administration to “misuse” federal statutes to “prescribe” how California must process ballots would “override the plain and manifest dictates of the Constitution itself.”

“Because Congress has not exercised the specific power granted to it under the Elections Clause to override California’s established laws for challenging ballots or removing ineligible voters, the State Legislature’s statutory scheme remains the only method to do so,” the judges found.

The panel’s majority — comprised of Trump appointee Mark J. Bennett and Biden appointee Gabriel P. Sanchez — wrote that “if the United States believes different procedures are necessary for vote-by-mail ballots, we believe it should take that suggestion to Congress, not the courts.”

They also wrote that separate federal law prescribes sweeping changes to voter lists 90 days prior to an election, especially given questions about the reliability of the Trump administration’s list of purported noncitizens.

“The suspect reliability of these lists found by the district court reflects the concern Congress sought to mitigate with the 90-day quiet period,” they wrote.

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee on the panel, dissented — arguing that his colleagues erred in denying a basic request by the Trump administration to ensure only citizens are voting.

“The federal government proposes a modest remedy — stopping California from mixing the ballots of citizens and suspected noncitizens,” Bumatay wrote. “This solution would not cancel any vote but would allow time to verify the eligibility of suspected noncitizens. The district court, and now our court, denies this reasonable request.”

This article will be updated.

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.

Dive deeper

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.

Dive deeper

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.

Dive deeper

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.

Dive deeper

The Los Angeles County Bar Assn. considers both qualified to serve.

Soon after a federal judge in Los Angeles sharply rejected a Trump administration effort to block 20,000 California ballots from voters it alleged may be noncitizens, the U.S. Justice Department announced it will appeal — leaving attorneys on both sides preparing Thursday for yet another court battle.

That was despite the lower court judge calling the request an unlawful threat to eligible voters in Tuesday’s midterm election and to free and fair American elections moving forward, and the same appellate court having already rejected the same plan days prior.

“Every day, more ballots are processed by election officials. This ongoing emergency disenfranchises American citizens through dilution,” wrote First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead prosecutor in L.A.

Early Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom swiped back at the Trump administration, writing, “A warning to Donald Trump: I’m deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts in California to protect every vote. And I just made it a FELONY to illegally seize ballots.”

With just days to go until polls close, the heated election war between California and the Trump administration is showing no signs of slowing down, despite multiple court orders rejecting the administration’s central effort to interfere in the midterms by accusing state and county officials of willfully turning a blind eye to voter fraud.

That’s in part because lawyers within the U.S. Justice Department have been unrelenting in their pursuit of such control, both through court orders and threats to state and county officials. It’s also because those same officials have refused to yield, denouncing the threats in recent letters back to the Justice Department as unconvincing and illegal.

“Be aware that we consider DOJ’s efforts to threaten California election officials with criminal sanctions for following federal and state law to be an effort to unlawfully intimidate both election officials and California voters, which can undermine voters’ faith in the election process,” Susan K. Blitch, counsel for Monterey County, wrote in one.

Several elections experts warned the administration is trying to sow confusion and suspicion around an election in which the Republican Party is poised to lose ground, in part so they can reject the outcome. But they also said the courts have consistently rebuffed the Trump administration, and will continue to do so through Nov. 3 and after — with the recent rulings in the case over the 20,000 flagged ballots a perfect example.

“The federal government lost in every way it could possibly lose. It lost on the law, and it lost on the facts, and it lost on the equities — [or] weighing the harms to the various parties,” said Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law.

Appeal, rebuke, appeal

Last week, Trump administration attorneys decided that U.S. District Judge David O. Carter was not ruling quickly enough on their emergency request for a temporary restraining order to block California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan from counting the 20,000 ballots it asserted were from “likely noncitizens” — so they appealed straight to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Monday, a three-judge panel there — including two appointees of President Trump and one of President Biden — denied the appeal for a lack of jurisdiction, because Carter hadn’t been given a chance to weigh in. However, two of the judges — Mark J. Bennett, one of the Trump appointees, and Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — also wrote separately to make clear that they would have denied the administration’s request on the merits, too, for being likely unconstitutional and in violation of federal law.

On Wednesday, Carter, an appointee of President Clinton, issued his own ruling, in which he wrote that the administration’s allegations about noncitizen voters were “not credible” and that the intervention it sought would violate a host of federal laws, sow chaos in the ongoing midterm election, likely lead to the disenfranchisement of legitimate voters and foster future political meddling in elections.

“This request violates longstanding constitutional principles mandating that states have control over their elections,” Carter wrote. “If [the Trump administration’s] last-minute request for relief were granted, either party could create chaos for their own political purposes to disrupt the election process.”

Carter wrote that never in American history “has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” and that, in bringing its suit, the Trump administration was asking the court to “believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign.”

“But California and its people are sovereign, too,” Carter wrote.

The ruling — forceful, unequivocal and based on several of the same arguments made by Bennett and Sanchez — was cheered by state officials and voting rights groups. Elections experts said it squared directly with their understanding of the law, and was appropriate in the face of the Trump administration’s unprecedented, legally baseless effort to intervene in an ongoing state-run election.

Trump administration officials did not see it that way, and weren’t taking no for an answer. Justice Department lawyers promptly filed notice of appeal back to the 9th Circuit — where the case is likely, though not guaranteed, to land before the same three-judge panel that previously rejected the administration’s demands.

War of words

On Wednesday night, Newsom appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and predicted Trump will take sweeping steps to “literally suppress the vote, to set the conditions where he will then express doubt in the electoral outcome, and suggest that it was rigged.” But he also said California is fighting back and prepared.

“Right now, I am focused on getting over 1,000 poll workers, folks out there to monitor the DOJ monitors that Trump’s gonna send to try to steal this election,” Newsom said. “We have been running tabletop exercises. We have 1,000 volunteers. We have 134 election law attorneys that we’re sending out.”

On Thursday, Essayli replied to the latter deployment, writing, “You’re going to protect every legal or illegal vote? What about California citizens whose votes are being diluted by ineligible voters. Do their constitutional rights matter.”

Trump, meanwhile, asserted with no evidence that “there are hundreds of thousands of bad ballots, bad votes, in California. Millions, in my opinion.” He said California has “very corrupt elections,” and that if it had honest ones, he “would have won it by a lot.”

The remarks were just the latest in a swirling and highly public war of words between state and federal officials.

In Carter’s courtroom Tuesday, Essayli claimed the federal government has maintained a collaborative “tone” since it first demanded the state set aside ballots, and said he was surprised at how “adversarial” state elections officials had been. But Essayli and other Justice Department officials have been engaged for weeks in an aggressive back and forth with California officials online — which is highly unusual for prosecutors actively litigating related cases.

When Newsom’s office recently wrote that “Trump’s DOJ is so desperate to invent ‘widespread voter fraud,’ it sent California counties lists of people who NEVER voted — and voters from the WRONG COUNTY. Absolute clown show!,” Essayli shot back, “Hey Fraud King,” with a crown emoji. “We’re not waiting for them to vote.”

Also unusual have been the threats Justice Department attorneys have been sending to county elections officials in California, including in a series of Oct. 23 letters in which they asserted varying numbers of “likely aliens” per county, set a 48-hour deadline for the counties to cooperate with federal authorities to prove those voters are citizens.

