lawsuit

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Saturday threw out President Trump’s multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over an article reporting on his ties to disgraced late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami ruled that the president did not prove the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice. Gayles dismissed the suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled and the dismissal is permanent and incontrovertible.

The ruling said the lawsuit was “grasping at straws” as it attempted to “manufacture” flaws in the Journal’s investigative reporting.

The lawsuit was over an article the Journal published last year describing a sexually suggestive letter that the paper said bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

The letter was reportedly collected by jailed British socialite and Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell as part of a birthday album for Epstein years before he was first arrested in 2006 and subsequently had a reported falling-out with Trump.

The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn nude woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper.

Trump denied writing it and called the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Miami, accused the paper and its reporters of having “knowingly and recklessly” published “numerous false, defamatory, and disparaging statements,” which, it alleged, caused “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” to the president.

Collins writes for the Associated Press.

A screenwriter is suing director Alexander Payne, alleging that the Oscar winner rewrote his script “Frisco” to become “The Holdovers.”

Simon Stephenson, a screenwriter behind “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” and “Luca,” is accusing Payne of copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a California federal court. In court documents obtained by The Times, Stephenson alleges that he wrote “Frisco” based on his experiences as a pediatrician and uploaded it to the industry platform “The Black List,” where it was ranked the third-best unproduced screenplay in 2013.

The same year, the suit alleges agents for Stephenson sent the script to Payne, who declined the project. They sent it a second time in 2019, and Payne passed again, according to the civil complaint.

“But in 2022, he finally made Stephenson’s screenplay,” the lawsuit reads. “Under Payne’s direction, Stephenson’s children’s hospital became a boarding school, the cynical pediatrician became a cynical teacher, and the precocious patient became a precocious pupil. The film earned its credited screenwriter career-defining Academy Award and BAFTA nominations, and the Writers Guild Award for Original Screenplay. Unfortunately, that credited screenwriter was not Stephenson, and the film was not called Frisco. It was called The Holdovers.”

David Hemingson, the creator of ABC’s “Whiskey Cavalier” and a veteran television writer for shows including “Kitchen Confidential” and “How I Met Your Mother,” was also named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

“The Holdovers” is Hemingson’s first produced feature film.

Representatives for Payne, Hemingson and Focus Features did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2023, Payne told The Times that a pilot written by Hemingson, as well as the 1935 French film “Merlusse,” written and directed by Marcel Pagnol, served as inspiration for “The Holdovers.” Both were set at a boarding school. During a 2023 post-screening Q&A interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, Payne was asked how he came up with the idea for the script, and he said it had come to him a decade before.

“I had the idea for the movie for about 10 years, but didn’t have either the discipline to research it, or I hadn’t gotten around to it,” he said. “And out of the blue, about four or five years ago, I was sent a pilot, set in a prep school and a boarding school, and I called the writer and I said, ‘You’ve written a very fine pilot, which I don’t wish to direct, but would you consider taking on an idea I have that takes place in that same world?’ And he did, and this is what worked out.”

Hemingson has the sole screenwriting credit on the film. Before “The Holdovers,” Payne is credited with penning most of the scripts that became his acclaimed films. He won Academy Awards for the adapted screenplays of “Sideways” (written with Jim Taylor) and “The Descendants” (written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash), but he told The Times that he took a more supervisory role on “The Holdovers.”

Alexander Payne

(Frankie Alduino / For The Times)

“He would run two, three, four different scenarios by me, and I would put the kibosh on him until we finally said, ‘Yes, this one,’ ” Payne said in a 2023 interview.

In March 2024, Variety reported that Stephenson exchanged emails and calls with the Writers Guild of America’s senior director of credits Lesley Mackey, alleging he needed to discuss a “credits-related issue” on a high-profile film. In one email, Stephenson wrote, “the evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from frisco is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen.’”

About a month after the accusations made headlines, Hemingson won the 2024 Writers Guild Award for original screenplay for “The Holdovers.” In his acceptance speech, Hemingson said he’d been a “proud member of the Writers Guild for 28 years” and thanked his wife and sons “who supported me for the six grueling years it took to conceive of and write ‘The Holdovers’ and for it to go from from page to screen.” He also thanked the cast for bringing his characters to life and accepted the award in memory of his mother, and his father “who gave me my love of the written word and taught me the value of integrity.”

“I believe that in life, things often arrive right on time. It took 28 years of reflection and experience and ups and downs for me to be able to tell this deeply personal love story,” he said. “Took a brilliant cast and a brilliant director to bring it to life at this time when we’re all so in need of connection.”

At the 2024 Sarajevo Film Festival, Payne shot down allegations that he’d lifted major elements of the script from Stephenson’s “Frisco,” calling the accusation “the stupidest thing in the world.”

Democrats, election officials and voting rights groups have long wondered whether President Trump, upon his return to the Oval Office, would again attempt to overturn an election when his party is trailing.

It’s no longer hypothetical.

Late last week, the president directed his Department of Justice to preemptively contest a potential Republican loss in the U.S. Senate race in Alaska. The department is demanding a court hold up certification of a possible Democratic win until it’s determined whether voters were confused by having two candidates with the same name on the ballot.

Trump followed that by calling for the prosecution of Democratic candidate Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman, based on a New York Times report that her campaign helped recruit someone named Dan Sullivan to siphon away votes from the Republican incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan. The governor has ordered an investigation.

Academics believe the lawsuit is the first time since the Civil Rights era that the federal government has sued to halt certification of an election, a duty the Constitution places in the hands of states.

Trump, for years, has claimed elections are rigged when he or his party loses, and this time is no exception. He has used his midterm rallies to say Democrats cheat, criticize election officials by name and call the ranked choice voting system in Alaska, which might hold the key to Senate control, a scam.

But the certification lawsuit elevates Trump’s crusade beyond mere rhetoric, indicating that he is preparing to use the power of the presidency to try to reverse a possible loss as his party struggles to hold its control of Congress in Tuesday’s elections.

Earlier this week, the president also announced a $1 million bounty for anyone who provides proof of prior or current voter fraud in the country. It wasn’t clear whether or how he planned to follow through.

“For at least the last year and a half, they’ve been laying that groundwork,” said Theresa Lee, a senior attorney with the ACLU. “We’ve been preparing for just as long, if not longer.”

Trump says he’ll accept results if the election is ‘honest’

Trump told reporters this week that he would accept the election results, but with his typical caveat: “If they’re honest elections,” he said.

That follows a pattern. Trump has preemptively claimed that upcoming elections will be rigged and labeled elections he’s lost as stolen. It started with the 2016 Republican Iowa caucuses, when he came in second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa,” Trump said at the time. “He stole it.”

Democrats and other groups that oppose Trump have been concerned that his words would turn into directives to have his administration interfere in the midterms. They have been running exercises for months and have lawsuits pre-written. They also plan to have tens of thousands of people monitoring the polls on Election Day.

So far, early voting has been quiet, with about 35 million people already casting ballots without any notable disruption.

In that respect, this year’s election so far resembles 2025’s off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia and a handful of other states. Democrats braced for possible Trump action then, but the election proceeded with no major issues. But the Justice Department’s more aggressive actions this month already make 2026 different from any election in recent memory.

It has sued California to block it from counting ballots after it alleged the state had 20,000 noncitizens on its rolls and made a similar demand of Washington related to about 400 voters in that state. Both states said the demands came too close to the election to fulfill, and a federal judge Wednesday rejected the federal government’s California demands.

Earlier, the Justice Department seized ballots and election records related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia’s Fulton County, and the administration launched a sweeping investigation of that vote, though it has yet to turn up evidence supporting Trump’s false claims of fraud.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department does not want to intervene in elections, but had no choice in Alaska.

“We are not doing anything improper,” Blanche said Sunday on CNN. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — (and) President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way, shape or form.”

After the lawsuit was filed, Trump told reporters he was the one who pushed for it: “I’m the one that said do it,” the president said.

Lawsuits seem more ‘impulsive’ than strategic

Though the Trump administration claimed to be acting on behalf of Alaska’s voters in its lawsuit to hold up certification, the president’s Republican allies in the state didn’t appear happy.

Sen. Sullivan would not say whether he supported the lawsuit. Alaska’s Republican-controlled state government filed court papers to try to have it dismissed. The state’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, said the administration “should never have filed” it.

While controversial, the situation in Alaska is not that unusual. Political parties often support extra candidates on the ballot to try to pull votes from their rivals. If state courts allow it, legal experts say, the federal government has no role challenging the results.

Derek Muller, a Notre Dame law professor, wrote that the Alaska lawsuit’s legal argument was “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.” He said that should reassure the public that Trump won’t be able to change election outcomes.

“The notion that there’s going to be something systemic that’s going to thwart the will of the voters seems much more speculative,” he said. “A lot of the conduct seems impulsive rather than strategic and planned.”

The courts have repeatedly rebuffed the administration, in many cases because the Constitution gives the president no direct power over how elections are run. Courts put on hold two Trump executive orders seeking to change voting procedures. The administration also has lost more than two dozen cases trying to get detailed voter information from the states.

That resembles 2020, when Trump and his allies tried to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden and in the process lost dozens of lawsuits.

Can the institutions hold?

Pat McCrory, a former Republican governor of North Carolina, is part of Right Count, a group of conservatives pushing back against election conspiracy theories and intervention in local elections. He said he’s confident the system will hold.

“The only thing that protects us from anarchy is this thin piece of paper called the Constitution,” McCrory said. “That thin piece of paper is, to me, a cement wall.”

It’s one that many analysts expect will continue to stymie Trump in the courts.

“The courts are likely to throw most, if not all, of these charges out,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “But this is a way of intensifying the signal to Trump’s supporters that the elections are rigged.”

The Justice Department in 2020 refused to join Trump’s allies in litigation. In his second term, Trump has pushed out career staff and stocked his administration with people who helped him challenge the 2020 election. That’s led to mounting concern he could deploy immigration agents, the FBI or even the military to the polls or seize ballots or voting machines, although multiple administration officialshave denied they have such plans.

All of that could happen before courts even have a chance to weigh in, said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist.

“The threat is that he’ll take actions that can’t be undone,” Nyhan said.

Riccardi and Swenson write for the Associated Press.

Already accused by his wife of sexually assaulting her, Marcellus Wiley is the defendant in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court alleging that he raped a 22-year-old USC student in 1999.

Wiley, a former NFL defensive end and longtime sports media personality, also has been accused by three women of sexual misconduct when he was a student at Columbia University in 1994 and by four additional women of similar criminal behavior from 1995 to 2009.

Those filings support a motion-seeking class-action status against Wiley and Columbia by one of the accusers, who filed her initial complaint in 2023 alleging that Wiley raped her in his Columbia dorm room in November 1994 after inviting her to study. She claimed university officials discouraged her from going to the police and handled the matter internally.