In one letter to Kristin Connelly, head of the Contra Costa County registrar’s office, U.S. Atty. Craig Missakian flagged 407 potential noncitizens in the county, and said he was writing “to make unmistakably clear the legal implications” of processing any ballots from those voters.

On Wednesday, Thomas L. Geiger, Contra Costa County counsel, responded with his own letter, questioning the accuracy of the noncitizen claims and saying it would be “legally unsound” for Connelly to “disregard both California and federal law” in order to comply with Missakian’s demands.

Other county attorneys hit a sharper tone in their own responses. Tony Lopresti, an attorney for Santa Clara County, wrote that his county “reserves its rights to pursue all legal remedies against DOJ for its unlawful intimidation of election officials and California voters.”

Former president faces renewed death penalty demand as he appeals life sentence for insurrection.

South Korean prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for former President Yoon Suk-yeol over his failed attempt to impose military rule.

The team led by special prosecutor Cho Eun-suk renewed the demand at an appeal hearing in Seoul on Thursday, arguing that Yoon’s actions threatened South Korea‘s democracy.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment in February after being convicted of leading an insurrection.

Prosecutors had previously sought the death penalty at Yoon’s original trial in January, but the court sentenced him to life imprisonment the following month.

At Thursday’s hearing at the Seoul High Court, a prosecutor said there was “no reason to hesitate” over imposing the death penalty, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

South Korea retains the death penalty but has not carried out an execution since 1997.

Prosecutors argued that this long pause should not prevent judges from sentencing Yoon to death.

Yoon declared martial law on December 3, 2024, deploying soldiers and police to the National Assembly, South Korea’s parliament.

Lawmakers overcame a security blockade to vote down the measure, forcing the government to withdraw it about six hours after it was announced.

The lower court found that Yoon had tried to stop parliament from functioning, detain political opponents and remain in control of the country for an extended period.

Yoon’s lawyers told reporters on Thursday that he had intended to warn an opposition-controlled parliament against what he considered attempts to obstruct his government, not to establish authoritarian rule.

Speaking at the Seoul High Court on October 27, Yoon also denied seeking to establish a long-term dictatorship, according to the Hankyoreh newspaper.

The crisis led parliament to impeach Yoon in December 2024. South Korea’s Constitutional Court, which decides whether to uphold impeachments, removed him from office in April 2025.

The appeals court plans two more hearings, including Yoon’s final statement on November 5.

On October 27, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that the PDVSA 2020 bonds and the pledge of 50.1% of the shares of CITGO Holding are valid under Venezuelan law.

The decision is Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. v. MUFG Union Bank, N.A., No. 25-2652, slip op. at 51, 60 (2d Cir. Oct. 27, 2026). This is a case that divided Venezuelan public opinion and legal circles. Much of the public debate tracked the nation’s political divide, with defenders of the bonds more commonly associated with the Maduro side and their opponents more commonly associated with the political opposition. Those who challenged the bonds argued that they were invalid because they were not approved by the National Assembly under article 150 of the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution. They were asking the courts to treat the 2020 bonds and the CITGO pledge as void from the start, so the bondholders could not enforce the notes or foreclose on the pledged CITGO shares. But the 2020 bonds did not create a debt out of nothing. They refinanced preexisting PDVSA debt. Paying what is owed should not be controversial; and the law is, or should be, what it is, no matter what political side one supports.

This case was started by a lawsuit brought in the US by PDVSA entities under the ad hoc board appointed by the interim government of Juan Guaidó, and highly promoted by Venezuelan political opponents of Maduro. The problem they faced is that PDVSA had never subjected its past debt transactions to legislative approval, whether under article 126 of the 1961 Venezuelan Constitution or article 150 of the 1999 Venezuelan Constitution. That is a fact, not a matter of opinion.

The 2015 National Assembly rejected the CITGO pledge in September 2016, but did not state that the indenture itself was a national public interest contract under article 150.

There was also no previous case holding that the contracts or indentures governing PDVSA bond issuances were national public interest contracts. The binding decisions of the Constitutional Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), as the US Court of Appeals read them, pointed in the other direction: national public interest contracts are contracts entered into by the Republic, or competent organs of the National Executive, and do not include contracts entered into by state owned companies in the Decentralized Public Administration, such as PDVSA. There were other TSJ decisions involving the Central Bank and mixed companies (in this case, allowing contracts without the National Assembly’s approval), but none decided that a PDVSA bond issuance or the CITGO pledge was a national public interest contract. 

But the lawyers hired by the interim government of Juan Guaidó argued that these bonds were different because they were secured by 50.1% of the shares of CITGO Holding, an asset of obvious importance to Venezuela. That was the novel step in the argument. There were older cases and legal writings discussing article 150 and public interest contracts, but no preexisting judicial authority had held that a PDVSA debt transaction, or a pledge of CITGO, became a national public interest contract requiring National Assembly approval. The older authorities that PDVSA invoked did not decide that proposition. What was new was not article 150 itself. It was the attempt to apply article 150 to this transaction.

The National Assembly elected in 2015 categorically rejected the CITGO pledge in a September 27, 2016 acuerdo. But that did not state that the indenture itself was a national public interest contract under article 150. That specific conclusion came in October 2019, after the transaction had closed and the controversy had fully developed, when the National Assembly stated that the 2020 Bond indenture violated article 150 because it was a national public interest contract executed with foreign companies without parliamentary authorization. The PDVSA plaintiffs, acting through the ad hoc board recognized in the United States, then submitted expert legal opinions advancing that same position.

There was no preexisting judicial holding applying article 150 to a PDVSA bond issuance or to the CITGO pledge. PDVSA’s historical practice ran the other way, and the courts ultimately rejected that application of article 150 of the Venezuelan Constitution.

The case has been litigated since 2019. The district court in New York initially ruled for the creditors under New York law. After the New York Court of Appeals held in 2024 that Venezuelan law governs the validity of the securities, the Second Circuit vacated that judgment and remanded. On remand, the district court considered additional expert legal submissions and again held that the bonds and collateral were valid, this time under Venezuelan law. The Second Circuit affirmed yesterday.

PDVSA had another argument: even if article 150 did not itself invalidate the bonds, it argued that US courts had to give effect to the National Assembly resolutions under the act of state doctrine, a rule that generally prevents US courts from questioning official sovereign acts carried out by a foreign government within its own territory. The court rejected that argument as well. Even assuming that the resolutions were sovereign acts intended to invalidate the transaction, the relevant transaction and property were outside Venezuela. The bonds, the depository arrangements and the collateral were centered abroad, particularly in New York. The court therefore held that the act of state doctrine did not require a US court to give the resolutions the extraterritorial effect PDVSA sought.

That record also matters when lawyers involved in the case later comment publicly on it. A novel litigation theory should not be described as if it had been settled Venezuelan law all along. It was not. There was no preexisting judicial holding applying article 150 to a PDVSA bond issuance or to the CITGO pledge. PDVSA’s historical practice ran the other way, and the courts ultimately rejected that application of article 150 of the Venezuelan Constitution. That history is relevant to credibility when lawyers or experts later present advocacy developed in litigation as a neutral account of what Venezuelan law clearly required from the beginning. Lawyers who participated in the case or publicly advocated its legal theory should disclose that context when commenting on it. Readers can then decide what weight to give their views.

Creditors may continue trying to collect the CITGO collateral. Whether and when they can actually reach it is a different question.