The filing Tuesday alleges that “Jane Doe” met Wiley in February 1999 and went on two dates with him. The lawsuit states that she told Wiley — who had just completed his third season with the Buffalo Bills — that she was sexually inexperienced and not interested in a romantic relationship. Nevertheless, she accompanied him to a L.A. nightclub and agreed to spend the night in his hotel room. Doe alleged that Wiley raped her after she fell asleep fully clothed.

“Jane told Wiley to stop and repeated ‘Please stop’ several times and told him, ‘You’re not listening to me,’” the lawsuit states.

While driving Doe to her dorm room, Wiley suggested that she be tested for a sexually transmitted disease because he “had the clap,” according to the filing. She claims they never spoke again.

Doe wrote that she filed a police report after a rape kit tested positive for Wiley’s semen. More than a month later she claims the district attorney’s office informed her that Wiley denied Doe’s allegations and that, “therefore, no charges would be filed.” Doe is suing Wiley for sexual battery, assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Wiley responded to the lawsuit by pointing to MenTooProject.org, a digital advocacy movement and platform he launched in August after the State of Florida declined to file charges against him following a July 4 domestic dispute with his estranged wife, Annemarie Wiley. She alleged that he poked her in the face and threatened to kill her in front of their 7-year-old daughter. Wiley denied the allegations.

The project, a spin-off of the #MenToo awareness campaign that gained widespread traction in India in 2019, invites men to “join us in the fight for truth, fairness, and justice,” Wiley wrote on the website. “My grandmother told me the truth always outruns a lie. She taught me not to chase the lie, just give the truth time to catch it.”

Wiley, 51, frequently addresses the allegations against him on his YouTube channel, “Dat Dude TV.”

“Pick a date, pick the encounter, pick the allegation. For every one of them, I either saw, communicated through email, text, phone, was invited by these individuals after these dates to engage, to be intimate, or all of the above, after the dates that are in question,” Wiley said in a May 2006 episode.

In a court filing two months later requesting a temporary restraining order, Annemarie Wiley accused him of raping her four separate times. The first alleged instance occurred in 2012 when they were dating and the other three allegedly took place in January 2026. Annemarie, a nurse anesthetist and former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” was granted the order as well as full custody of their children. She filed for divorce the same day.

In Sepember, a judge granted her request to extend the restraining order for three years. The July 4 episode that triggered the restraining order resulted in Wiley’s arrest, but a month later the Orange County State Attorney’s Office dropped criminal charges, stating that testimonial evidence lacked corroborating physical or other evidence required to pursue a conviction.

Wiley, who grew up in Compton and played 10 years in the NFL including three with the Chargers, defended himself publicly through a long social media post that read in part, “I owe it to my children to truthfully document what they and I have endured. To do that, I must address the lies Annemarie has told about me by telling the truth about her and our marriage.

“Over the years, I have compiled videos, photographs, text messages, emails, and other evidence that directly contradicts those baseless claims and provides a factual record of our family and the events leading to this unfortunate divorce,” he wrote.

Wiley has repeatedly lamented that the allegations, lawsuits and media reports could have a negative impact on his young son and two daughters. He pointed out on social media in May that three sexual assault claims were dismissed in New York County court in September 2025, while suggesting that his son, Marcellus Wiley Jr., could suffer from the allegations.

“To me, it’s about my son’s name, that he will one day Google and think this is about him, but he’s gonna know it’s about his dad,” he said on “Dat Dude TV” in May. “And how dare you stain the brain of my child.”

Groups that provide legal services to immigrants filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to stop the Trump administration’s new policy of hiding the locations of tens of thousands of detainees with final deportation orders.

The policy, adopted suddenly last month to expedite deportations, interferes with immigration lawyers’ rights by making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to locate their clients, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston. It asks a judge to issue an order blocking the “unlawful and inhumane” change.

“No one should be denied a meaningful opportunity to defend their rights because the government has made it impossible for their lawyer to find them,” said Jacquelynne Bowman, executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services, one of the four groups listed as plaintiffs. “This arbitrary new administrative change leaves hundreds of thousands of people at risk of potentially life-altering consequences without essential legal help.”

The lawsuit challenges U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision, first reported by the Associated Press, to remove the locations of people facing final removal orders from its Online Detainee Locator System and to instruct staff not to reveal their whereabouts. As of last month, the move affected more than 16,000 of the nearly 69,000 detainees who were in ICE custody.

ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment on the lawsuit.

The agencies have not publicly confirmed the change, but have said they are prioritizing people with final removal orders for deportation. They have also said they are facing a “historic number of injunctions” from courts blocking their efforts. The agencies have denied that they are disappearing detainees, saying they remain free to make phone calls.

Since 2010, lawyers and family members have used the online system to track detainees as they get moved from facility to facility through ICE’s sprawling detention network.

Approximately 1.4 million people living in the U.S. are subject to final orders of removal, which means an immigration judge has ruled they should be deported and the decision has been upheld on appeal or not appealed.

Those individuals still have several options to challenge the conditions of their detention and looming deportations, including asking to reopen proceedings, seeking relief from removal to third countries and challenging violations of their rights. Federal judges have ruled thousands of times that detainees should be released or granted bond hearings.

Since the change went into effect, lawyers have been unable to find clients and potential clients and have spent “significantly more time” tracking down others, the lawsuit says. Calls to ICE, including to its Detention and Removal Information Line, “lead to long wait times on hold, sudden hang-ups, a general lack of information or no answer at all,” it says.