What does all of this mean in practical terms? It does not mean that the bondholders own CITGO today or can seize it tomorrow. It means that PDVSA lost its central defense to the 2020 bonds and the CITGO pledge. PDVSA cannot avoid those obligations by arguing that the Venezuelan Constitution required prior approval from the National Assembly. The bonds and the collateral are legally valid. The creditors may therefore continue trying to collect. Whether and when they can actually reach the CITGO collateral is a different question involving enforcement proceedings, US sanctions administered by OFAC and the separate Delaware proceedings involving other creditors of Venezuela.

The PDVSA entities may now ask the US Court of Appeals to rehear the case or seek rehearing by the full court, sitting en banc. They may also petition the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of certiorari. That would be a request for discretionary review, not another appeal as of right. If the judgment stands, the case will return to the district court and the creditors can continue pursuing their contract and enforcement claims. OFAC may still control whether and when a transfer or sale involving the CITGO collateral can occur, and the separate Delaware creditor proceedings remain important.

The political argument over the PDVSA 2020 bonds may continue, but the legal argument is now much narrower. After seven years of litigation, the district court and the court of appeals, applying Venezuelan law, have concluded that the bonds and the collateral are valid. Politics may still affect when creditors get paid. It no longer supplies a persuasive legal basis for saying that the debt or the pledge never validly existed.

A federal appeals court Monday denied an emergency request from the U.S. Justice Department to step in and block California election officials from counting about 20,000 ballots from voters whose citizenship the Trump administration has questioned.

The three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — composed of two judges appointed by President Trump and one by President Biden — ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over the request, given that a lower district court has not yet made a ruling on it.

But two of the three judges also wrote separately to make clear they also would have denied the Trump administration’s request on other grounds, if they did have jurisdiction.

In an unsigned order — joined by Judge Mark J. Bennett, one of the Trump appointees, and Judge Gabriel P. Sanchez, the Biden appointee — the court granted a request from Los Angeles County to dismiss the appeal, writing that the Trump administration “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” its request for a temporary restraining order barring the ballots from being counted before filing its unusual appeal to the appellate panel.

The court found that the “emergency” the Trump administration asserted was in part a “self-constructed one” and that delays in the district court were partly attributable to its “own delay in filing suit, in realizing that existing California state law governs the issuance and processing of ballots, in recognizing that California has millions of registered voters and processes ballots on a schedule aligned with that scale, and in communicating to the court its desired relief.”

Both Bennett and Sanchez also each wrote a concurring opinion — in which they made clear that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request even if they did have jurisdiction, too.

Sanchez wrote that federal law would bar the court from issuing such a demand on state elections officials so close to an election.

“The United States seeks to have a federal court dictate to California the manner in which it must administer its own electoral process by segregating mail-in ballots and undertaking a citizenship verification process the State has never done before,” Sanchez wrote. “The proposed injunction would transform California’s election rules for an election that is already underway and would cause widespread confusion among voters and election officials, divert election administration resources, and ‘usher in electoral chaos.’”

Bennett wrote that he would have denied the Trump administration’s emergency request for several reasons beyond jurisdiction, including that it would be likely unconstitutional under the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which he wrote “confers broad authority only on Congress and the States, not the Executive,” and Congress has not acted to say that California’s existing laws for ensuring only U.S. citizens vote are problematic.

“Thus, under the Elections Clause, the legislature’s statutory scheme remains as the only method to do so,” Bennett wrote.

Bennett wrote that there are existing California laws to deal with the harm the Trump administration claims it is suffering, but that granting its request to intervene could “result in immense hardship” to the state “and harm the public by risking the disenfranchisement of eligible voters and putting the entire tabulation process in jeopardy.”

Bennett wrote that the Trump administration “offered no workable plan of any kind as to how the remedy it seeks could be accomplished in practice without potential catastrophic consequences to California’s ongoing election.”

Judge Patrick J. Bumatay, the other Trump appointee, dissented — arguing the Trump administration was well within its legal rights to intervene, and the appellate court did have jurisdiction to grant its request and bar the state “from accepting and processing ballots likely cast by aliens until their citizenship could be verified.”

“The question — does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote. “Simply, the federal government has a sovereign interest in safeguarding federal elections and ensuring that the votes of noncitizens do not undermine our electoral results.”

The ruling clears the way for the lower court to proceed with a hearing scheduled Tuesday afternoon before U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in Los Angeles.

Carter, an appointee of President Clinton, previously rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to obtain California’s full voter rolls, calling that demand unlawful and a threat to democracy in January. Other federal judges made similar rulings in dozens of states across the country.

The question at issue Tuesday — and hashed over by the appellate court during oral arguments Sunday — is whether the courts should bar the state, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan from processing and tabulating the flagged ballots until they can provide to the Trump administration proof that those individuals are citizens.

The Trump administration has argued in court filings that the federal government is suffering irreparable harm each day such counting is allowed to continue, as once California ballots are removed from their mail envelopes or cast in person, there is “no way to associate the voter with the ballot” or resegregate those ballots from others.

More than 3 million ballots have already been cast in the upcoming Nov. 3 midterm elections statewide, and more than 500,000 have already been cast in L.A. County.

Attorneys for California, Weber and Logan have argued in court filings that the administration’s demands to segregate 20,000 ballots and vet those voters for citizenship with just days to go before the election are impossible to comply with and would cause catastrophic disruptions if elections officials across the state were forced to try.

They have also said the demands are clearly unconstitutional, illegal under state and federal law, and based on federal immigration and third-party data sets that have been shown to be deeply flawed, inaccurate and inclusive of legitimate voters.

While the appellate court’s formal ruling Monday adhered closely to the technical issue of jurisdiction, its conversation Sunday did not — with both Bennett and Sanchez expressing substantial doubts about the lawfulness of the Trump administration’s request, just as they did in their separate concurrences.

Bennett grilled Matthew Donnelly, the attorney for the Justice Department, on how the executive branch’s demands squared with the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly gives states the power to set laws regarding the time, place and manner of elections and Congress — not the executive branch — oversight over those laws.

Bennett said that while the Trump administration is “unhappy” with how California law ensures voters are citizens — namely by requiring that they attest to their citizenship upon registration — the state has the right to determine its election laws under the Elections Clause of the Constitution, and Congress has not challenged its process.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law the California Legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett said. “How can we do that?”

Bennett and Sanchez both questioned how the appellate court could step in and adjudicate whether to grant the Trump administration’s request to intervene in the state’s election when it is not a fact-finding body, and the district court was never given a chance to develop a record of facts — including around the dueling and contradicting claims about the origins and reliability of the federal government’s list of “likely” noncitizen voters and the state’s claims that an order forcing them to segregate out the votes at this late stage in the election would cause catastrophic harm to the election process.

Carter is sure to pick those issues back up on Tuesday.

JACKSON, Miss. — Portions of a Mississippi ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices in public schools can go into effect after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a lower court’s ruling that blocked sections of the law from being enforced.

The parts of the law in question prevent public schools from requiring diversity training and maintaining DEI-related programs, courses and offices. It also bans public schools from discussing a list of “divisive concepts” related to race, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity and national origin. Public schools that violate the law could lose state funding.

The ban passed in April 2025 and is being challenged by a group of educators, students, parents and activists who say the law violates their 1st and 14th Amendment rights.

The plaintiffs have several weeks to file a petition for rehearing with the 5th Circuit. The law would take effect seven days after the petition deadline passes or if a petition is denied, according to McKenna Raney, an attorney representing the plaintiffs.