As a workaround, some lawyers have tried to find their clients through an ICE program that schedules legal calls, but only a small percentage of detention centers use it, the lawsuit says. The result has been delayed or missed legal filings and fewer cases taken, according to the organizations.

The lawsuit argues the change violates the Administrative Procedure Act because it was adopted without explanation and the First Amendment, which protects lawyers’ ability to advise people of their legal rights and seek prospective clients.

Foley writes for the Associated Press.

The plaintiffs argue they are losing access to vital information media outlets covering Trump used to provide.

A group of private citizens has sued the administration of United States President Donald Trump over its restrictions on news outlets covering the White House.

“All of the Plaintiffs rely on the White House press corps for independent reporting about the president and his administration, and all of them use that reporting in a variety of ways in their scholarship, teaching, journalism, or advocacy,” says the lawsuit, filed on Monday in a federal court in New York.

The lawsuit is the first lodged not by the news outlets being banned, but by those who consume the news and rely on it for their work.

The plaintiffs include a human rights advocate, a media watchdog, a university history professor, a high school teacher, a legal journalist and a student journalist.

Each argues they need unbiased, diverse media reporting from the White House to do their work.

“I’m gravely concerned that the Trump administration’s restrictions on White House reporters are cutting off access to crucial information,” Peter Schmidt-Nowara, a high school social studies teacher in New York City, said in a statement.

“I joined this lawsuit because my students deserve to know what’s happening in their government and to hear from a free and independent press.”

Trump already faces several legal challenges to his practice of banning journalists from outlets he dislikes from accessing the White House.

Last month, he banned journalists from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from attending news conferences at the White House. A federal judge later ruled the order was unconstitutional, a violation of the First Amendment, which protects freedom of the press, and ordered access be restored. However, the Trump administration continues to fight the ruling.

Last week, Trump dismissed reporting that he planned to evict journalists from the White House press briefing room and restore a swimming pool that was housed there starting in 1933. But he said he is still considering moving the press out of the briefing room.

“I am thinking about moving the Press, and putting them in a different location, but I will use that location for very badly needed space,” Trump said in a social media post.

Kenneth Roth, a senior fellow at Yale University and former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said the restrictions on press access were familiar postmarks in countries whose leaders have become authoritarian.

“Worldwide, I have seen how governmental leaders’ efforts to penalise independent journalists are a prelude to the rise of autocracy,” he said in a statement.

Judge questions the Trump administration’s efforts to exert greater influence over elections process ahead of upcoming midterm vote.

A United States appeals court has expressed doubt over the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against California, which seeks to force the state to throw out mail-in ballots it has deemed likely to go to non-citizens.

Circuit Judge Mark Bennett said on Sunday that the three-judge panel would issue a decision as soon as possible, following a rare weekend oral argument.

But Bennett, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump, voiced concern that the lawsuit would not hold up to scrutiny.

He pointed to the Elections Clause in the US Constitution, which allows states — not the federal government — to administer elections.

“It seems to me that you want us to issue an injunction that is entirely inconsistent with the law that the California legislature has adopted pursuant to the Elections Clause,” Bennett told Justice Department lawyer Matthew Donnelly. “How can we do that?”

The case is part of a larger effort under the right-wing Trump administration to crack down on alleged non-citizen voting ahead of the crucial November 3 midterm elections.

On October 15, less than three weeks before the midterm races, the Justice Department issued a complaint targeting California, a left-wing stronghold.

It asked the federal court system to set aside thousands of mail-in ballots that the government says were sent to “likely non-citizens”.

The lawsuit indicates the Trump administration sent California officials a list of 20,000 names it believes are not eligible to vote, based on citizenship.

Trump has often pushed the discredited claim that the Democratic Party is benefiting from widespread voting by non-citizens.

California has long been one of the targets for his election misinformation.

Earlier this year, Trump denounced the state’s primaries after right-wing candidates like Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Spencer Pratt felt short of his expectations.

“There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” he wrote on social media at the time.

He then announced that the state would be under investigation from the US attorney’s office.

Trump’s efforts have caused alarm, with critics accusing him of seeking to dampen voter turnout through intimidation and confusion.

The midterms will decide which party controls the US Congress, as well as key state and local positions.

Polls, however, predict steep odds for Republican candidates, given Trump’s souring approval ratings and dissatisfaction with issues like the cost of living and the US-Israeli war against Iran.

Voting rights advocates have warned that the Trump administration has not publicly revealed how it has compiled its list of non-citizen voters, and whistleblower reports have cast doubt on the accuracy of such lists.

In response to the October 15 lawsuit, California has countered that it has strong safeguards to prevent non-citizens from voting.

It also said that the Justice Department’s claims are based on dubious data.

“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,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement earlier this month.

“We will continue to carry out free and fair elections in the Golden State — and call out this authoritarian as he tries every play in the dictator’s playbook.”

WASHINGTON — U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche on Sunday defended the Trump administration’s lawsuit to block certification of Alaska’s Senate results if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses the race, arguing that the legal challenge was a necessary step to avoid confusing voters in the closely watched midterm race.

Some election experts have said the move is another attempt by the Trump administration to meddle in the Nov. 3 midterm elections in the event Republicans don’t fare well. Democrats as well as some Republicans have criticized it.

Blanche, however, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that President Trump — who said Friday in reference to the lawsuit that he was “the one that said do it” — is not trying to overturn state election results “in any way, shape or form.”