The 5th Circuit also ordered that the case be reassigned to a different district court judge after U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate issued a “botch job” temporary restraining order that contained artificial intelligence hallucinations, according to the Thursday ruling. The TRO predates Wingate’s August 2025 preliminary injunction, which the 5th Circuit overturned.

Additionally, the ruling provides clarity on the scope of the law, which opponents have criticized as overly vague.

The law does not apply to scholarly activities, student activities and groups or creative engagements, according to the 5th Circuit. The court also said concerns raised by the plaintiffs that the law would ban discussions of civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th Amendment, Juneteenth and “Of Mice and Men” are incorrect.

“It is heartening to know that at the very least these specific iterations of classroom discussions that have been happening for years in Mississippi are exempted and they can continue unimpeded,” said Raney, an LGBTQ Justice Project staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. However, Raney said the types of discussions allowed under the law are still “murky.”

Bates writes for the Associated Press.

It was less than a month before the Nov. 3 election when Los Angeles city attorney front-runner Marissa Roy realized she’d missed her lucky manicure.

A deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice, she had scarcely slept since her team clinched its historic $17-billion settlement with Meta in August. She’d been canvassing hundreds of voters and sounding out scores of deputy city attorneys in her bid to transform the troubled office where she’d launched her career in 2017 into the “largest public interest law firm” in L.A.

Between filming TikTok spots and prepping for formal debates, Roy has been fine-tuning her plans to avenge exploited tenants and claw back stolen wages, tame runaway civil liability, protect victims of child abuse and domestic violence, and join other elected attorneys in lawsuits against the Trump administration.

Nails didn’t make the cut.

“There’s just been too much to do,” Roy said of the chrome gel ritual she inaugurated as a volunteer for Eunisses Hernandez in 2022.

Marissa Roy outside L.A. City Hall. “I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” she said of her campaign.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Seen one way, Roy’s talismanic manicure is an object lesson for her fiercest critics: all flash and no substance, evidence the 34-year-old lacks the “gravitas” to be among the state’s most powerful elected lawyers.

But like the iridescent glitter in her campaign-matched chrome polish, the meaning shifts with the viewer’s perspective.

To supporters on the city’s restive left and the clique of California city attorneys eager to add Roy to their group chat, it’s a winking show of solidarity burnished through years of knocking on doors for fellow up-and-coming progressives. It was metallic blue for Hernandez, silver for Ysabel Jurado and ultraviolet for her own historic primary upset in June. Her backers see fierce loyalty reflected in the polish, a ritual she started while hunting salon wage thieves to sue.

“I wanted the slogan ‘let’s sue it’ — that was violently nixed,” Roy said of her campaign.

With her Democratic Socialists of America sass, bright amethyst blazers and Bollywood needle drops on Instagram, the lifelong Angeleno cuts a stark contrast to her rival, Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, 58, who leapfrogged to a second-place finish in the primaries amid a stoic, law-and-order campaign that sometimes slipped into Spencer Pratt-style dystopian imagery.

McKinney’s boosters point to his extraordinary biography — from penniless orphan to director of special prosecutions in the country’s largest district attorney’s office — and celebrated courtroom prowess as evidence he is better suited to handle the 120,000 violations referred to the city attorney for potential charges every year.

“John has the experience, stature, reputation, and gravitas to do the job and will be both effective and respected,” said former Los Angeles City Atty. Burt Pines. “I do not have the same confidence in her.”

Campaign materials for the Los Angeles city attorney candidate at a canvassing event in Silverlake.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

Roy’s allies counter that prosecuting misdemeanors is only a third of the city attorney’s job — and typically the less complex part. Whereas McKinney has never worked a civil case, Roy has managed multicity litigation and shares the credit for legal victories no attorney could secure alone. In the Meta case, Roy and her team had argued that the social media giant had intentionally designed its products to hook young children and repeatedly misled the public about known risks.

“She was one of the original four team members in California that stayed up until 2 a.m. filing the [Meta] complaint,” said California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. “She helped develop our legal strategy, particularly our deception theory, which was our core theory of legal liability for the case.”

Similarly, while McKinney’s camp paints a lawman of singular personal ability, Roy supporters describe her as brilliant, driven, and eager to lift the best and brightest around her.

“She is tenacious and works around the clock,” said San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu.

She’s also infamously bubbly: When a canvasser door-knocked 9th Circuit Judge Richard Paez, for whom Roy had clerked, he reportedly asked the volunteer to give her a hug.

“She has a natural enthusiasm about her that is infectious,” said Mark Ramos, chair of Los Angeles County Democratic Party. “She’s [always] shown up, and showing up matters.”

Which matters more — individual virtue or collaborative ingenuity — now in effect divides the race for the most abstruse job in local politics: Four of L.A’s former city attorneys have endorsed McKinney, while California’s current top elected lawyers have largely lined up behind Roy.

A head-to-head match with McKinney was not what Roy envisioned last year when she launched her campaign to unseat the incumbent city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. After charming L.A.’s major power brokers, she had hoped to win the primary outright and avoid a runoff so she could focus exclusively on the Meta trial in August.

“I had been planning for things to end in June,” she said.

Feldstein Soto was bogged down by scandal and soaring civil liability costs for the city. She also faced criticism for ducking challenges to President Trump’s policies, including the deployment of military troops to Los Angeles last year, a fight the city joined but did not lead.

By early spring, Roy had racked up endorsements from the state’s legal elites and leftist kingmaker Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). She earned the imprimatur of the city’s powerful Democratic clubs and its influential labor unions, while enjoying widespread support from a democratic socialist base.

Marissa Roy, left, candidate for Los Angeles city attorney, and Alyssa Acevedo, with Service Employees International Union canvass in Silverlake.

(Gary Coronado / For The Times)

L.A. voters want “the transformational leadership that they’re seeing in [New York Mayor Zohran] Mamdani, and also in Mayor [Daniel] Lurie in San Francisco,” said L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, a longtime friend of Roy’s and among her earliest endorsers. “Angelenos are increasingly impatient in wanting to see that change come to their city, too.”

Then, in April, Feldstein Soto slipped from unpopular to politically radioactive after hackers stole thousands of LAPD files from her office. That inspired a late-breaking police union endorsement and a surge of corporate cash for McKinney, boosting him to a second-place finish and knocking out Feldstein Soto in a historic rout.

McKinney touts the city attorney’s prosecutor role as a means to stem quality-of-life crimes and curb homelessness. Roy has promised to keep more Angelenos housed and protect their livelihoods through “affirmative litigation” — suits brought against slumlords and exploitative corporations under the state’s Unfair Competition Law.

“When you file these suits, you have complete discretion,” said Pines, the former city attorney who successfully lobbied the state to extend Los Angeles that power in 1977 and watched in dismay as Feldstein Soto left it to whither.

In recent years, affirmative litigation has become an essential tool for defending against punitive federal policy and recovering public funds, Pines and others said.

Seeing the San Francisco city attorney’s office sue to overturn California’s ban on gay marriage — a law that would have stymied her gay younger brother — inspired Roy to give up her elementary school dream of decoding ancient texts to pursue the law.

“Childhood Marissa spent recesses in the library buried in books about ancient Egypt,” Roy said. “It was San Francisco suing — that was when I began to become aware of the power of lawyers.”