“We wish that we didn’t have to do this. We hope for a resolution that works,” Blanche said.

Republicans fear that a second candidate on the ballot who is named Dan Sullivan — a retired teacher and school administrator from the tiny fishing community of Petersburg — could siphon away votes from the GOP senator and tip the outcome in favor of Democrat Mary Peltola, a former congresswoman. Because Alaska has ranked-choice voting, there are more than two candidates on the general election ballot.

A day after the lawsuit was filed Thursday, Peltola called it “just flagrant, flagrant corruption, in my opinion,” and a diversion tactic by Republicans. Alaska’s other Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, also criticized the lawsuit in a social media post.

Trump told reporters Sunday that he believed the ballot was illegal because it was unfair and that Sen. Sullivan should be identified to voters as the sitting senator. Courts, however, have ruled otherwise, upholding both Sullivans’ spots on the ballot.

“At least let him use the name Sen. Dan Sullivan as opposed to incumbent, because a lot of people don’t know what incumbent means,” Trump said.

Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent” on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” is listed without party affiliation.

Blanche represented Trump as a personal attorney — including the case in which Trump was convicted of felony fraud — before the Republican president appointed him to lead the Department of Justice, which filed the lawsuit in Alaska. Blanche defended Trump in his election inference case before voters elected Trump to a second White House term, effectively ending the criminal prosecution.

Blanche told CNN host Dana Bash that it was “crazy” for her to ask him if Trump was trying to lay the groundwork for the same sort of election challenges that occurred before a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the source of the election interference case, in which Trump was indicted on felony charges, and for which he was impeached.

“We are not doing anything improper. We’re not doing anything we’re not allowed to do. And we have to let the process play out,” Blanche said. “But I do think it’s important for the American people to understand that we are not — [and] President Trump is not — trying to take over a state election in any way shape or form.”

The lawsuit, Blanche said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” is meant to “put guardrails in place” to preserve possible evidence of voter confusion at the polls.

“It’s not saying, ‘Don’t certify.’ It’s saying, ‘If a court ultimately determines that it was decided because of confusion and not the will of the voters, then we do not think the states should certify.’ And that’s consistent with federal law and consistent with even Alaskan law, if that happens,” he said.

Kunzelman writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Josh Boak contributed to this report.

United States Attorney General Todd Blanche has defended the Department of Justice’s decision to sue to prevent the certification of a Republican loss in Alaska’s tight Senate race.

On Sunday, Blanche did a tour of the morning political shows in the US, making stops at CNN’s State of the Union TV programme and CBS’s Face the Nation.

In each appearance, he faced pointed questions about the legality of the Justice Department’s efforts, responding, in some cases, with open frustration.

“ Why is this controversial?” Blanche asked CNN host Dana Bash at one point. He proceeded to accuse one of the candidates in the Senate race of intentionally trying to confuse voters.

“We’re going to try to create a situation where that can be remedied,” he said. “That shouldn’t be something that is causing this shock and horror.”

But the Justice Department’s lawsuit, filed on October 22, has been the subject of bipartisan criticism.

Many have accused the administration of President Donald Trump of laying the groundwork to block a Democratic win in the race. Trump himself claimed to have authorised the lawsuit.

“I’m the one who said do it,” he told reporters on Friday.

Inside the Alaska Senate race

During the midterm elections on November 3, citizens in Alaska will be asked to vote in one of the closest Senate races in the country, one which will help decide whether Republicans maintain their majority in the chamber.

Senator Dan S Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, is seeking to defend his seat in the Senate. But he faces fierce competition from former US Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat.

Also in the running is another candidate named Dan J Sullivan, a former Forest Service employee.

The second Sullivan’s decision to also run has raised concerns that he is a spoiler candidate, whose presence on the ballot is designed to draw votes away from the incumbent.

But the Forest Service worker has denied any such intent. Such allegations, he said, are “entirely false”.

“I am not a registered Democrat, and I have had no conversations whatsoever with the Peltola campaign about my candidacy,” the second Sullivan wrote in a letter to Alaska’s lieutenant governor before the state’s primaries.

“I have considered running for political office for over a decade. I made the decision to formally run for the United States Senate in the upcoming primary election because Senator Sullivan has routinely failed the people of Alaska, and they deserve a better representative. It is my right to do so.”

Four candidates advanced to the final round of voting after Alaska’s August primaries. They included Peltola and both Sullivans. The two men are running as Republicans.

A controversial lawsuit

The Department of Justice has argued that its lawsuit — filed less than two weeks before the midterm elections — is necessary “to protect the integrity” of the election.

Any result in the Senate race, it argues, would be “tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J Sullivan”.

The department has therefore called on the US district court in Alaska to issue an order declaring the race’s certification “unlawful” and barring the state from “allowing such a certification to occur”.

Under the US Constitution, only states have the power to administer elections, though Congress has the right to pass regulations concerning federal votes.

It is highly unusual for a presidential administration to inject itself into issues of state election certification — and experts say such a move is likely to be deemed illegal.

Already, in June, Alaska’s Supreme Court ruled that both Sullivans could compete in the Senate race. The state’s Division of Elections has also taken steps to reduce voter confusion.

The November 3 ballot, for instance, will list Dan S Sullivan as the incumbent and as a “registered Republican”.

Dan J Sullivan, meanwhile, will have the suffix “Jr” added to his name, and his party affiliation will be left blank, despite the candidate identifying as Republican.

But in Sunday’s TV appearances, Blanche — who leads the Department of Justice and formerly served as Trump’s personal lawyer — argued that merely having two Sullivans on the ballot is a recipe for confusion.

“It is wrong,” Blanche told CNN. “Putting aside whether we’re going to win or lose in the courts, putting aside what the Alaskan Supreme Court has done, in our system we should not have a candidate who has to worry about another candidate being on the ballot for no other reason than to confuse voters.”

Blanche also denied any impropriety in Trump saying he ordered the lawsuit.

“He’s supposed to make sure that everything in this country is running right, including elections,” Blanche said.

The race for the Senate

Historically, the Department of Justice has embraced a norm of judicial independence, though critics have accused the Trump administration of wielding its prosecutorial powers for political gain.

Bash, the CNN host, raised some of those concerns, pointing to Trump’s comments accusing Democrats of cheating, as well as his history of election denialism.

The president has long denied his loss in the 2020 presidential race, and his supporters sought to block the certification of that election, notably by storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When Bash pointed to that incident, Blanche chided her: “Oh, you’ve got to stop it with that.”

“Why are you yelling at me?” Bash responded, as the two talked over each other.

“You are not being a real person. Come on, man,” Blanche continued. “That is crazy.”

He also denied that Trump was setting the stage for a contested election if the Democrat Peltola were to win. Instead, he framed the lawsuit as setting the stage for further investigations into any eventual results.

“The relief that we’re seeking — which, again, isn’t to determine who the senator is, it’s not to try to overturn something the state is going to do — it’s just to make sure that the ballots that come in are kept in a way that may allow a court to investigate further,” Blanche said.

Speaking to CBS, Blanche also dodged a question about whether Trump personally asked him to file the lawsuit.

“I will never, ever, ever talk about communications that I have with the president of the United States. I never have, and I never will,” Blanche said.

The race to control the US Senate is expected to be a nail-biter, with the Republicans holding a slim majority at present: They have 53 seats in the 100-member chamber.

Only a third of the Senate’s seats — 35 in total — will be up for grabs in the midterm races, though, as terms in the chamber last six years and are staggered across different election years.

Trump’s Republican Party is projected to face an uphill battle to protect its congressional majorities, amid backlash against the rising cost of living and Trump’s own withering poll numbers.

Roughly seven Senate elections are considered toss-ups, including the Alaska race.

In early October, The New York Times and Siena College released a poll finding Peltola leading the incumbent Sullivan by nearly seven percentage points, one of the widest margins of any of the toss-up states.

Oct. 25, 2026 10:03 AM PT

ANCHORAGE — A little more than one week before the midterm elections, the leading candidates in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race are trying to rally support from Alaska Native voters, a key constituency.

Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola both spoke at last week’s Alaska Federation of Natives conference in Anchorage.

The organization previously endorsed Peltola, who is Yup’ik, during her House races in 2022 and 2024, but it did not issue endorsements this year.

Both candidates have highlighted support from Native organizations and leaders ahead of the Nov. 3 election. Sealaska Corp., a regional Native corporation in southeast Alaska, has endorsed both of them, calling it a way to “honor their contributions and commitment to our communities, and to honor the diverse positions of our shareholders.”

The race is among the most closely watched nationally, with control of the Senate at stake. On Friday, President Trump — who held a rally in support of Sullivan earlier this month — said he told the Department of Justice to sue to block certification of the race if the incumbent loses. The lawsuit cites potential confusion with another candidate who is listed on the ranked-choice ballot as Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.

Sen. Sullivan is listed as a Republican and the incumbent, while Sullivan Jr. is listed without a party designation. U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche wrote on social media that the lawsuit is necessary to make sure officials “have the information necessary to make a determination as to whether Alaskan voters were confused or [misled].”

Many voting rights advocates and Democrats have pointed the lawsuit as an improper political use of the Justice Department and an example of Trump’s interference in the upcoming election, following up on his threats to assert federal control over the vote.

Alaskan Natives represent about one-fifth of the state’s population, but they can face challenges to voting in remote communities. Advocates have raised concerns in recent years with polling locations in some villages opening late or ballots not arriving on time to be fully counted due to mail delays.

There’s also cynicism about whether participating in elections will make a difference.

“There’s legitimate hesitations about whether whoever they vote for is actually going to impact them,” said actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth, who is Bdewakantunwan Dakota and Dine and came to Alaska to encourage conference attendees to vote. “And our job is to say, hey, whether that matters or not, there’s an opportunity for you to make sure that your voice is counted. And I want to encourage people just to take the opportunity as much as possible.”

Sheri Buretta, who chairs the board of Chugach Alaska Corp., an Alaska Native corporation, introduced Sullivan to the conference Thursday as “one of our strongest champions.”

Sullivan, speaking as part of a congressional delegation update, said he’s learned important lessons from Native leaders. He cited work he’s done on issues such as pushing to ensure that Alaska Native Vietnam War-era veterans have access to land allotments.

Peltola, during a candidate forum Friday, became emotional speaking about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous people and said additional law enforcement resources are needed. She also expressed support for fisheries. Subsistence fishing is critical in many Native communities.

“I will always fight to restore our fisheries. I feel like working on fish issues is my life’s work,” she said.

Energy is also a crucial issue in Alaska, including within Native communities.

Peltola recently said Alaskan Native people were being “absolutely crushed” by high costs from the ongoing war with Iran, which Sullivan has supported. Many rural communities rely on diesel for electricity and to heat their homes.