Unlike her opponent, Roy grew up comfortably in Monrovia, largely shielded from the sacrifices her family made to afford her an elite education. The daughter of an Indian immigrant mother and a white American father, she graduated from Flintridge Prep and attended University of Southern California on scholarship.

While studying law at Yale, she interned in the affirmative litigation department in the San Francisco city attorney’s office — a program Chiu lauded as “an essential training ground for the next generation of government lawyers” in a recent law review article.

Roy and her supporters say those early experiences cemented her commitment to teamwork, which is central to the less glamorous, more costly side of the city attorney’s job: serving as general counsel for myriad city agencies and legal advisor to City Hall.

“There’s absolutely more collaboration and it’s more significant given the things we’re up against,” said San Diego City Atty. Heather Ferbert, a close ally of Roy’s.

John McKinney, a Los Angeles County prosecutor running against Marissa Roy to become L.A. city attorney, speaks during a news conference on May 5, 2026.

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Ferbert and others pointed to a surge in lawsuits against municipalities over everything from sidewalk trip-and-falls to police misconduct — cases that can lead to seven- or eight-figure payouts.

“If it’s not extremely unusual, it doesn’t make it to the city attorney’s desk,” said Oakland City Atty. Ryan Richardson, who endorsed Roy.

As a deputy city attorney, Roy spearheaded a trio of major wage-theft suits just a month after she was admitted to the bar. Independent expenditure groups supporting McKinney spent more than $350,000 trying to strip her of that title because she was paid by a nonprofit — an common arrangement employed by government law offices across the U.S. — while the city attorney’s office itself gave her permission to use it, and lists her as such in its court filings.

McKinney has since sought to paint Roy as the second coming of George Gascón, the polarizing district attorney who was drubbed in 2024 — a move that assumes most voters are still thinking about Gascón, or are likely to see the graying “godfather of progressive prosecutors” in a raven-haired deputy attorney general.

“The only way you disprove that is by putting your head down and doing the work 10 times harder,” Roy said. “Voters are smarter than that. People in the coalition see these tactics and are tired of them too.”

President Trump illegally usurped Gov. Gavin Newsom’s command of the California National Guard by ordering a surge troops deployed into Los Angeles and across the state amid protests against the White House’s mass deportation program last year, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday.

The two-one decision split the president’s own appointees to the court, with Judge Eric D. Miller of Seattle siding with Judge Jennifer Sung of Portland, a Biden pick, and Judge Mark J.Bennett of Honolulu dissenting.

“The order exceeded the President’s statutory authority and encroached on Congress’s calling forth power, in violation of the constitutional separation of powers,” Sung wrote for the majority, calling Trump’s order “unconstitutional.”

The decision also appeared to foreclose what California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called “the Trump Administration’s transparent attempt” to preserve its right to call up California troops again under the same obscure statute — a novel legal maneuver administration lawyers said let the president seize command without invoking the far stronger Insurrection Act.

The 9th Circuit trio was among the first to weigh the law last June, after Trump federalized 4,000 National Guard soldiers in response to unrest over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.

California sued. US District Judge Charles R. Breyer quickly ruled to block the deployment. But Sung, Bennett and Miller stayed his order, finding that the California deployment could go forward under an obscure and virtually untested subsection of the law.

That decision set a “great level of deference” as the standard of review for deployments, meaning courts had very little power to test the president’s rationale for sending troops into American streets.

At the time, the decision represented one of the president’s most sweeping second-term victories: a plug-and-play legal mechanism to deploy soldiers against civilians in cities across the country.

In Portland that fall, another 9th Circuit panel stayed U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut’s order to stand down troops, using the first trio’s precedent.

The Portland decision — based in part on data the Department of Justice later admitted was false — prompted an extraordinary filing by Judge Jay Bybee, who all but pleaded with the court to rehear the case and interpret the law differently.

“There is no greater threat to the sovereignty of the states than an assertion of federal control over their domestic affairs,” Bybee wrote.

The issue quickly found its way to the Supreme Court, after a 7th Circuit panel found the president had provided “insufficient evidence” for deployment even under the 9th Circuit’s deference standard.

On Dec. 23, the Justices adopted a celebrated Georgetown scholar’s academic reading of the statute, saying it only allowed the president to commandeer national guard troops if the situation had already outmatched the standing army.

Federalized troops were ordered to leave Los Angeles in December.

On Friday, the 9th Circuit held that Trump’s claim that Los Angeles was in the grips of a rebellion last June “did not reflect a colorable assessment within a range of honest judgment.”

Using “the plain text of the statute,” and “dictionary definitions of the disputed term,” the majority found the president had not furnished evidence of a “a violent, armed, organized, open and avowed uprising against the government as a whole” — nor anything close to it.

Instead, Justice Department lawyers had relied on subsidiary definitions of “rebellion” that the 9th Circuit warned would allow the president to call up troops to quell almost any resistance, including peaceful protests.

“Resistance that is not violent, armed, organized, and against the government as a whole generally does not require a military response,” Sung wrote.

“Because Defendants have failed to identify a source of authority that would allow the military to legally execute the laws in California, they have not carried their burden to show that the President had the authority to federalize California’s National Guard,” Sung wrote.

Federal authorities this week teased a “separate batch” of 17,000 potential noncitizen voters in their federal court challenge to California’s handling of alleged voter fraud.

In response, Los Angeles County officials questioned the accuracy of the government’s earlier list of 20,000 alleged noncitizen voters — saying a preliminary review of a subset of those voters found evidence that nearly 40% were born in the U.S.

The claims came in filings shedding new light on the unprecedented Homeland Security inquiry into California’s voter rolls just weeks before the Nov. 3 election.

On Monday, Nicolas Bartell, a Homeland Security official, wrote in a sworn affidavit that — in addition to developing the disputed list of 20,000 “likely noncitizen” voters at the heart of the litigation — his agency has also developed a “separate batch of more than 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens.”

“Our review is ongoing as USCIS receives records on a rolling basis before the election date,” wrote Bartell, the associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

On Tuesday, Monica Flores, a top official in the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, wrote in an affidavit that staff members had reviewed a sample of 200 registrations from the list of 20,000 voters whom the Justice Department alleged last week were “likely noncitizens.” The office found that more than half — 112 — had been canceled or were inactive, meaning no ballot was sent to those voters.

In instances where those voters’ birthplace was “meaningfully reported, 38.9% indicate that they were born in the United States, which is strong evidence of citizenship,” Flores wrote, while 71.2% showed no record of ever voting.

Flores wrote that similarly vetting the citizenship of thousands of additional voters before the election would not only be “administratively impossible and take key personnel away from their critical election duties,” but would also “risk disenfranchising voters who are validly registered.”

Also Tuesday, Rachel Evans, an attorney in the California secretary of state’s office, wrote in an affidavit that the office since August has received and been complying with grand jury subpoenas for the detailed voter records of about 300 people.

Evans’ acknowledgment came a day after federal prosecutors charged 28 people across California with federal election-related crimes, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements in a naturalization application, and suggests federal prosecutors are pursuing criminal cases against hundreds more.

Taken together, the filings indicate that the legal battle between the Trump administration and California over alleged fraudulent voting is only just gearing up — with no end in sight before Nov. 3 — as is the political sparring over the issue.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, posted to X on Tuesday that Flores’ acknowledgment that her office could not possibly vet voters’ citizenship before the election was a “massive concession,” proving the federal government’s case.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said that “any credible allegation of voter fraud should be taken seriously and investigated,” but that federal officials charging just 28 people in a state with 23 million voters showed they have no evidence of widespread fraud.

“Yes, non-citizen voter registration and voting does happen in isolated instances — in California and the rest of the country alike — but it is so rare that the Trump admin is parading around town about .0001% of California voters,” Newsom’s office wrote on X.

The broader case

On Monday, Justice Department lawyers filed a request for an emergency restraining order requiring state election officials to segregate any ballots from the 20,000 voters flagged on the initial Homeland Security list until their citizenship is proved. They argued the state is violating the law — and harming the federal government — by refusing to do so.

State attorneys argued Tuesday that the federal government has no authority over California elections and seeks to violate federal law precluding voter roll purges in the 90 days before an election.

State officials wrote that the Justice Department appeared to have “individualized evidence” of noncitizenship for the 28 people it had charged, and that nothing was preventing it from working through existing “statutory channels” to block those individuals’ ballots. But they argued that it does not have evidence to back its claims against all 20,000 voters whose ballots it is seeking to sequester.

Those contentions — and Bartell’s claim of a second list of 17,000 potential noncitizen voters — only add to an already heated debate about the scope of the inquiry and its legitimacy.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged in a letter to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber that there “may be as many as 190,832 noncitizens registered to vote in California,” and demanded that the state work with federal authorities to investigate. The state asked that Homeland Security first provide more information, including about its methodology for identifying that figure.

Last week, acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote follow-up letters to Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County registrar’s office, asserting that 20,000 “likely noncitizens” were on state rolls, and again demanding state cooperation within 48 hours to remove them. Weber balked, arguing that federal law precludes systematic roll purges within 90 days of an election to protect eligible voters.

Weber and other state officials also questioned the drop from 190,000 to 20,000, and the reliability of the federal government’s underlying data and methodology. “What happened to the 170,000? You just got those wrong?” California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta asked.

On Monday, McCotter said the 190,000 figure was “the ceiling,” inclusive of cases that federal authorities had high, medium and low confidence in, while the 20,000 figure was “the floor,” inclusive of only high confidence cases.

Potential flaws in the list have been a major point of contention among California officials, who have pointed to substantial inaccuracies in lists elsewhere, including in Nevada, where a state review found that the 185 voters whose citizenship was questioned by the Trump administration were all citizens.

Now, it appears the federal government’s disputed list of 20,000 voters won’t be the last in California.

How voters were identified

In court filings, federal officials described purchasing California voter registration information before USCIS and Homeland Security Investigations agents worked to identify any voters who are not citizens. They said that they did so in part by comparing the state data with “third party commercial data” sets and law enforcement data sets, and that they further vetted their list by culling dead people.

Essayli pointed to those descriptions to dispel arguments that federal authorities have not provided their methodology for identifying potential noncitizens on voter rolls. He said that the federal process was robust and trustworthy and that federal authorities had compiled “overwhelming evidence of tens of thousands of ineligible voters on the state’s rolls.”

Independent election experts saw it differently.

“They admitted to using some of the same tools amateur election conspiracy theorists use, like unidentified third party software, commercial lists, and public versions of [the state’s] voter roll,” Gowri Ramachandran, an election administration expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. “These amateur data matching efforts don’t get any better merely because the Department of Justice relies on them.”

“If DOJ could prove many more cases, we would have heard about it,” Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA School of Law, wrote in a blog post. “They’ve been on an aggressive hunt nationally for such fraud. It’s not surprising they’ve found little because it is a small problem.”

MIAMI — Former Cuban President Raúl Castro is facing more charges in Florida related to the 1996 downing of civilian planes flown by Miami-based exiles after the U.S. government indicted the former leader earlier this year.

Florida Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier on Monday accused Castro, 95, of directing spies to infiltrate the exile group Brothers to the Rescue and ordering the attack on their planes. The state charge of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder is based largely on a federal indictment announced in May that included charges of murder and destruction of an airplane.

It remains unclear whether Castro will ever step foot in a U.S. courtroom. Uthmeier said the arrest warrant will restrict Castro’s ability leave the island nation and prevent him from traveling to any place with an extradition agreement with the U.S.

“I’m not ignorant of the fact that Raúl Castro is an older man who’s probably not looking to march himself into Miami,” Uthmeier said. “I think others would get him before the court of law would, but at the end of the day, we stand ready to prosecute the case.”

According to the state complaint, Castro was the Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and First Vice President of Cuba when he gave the final authorization to shoot down the planes. Cuban Directorate of Intelligence agents operating as part of the Wasp Network in the Miami area and the Florida Keys infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue and reported flight plans, investigator said.

On Feb. 24, 1996, three unarmed Cessna aircraft departed Opa-Locka Airport in Miami-Dade County. Well outside Cuba’s territorial waters, Cuban MiGs destroyed two of the civilian planes with air-to-air missiles, killing the four occupants, the complaint said. Both aircraft were traveling away from Cuba and received no warning despite contact with Havana air traffic control, U.S. officials said.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called the federal indictment earlier this year a political stunt that sought only to “justify the folly of a military aggression against Cuba.” He accused the U.S. of lying and manipulating events surrounding the shootdown.

“Our historic federal indictment laid the groundwork, and James and his team have now taken the important step of bringing charges under Florida law,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones said at a news conference.

Castro took over as president from his ailing older brother Fidel Castro in 2006 before handing power to a trusted loyalist, Díaz-Canel, in 2018.

While he retired in 2021 as head of the Cuban Communist Party, he is widely believed to wield power behind the scenes, underscored by the prominence of his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro.

Meanwhile, President Trump has been threatening military action in Cuba ever since U.S. forces captured former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the Cuban government’s longtime patron.

After ousting the Venezuelan leader earlier this year, the White House ordered a blockade that choked off fuel shipments to Cuba, leading to severe blackouts, food shortages and an economic collapse across the island.

Fischer writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 17, 2026 8:31 AM PT

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s abrupt decision to waive sanctions on Russia days before they were to take effect drew outrage Saturday from members of Congress, which had overwhelmingly passed the legislation in a bipartisan display of American support for Ukraine in the war with Russia.

Lawmakers from both parties blasted the executive order late Friday, the latest in a series of steps that the Republican president has taken drawing the United States closer to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Trump recently announced a diesel deal with Putin to import Russian energy in a long-shot effort to curb high gas prices in the U.S. that are roiling the midterm elections on Nov. 3.

“Beyond irresponsible,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), on social media, hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed hope that the sanctions that were supposed to take effect Sunday targeting Russian’s economy could be revived.

“What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?” Tillis said. “It’s unconscionable that this administration is capitulating to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine.”

Tillis said that if Trump wants to actually bring down energy prices, he should resolve the Iran war, which is largely blamed for the spike at the pump, and “not by doing a solid for Vladimir Putin.”

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said, “Lindsey would be appalled,” referring to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who worked endlessly on the bill before he died this summer. The bill is known as the Lindsey Graham Russian Sanctions Act.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Trump is “thumbing his nose” at Congress and “enabling Vladimir Putin to continue his war of aggression.” She urged her colleagues to take action to reverse course.

Trump’s actions come as Ukraine is bracing for a stark winter confronting Russia’s ongoing attacks on its energy infrastructure to heat homes and keep the lights on. Zelensky, who has endured a rocky relationship with Trump but stayed close to the U.S. lawmakers, urged supporters to speak out on behalf of the sanctions.