Sullivan has argued the war against Iran is temporary and that the “forever war is the Democrats’ war against Alaskan energy.”

Many Native leaders on Alaska’s petroleum-rich North Slope see oil drilling as crucial to their region’s economy, and they believed their voices weren’t heard while President Biden was in office. His administration sought to restrict drilling in places like the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but Trump and the Republican-led Congress have rolled those efforts back.

Peltola has said she supports expanded oil and gas drilling and would work with Trump to accomplish that. But Sullivan and his allies have tried to align her with what they refer to as “Lower 48 liberals” who oppose more drilling.

Bohrer and Daley write for the Associated Press. Bohrer reported from Juneau.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has filed a lawsuit to block certification of the Senate race in Alaska if Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan loses the contest while another candidate with the same name is on the ballot, kicking off what many have feared could become a lengthy battle between the U.S. government and states over certifying an election where the president’s party is struggling.

Many in both parties believe the fight could come down to Alaska, where Sullivan faces Democrat Mary Peltola. Also on the Alaska ballot is a Daniel J. Sullivan from the tiny fishing community of Petersburg. He has said he decided to run on his own, but Republicans have contended he’s a Democratic plant to siphon votes away from their candidate.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in federal court in Alaska demanding that the state be blocked from certifying a Peltola win if the other Sullivan remains on the ballot. “The United States accordingly brings this lawsuit to protect the integrity of the 2026 Senate election in Alaska,” the lawsuit alleges, contending that federal law requires states to protect the integrity of federal elections.

The Alaska Supreme Court rejected previous Republican efforts to remove the other Sullivan from the ballot, and the state’s Republican officials made the decisions about how to list him on the ballot. The other Sullivan will appear without a party designation next to his name, while the senator will be listed as the Republican incumbent. Alaska’s ranked choice voting system also will allow voters to select both of the men if confused.

The Trump Department of Justice has increasingly been used to bolster the president’s political operation, targeting his enemies and filing lawsuits against Democratic-controlled states in the run up to the election. Democrats and many voting rights advocates have long feared the Trump administration will try to block certification of elections the president’s party loses much as Trump unsuccessfully tried to do when he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Earlier Thursday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche told reporters that was unlikely outside of extreme circumstances. “It is not DOJ’s intention to and it’s never our intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process,” the attorney general told reporters in Virginia.

Derek Muller, a law professor at Notre Dame University, said the lawsuit will likely only kick in if Republicans narrowly lose the Alaska Senate race and that it does not seem to have legal merit. “The statute simply doesn’t let the Department of Justice enjoin certification,” he said.

Riccardi writes for the Associated Press.

Oct. 22, 2026 8:59 AM PT

MIAMI — A federal judge on Thursday ordered President Trump to sit for a deposition in his $10-billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC by Dec. 11.

The order from U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett came as the BBC’s lawyers complained that Trump had delayed his appearance. Attorney Charles Tobin said that with two months left in the discovery period, “we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff.”

He noted there was an agreed-upon date of Oct. 16, but that the Republican president canceled it for a “matter of national importance.” Tobin said Trump was in fact campaigning in Georgia that day.

“He was participating in party politics and prioritized that over sitting for the deposition,” Tobin said.

Lett said Trump must sit for a deposition by Dec. 11, or face sanctions up to dismissal of his lawsuit — unless the discovery period was extended past Dec. 18.

The BBC asked the judge last week to compel Trump to appear. The British broadcaster says Trump is trying to delay his appearance until January 2027. The judge has threatened sanctions if Trump fails to comply with the court’s schedule.

Trump, who has often avoided depositions, filed his lawsuit against the BBC last December, seeking $10 billion in damages. He accused the publicly funded broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices related to a documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.”

The BBC acknowledged that filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump delivered to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the U.S. Capitol, to make it seem he was directly urging violence. The broadcaster apologized over the editing, and the head of the BBC and its top news executive both resigned. The BBC has denied Trump’s claims that it defamed him.

Trump’s lawyers say Jack Smith ‘lacks personal knowledge’ of issues in the case

To bolster its defense, the broadcaster subpoenaed former special counsel Jack Smith earlier this month. Trump’s lawyers argued, in a joint filing asking for a hearing on the matter, that there was no good reason for Smith, who is not a party to the case, to appear.

“Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter,” they argued in the filing. “He was not present when President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech … was made, nor did he participate in its preparation. Smith does not have any personal knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind at the time the Speech was given.”

Trump’s side also argued that “Smith’s testimony would be duplicative,” because he published a lengthy report on the events of Jan. 6 and also testified for many hours. “The entirety of his testimony is publicly available,” it argued.

The BBC countered, in the same filing, that there were few more knowledgeable sources about the events of Jan. 6 than Smith, who studied and investigated them for years.

“It is difficult to imagine a more authoritative source on these issues than Mr. Smith, who spent years gathering evidence on those topics with the force of the Justice Department and the power of the grand jury behind him,” the BBC’s lawyers argued.

“No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim…”

When will Trump sit for a deposition?

In a filing Oct. 13, the BBC’s lawyers said they first requested dates for a deposition in July, and followed up repeatedly, with both sides eventually agreeing on Oct. 16.

After weeks of silence, they wrote, “Plaintiff’s counsel responded on September 28, 2026, indicating that ‘the President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance’ and that counsel would ‘endeavor to provide you with a replacement date by the end of this week.’ He did not.”

They said they were then told that Trump “has no availability whatsoever for a deposition” before discovery is set to close on Dec. 18, and that Trump would instead make himself available the second or third week of January.