The next steps are highly uncertain with the House and Senate on recess until after election day. Trump said he was waiving the sanctions indefinitely, citing national security concerns. It is unlikely Congress would be in a position to take any action to challenge Trump’s moves until lawmakers return to Washington.

It took almost a year for Graham to persuade Trump to agree to the Russian sanctions package. It was designed to impose steep tariffs on countries that import large amounts of Russian oil and energy products and was promoted as way to halt the flow of funds fueling Putin’s four-year war against Ukraine.

But even as Zelensky had watched from the visitor gallery as the Senate advanced the package after Graham’s death, skeptics in Congress warned Trump would be unlikely to follow the bill once he had signed it into law a month ago.

Last week, a bipartisan group of senators urged the Trump administration to more quickly clamp down on Russia, particularly the “shadow fleet” of tankers that Moscow is using to transport oil and bypass America’s sanctions. The senators noted that the bulk of the new law’s provisions were to be effective Sunday.

Instead, Trump soon announced the diesel deal with Putin, saying that Russia had agreed to supply tons of fuel to the U.S., where gas prices have skyrocketed in some areas and voters saying affordability issues are a top concern.

Outraged lawmakers have pledged to stop the Trump-Putin deal.

New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who had led opposition to the Graham bill — warning that Trump would flout the law — introduced legislation Friday that would block Trump’s diesel deal with Putin.

“At a time when the United States should be increasing pressure on the Kremlin, Donald Trump is cozying up to Putin and striking self-enriching deals instead of standing with Ukraine,” Meeks said in a statement.

He called the deal “corrupt” and said it “goes against everything the United States stands for.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press writers Kevin Freking and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

US president’s executive order comes two days before sanctions deadline and a week after diesel deal with Putin.

US President Donald Trump has put on hold a sweeping package of sanctions on Russia that he signed into law last month, telling Congress the pause is in the national interest.

Trump signed an executive order on Friday, two days before a deadline in the law that would put the sanctions into effect.

The law – named after Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator who died unexpectedly in July after returning from Ukraine – had passed in the House of Representatives and the Senate by large margins. The bipartisan legislation was drafted by Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal.

It sought to starve Moscow of money for the war by sanctioning Russian officials, banks and a shadow fleet of tankers carrying its energy.

It also directed Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on the five biggest importers of Russian oil or gas, with an exception for countries that import less than 15 percent of Russia’s natural gas exports and are taking steps to cut them.

Diesel deal and criticism

The decision to suspend the sanctions comes a week after Trump said the US had signed a deal to buy diesel from Russia to try to lower global fuel prices.

Both Republicans and Democrats, criticising the deal, said it would help Russia’s war effort without affecting fuel prices.

Democratic Representative Don Beyer said he and others had “warned” that Trump might do this, in reference to Trump’s deal with Moscow.

Beyer called on Congress to “fix this flawed law to stop Trump from capitulating to Putin and ensure that it truly supports Ukraine”.

Trump has also increasingly criticised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lately for failing to reach a deal with Russia.

As Republicans try to keep control of Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, an AP-NORC poll released on October 1 found Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran war and blame him for higher prices among several other domestic policy issues.

Merida, May 10^th 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – Venezuela’s new Labour Law for Workers (Lottt) came into effect this week, guaranteeing shorter working hours, longer maternity leave and pensions for all Venezuelans.

Described by the Venezuelan government as the “most advanced labour law in the world”, the Lottt reduces the working week from 44 hours to 40, and requires that employers provide two consecutive days a week off.

When the law came into effect on Tuesday, labour minister Maria Iglesias stated that the new working hours are part of the process towards a “just distribution of wealth”.

The following day, Carabobo state labour affairs committee president Jose Joaquin Vargas hailed the law as an important part of the transition from “capitalism to socialism”, while last week vice president of the National Federation of Public Sector Workers Franklin Rondon described it as “historic”.

“We are in a historic moment, in 14 years the achievements we have obtained for workers are numerous; we have achieved much more than in the last forty years,” Rondon told VTV on 5 May.

Vargas also urged workers to ensure their employers and unions act in accordance with the Lottt.

For the next six weeks, the government will be inspecting workplaces to ensure employers adhere to the new requirements. Although employers were informed earlier in the year that they would need to make any necessary changes prior to 7 May, on Tuesday Iglesias stated that inspections over the next six weeks will be “corrective in nature”. The minister warned that penalties will be imposed on employers who fail to adhere to the Lottt after 15 June.

However, workers are already reporting breaches of the new laws. In Miranda state, employees of processed meat manufacturer Industrias Alimenticias de Corralito (Inacor) have denounced their employer. A worker spokesperson, Peggy Serrano, alleged that management made a series of surprise changes to the timetable that could result in employees being forced to work overtime.

A Decade in the Making

Along with establishing new working hours, the Lottt prohibits unfair dismissal, outsourcing, guarantees the right to work for both women and people with disabilities and increases maternity leave.

Under the Lottt, Venezuela now has the world’s third longest maternity leave. Mothers are entitled to six weeks pre-natal leave, and twenty post-natal. Fathers are also entitled to two weeks paternal leave. Under the law, the same conditions apply to parents who adopt a child under three years of age.

All workers are also now entitled to retirement pensions, including full time mothers and the self employed.

The Lottt is the result of nearly a decade of discussions in both the national assembly and the labour movement.

When he approved the law last April, former president Hugo Chavez stated that, “In more than 200 years of republican history I am absolutely positive that there has never been a work law….that has been debated so much as this one.”

The Trump administration on Thursday sued California over its handling of voter fraud claims, asking a federal court to immediately bar the state from counting ballots from about 20,000 voters statewide — many in Los Angeles County — whom the administration alleges are “likely noncitizens.”

The lawsuit is highly unusual, particularly given that California voters have already begun voting in the Nov. 3 midterms via mail ballots, experts said.

It’s also highly inappropriate and based on questionable federal data that have proved wildly inaccurate in other states, state officials said.

“This is a sad, desperate attempt by Trump to use his politicized Justice Department to try to suppress California voters just three weeks before Election Day,” Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote on X. “Courts have made clear the federal government has no role in running state elections. We will defend free and fair elections in the Golden State and call out every authoritarian attempt to undermine our democracy.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, in his own statement, defended the lawsuit.

“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” he said. “If found responsible in a court of law, the State of California will have seriously undermined confidence in our electoral system and violated laws that protect our nation’s representative system of government.”

The lawsuit states that “as part of an investigation into unlawful voting,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted a “multiagency and multilevel review” of state voter and federal citizenship data and determined with “high confidence” that around 20,000 “likely noncitizens” are registered to vote in the state.

It then forwarded those names to Homeland Security Investigations, which conducted its own investigation and concluded the same, the lawsuit says.

“This means that, consistent with state law, nearly 20,000 noncitizens in California have been sent a vote-by-mail ballot to participate in the federal election (or will receive one), with many addresses listed in Los Angeles County,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit comes two days after Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office, giving them 48 hours to set aside the same ballots in order to investigate those voters’ citizenship status.

McCotter had said the Trump administration would be forced to file for emergency relief in the courts if Weber and Logan did not comply.

The lawsuit comes about three months after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote his own letter to Weber, alleging that there may be more than 190,000 noncitizens registered to vote in California.

The lawsuit makes no mention of that prior estimate, or why Homeland Security’s initial estimate was so much larger than its current estimate. It does say that USCIS identifying with “high confidence” that a voter is a likely noncitizen “means that the match between voter information on the voting roll and USCIS’ internal records is strong and consistent based on multiple identifiers that support a strong identity link.”

It also said, “The Federal Government notified California months ago that numerous noncitizens may be registered to vote in California. Despite knowing that California must send vote-by-mail ballots to every registered voter, the State made no serious attempt to work with the Federal Government to determine whether noncitizens are registered to vote.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for more information as to how the 190,000 figure dropped to 20,000.

In a letter back to McCotter, Weber noted both figures and accused the Trump administration of pushing forward to disenfranchise voters at the last minute before the midterms based on shoddy data work and no certainty that those voters are ineligible.

“Nowhere has the federal government clarified the basis for suspecting — not even confirming with any level of certainty — the listed individuals are non-citizens. And as one court recently noted, the federal government’s citizenship records are ‘known to be unreliable,’” Weber wrote, referring to a case brought against the Justice Department by the organization Common Cause. “To give just one example, in a similar incident in the State of Nevada, DHS initially alleged that Nevada’s voter roll included nearly 16,000 potential non-citizens. However, after working with the State of Nevada, DHS officials failed to establish that a single non-citizen was on the voter rolls.”

Weber called it “remarkable” that the Justice Department would demand that her office “review and confirm the citizenship status of each of the approximately 20,000 individuals on the list on the eve of an election and within a mere 48 hours” despite providing no clear evidence that those individuals are wrongly registered.

“This is an emergency of the DOJ’s creation,” Weber wrote. “California’s election administration will continue to be governed by applicable federal and state law, not by unsubstantiated claims and outrageous demands.”

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, posted about the lawsuit on X, noting the 48-window given to Weber and Logan had lapsed and writing, “Time is up for California.”

“This is not political or controversial,” he wrote. “We will not allow California to dilute the votes of American citizens.”

The Trump administration’s lawsuit says that while the U.S. “actively investigates and prosecutes incidents of unlawful voting,” it “is not practicable or feasible for the United States to investigate before the 2026 election concludes thousands, let alone tens of thousands, of individuals that two federal investigative offices identified on the California voter roster as likely being sent vote-by-mail ballots.”

Because of that, it argues, “California is thus knowingly imposing an obstacle on the United States’ ability to enforce [federal election law] by facilitating unlawful voting rather than working with the Federal Government to prevent it,” and the state is therefore legally barred from sending mail ballots to the 20,000 voters Homeland Security has flagged.

It asks the federal court in the Central District of California to declare the state’s actions — including providing and counting ballots for those 20,000 people — to be barred by law and in violation of the Supremacy Clause, and to issue an injunction barring the state from counting those ballots in federal elections “until those individuals’ citizenship status can be verified.”

The Trump administration’s attempts to use immigration data to reach conclusions about California voter rolls and intervene in California’s election is already being challenged in a separate federal case in the district of Washington, D.C., brought by attorneys with the UCLA Voting Rights Project on behalf of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo.

The UCLA attorneys filed their own emergency petition Thursday to preclude the Justice Department from moving forward with such actions against California, citing the letters McCotter sent to Weber and Logan.

A judge in that case ordered the parties to meet and file a status report with the court by Friday as to when each side would be able to brief the court on the issue.

Times staff writer Brittny Mejia contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — FBI employees fired for their roles in the investigation of President Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida estate sued on Thursday to get their jobs back, calling their terminations unlawful acts of “political retribution.”

The complaint adds to the growing list of legal challenges to the mass terminations under FBI Director Kash Patel of agents who participated in investigations of the Republican president or are seen as opposed to Trump administration interests.

The suit was filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of nine agents, intelligence analysts and staff operations specialists who were fired in February after dismissals of agents who had worked on the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Patel has said in congressional testimony that employees he has fired had “weaponized” the FBI. But the agents deny that claim in the lawsuit, noting that between them they had more than a century of distinguished and apolitical FBI service that involved responding to the Boston Marathon bombing, hostage recoveries and the investigation into the 2024 assassination attempt of Trump in Butler, Pa.

Their firings, the lawsuit says, create an “immeasurable loss” to “America’s national security.”

“In return for their service, they were fired because they did their jobs, as they always did to follow the facts and law without bias or favor. To this administration, this is an offense. To the rest of us, it is heroic,” said a statement from their attorneys, Margaret Donovan, Abbe Lowell and Rebecca Tinio.

“This lawsuit will prove their unlawful dismissal and hold the administration accountable for this blatant attack on the rule of law,” the statement added.

The Mar-a-Lago investigation produced criminal charges against Trump

The suit lays out a detailed recitation of the allegations against Trump, describing how he improperly stored dozens of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that he took with him after leaving the White House, showed them off to people not authorized to see them and obstructed FBI efforts to get them back.

The investigation resulted in a dramatic 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that recovered classified records and later produced an indictment in federal court in Florida charging Trump with dozens of felony counts.

Trump denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed in 2024 by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, who ruled that the special counsel who filed the charges, Jack Smith, had been illegally appointed by the Biden administration Justice Department.

The nine fired FBI employees did not volunteer for the investigation but were rather assigned to it as part of their work on specialized counterintelligence and counterespionage squads, according to the lawsuit, which says they were nonetheless terminated because of baseless perceptions that the performance of their law enforcement duties had run “afoul of the political and personal loyalty to Trump that Defendants demanded.”

“By casting Plaintiffs’ work on the Plasmic Echo investigation as ‘politically weaponized,’ Defendants incorrectly presumed to know the personal political convictions of Plaintiffs and took unlawful action based on that presumption,” the lawsuit says, using the FBI code name for the classified documents investigation. “Worse still, Defendants incorrectly concluded that those personal political convictions affected or drove their work.”

The lawsuit seeks, among other remedies, reinstatement to the FBI, an awarding of back pay and a court order declaring that the firings were unlawful.

The suit says the firings were the culmination of a retribution campaign

Lawyers for the fired employees suggest their clients’ “fate was sealed” well before the February terminations, casting the ousters as the culmination of a long-running retribution campaign that kicked into gear once Trump returned to the White House in 2025.

The lawsuit notes how Patel, in his capacity as a conservative podcaster before becoming Trump’s FBI director, had derided the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search as “unlawful” and had accused the agents who had participated in it as being “corrupt government gangsters.”

Days after Trump was inaugurated, a top Justice Department official demanded that the FBI turn over a list of bureau employees who had participated in Trump-related investigations, an order that the then-director, Brian Driscoll, resisted and that was seen within the workforce as a potential prelude to mass firings.

Over the following year, the FBI and the Justice Department fired waves of employees involved in investigations of Trump, without hearings or proper notice that the plaintiffs’ lawyers say are required by law.

The lawsuit says that the Mar-a-Lago agents and analysts were fired in February after Patel disclosed to Reuters that the FBI, as part of the investigation, had subpoenaed his toll records, which show the date, time and length of a phone call but not the content of the communications.

“The Plaintiffs were unlawfully terminated not for any cause or any legitimate reason, but only to satisfy the President’s personal vendetta,” the lawsuit states. “The firings did not follow any internal investigation or disciplinary process within the FBI, and Plaintiffs were not given any notice, a hearing, or an opportunity to appeal.”

Tucker writes for the Associated Press.