Tobin wrote in the filing, “Those delays have flouted the cooperative spirit of discovery and precluded the BBC from obtaining the evidence necessary to robustly litigate its defense.”

Fischer and Noveck write for the Associated Press. Noveck reported from New York.

A sweeping campaign by federal immigration agents to identify voter fraud by noncitizens through door knocks, street stops and other field interviews in California and eight other states must be reined in ahead of the Nov. 3 election, after a federal judge in Northern California ruled it has intimidated U.S. citizens and interfered with the work of voting rights groups.

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguin said in a ruling Wednesday that limiting the Department of Homeland Security’s surging operations in those states — which she wrote “sweep in U.S. citizens for investigation” — does not prevent the Trump administration from “exercising their authority to investigate voter fraud by lawful means.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson said the agency is “laser focused on identifying, prosecuting, and removing aliens who vote,” and has “no plans to question or investigate people we believe to be U.S. citizens.”

The ruling was the latest to come out of an unprecedented legal war playing out between the Trump administration and California in recent days, in which an array of election cases are working their way through the federal courts at breakneck speed.

There is, for example, the lawsuit the U.S. Justice Department filed against California and state and local elections officials last week, demanding that they set aside any ballots from a list of 20,000 individuals identified by immigration officials as “likely noncitizens.”

There are also two cases out of Washington, D.C., in which a coalition of Democratic leaders, immigrant rights groups, voting rights experts and naturalized citizens in California are challenging the Trump administration’s use of Homeland Security data to target voters.

The litigation is playing out amid an intense political debate about election security at the national level — driven in part by President Trump, a longtime election denier — and a sweeping campaign by his administration to root out and parade examples of alleged voter fraud in the final days before the election.

White House, Homeland Security and Justice Department officials have all defended the administration’s efforts as necessary to ensure that noncitizens are not illegally diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, has claimed to have “overwhelming evidence” that tens of thousands of noncitizens are doing so in California.

‘That is not normal’

Democratic leaders and prominent elections experts, meanwhile, have cast the administration’s claims as baseless and intentionally exaggerated to stoke uncertainty about election security and ultimately challenge midterm results the president doesn’t like, and the Justice Department’s legal arguments as fundamentally flawed and wildly out of line with long-established department policy to stay out of elections in the lead up to voting.

“That is not normal. We have literally never experienced that in American history. Not once,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former Justice Department elections attorney. “The fact that the administration appears poised for the first time to act as an adversary to the states and counties who have [the] undisputed constitutional authority to run elections? That is unusual.”

At the same time, Becker and other experts stressed that those efforts to date have failed, and state and local elections have largely proceeded in recent weeks without incident, with millions of Americans having already cast their ballots.

“California voters need to know that they’re in good hands, that we have leaders at the state and local levels who are protecting our ballots and are ensuring that these attempts by the federal government to root out supposed noncitizen voting are not going to prevent Californians from casting our ballots,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. “Part of the strategy here is to distract people and scare people and raise fears, and the important thing is to continue to stay focused on … making a plan to vote.”

Status of cases

Federal courts have already rejected multiple Trump executive orders seeking to enforce nationwide voter ID and citizenship requirements. The Supreme Court blocked an administration plan for the U.S. Postal Service to vet mail ballots. The Justice Department has compiled a stunning record of losses in its 30 lawsuits demanding state voter rolls — with 26 of those cases, including the one in California, so far dismissed.

And election experts said they expect the Trump administration to rack up more losses in coming days — including in the Justice Department’s case challenging California officials’ refusal to segregate the ballots of some 20,000 voters based on the administration’s unsubstantiated claims they are noncitizens.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, shown in 2023, is overseeing a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice says 20,000 California ballots may have been sent to “likely noncitizens.”

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

That case was taken up — and scheduled for a Tuesday hearing — by Judge David O. Carter, an appointee of President Clinton who in January rejected the administration’s demand for California’s voter rolls, calling it a clear federal overreach that would have a “chilling effect” on voters and threaten American democracy.

California has called for the case to be dismissed outright, on the grounds that the administration has zero authority to make such demands, and that the demands are unlawful. The Trump administration has asked Carter to immediately rule in the matter.

“Every minute of [ballot] processing that occurs without segregating the ballots of suspected non-eligible voters causes untraceable disenfranchisement and dilution of the votes of United States citizens,” wrote Julie Hamill, an assistant U.S. attorney in Essayli’s office.

In D.C. federal court, Judge James E. Boasberg set an Oct. 30 hearing in a case in which UCLA Voting Rights Project attorneys, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, and a California voter named Pedro Trujillo are challenging the administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege California voters aren’t citizens.

Carl Bergquist, an attorney for CHIRLA, said he looked forward to bringing a host of recent Trump administration actions to the court’s attention — including the administration’s lawsuit against California, the charging this week of 28 legal permanent residents in California with election-related crimes, and Trump’s threats to arrest California elections officials who don’t comply with his administration’s demands.

“The events of the last few days, from threats to state and local officials, increased general immigration operations, the random knocking on doors by federal agents and the recent arrests are causing a chill in the community,” Bergquist said. “People, including naturalized citizens, are making their plans to vote and the Federal Government is doing its utmost to quash their attempts to exercise this fundamental right that they have lawfully acquired.”

The argument that naturalized citizens are being intimidated also features prominently in a second lawsuit filed in D.C. federal court Tuesday, in which top Democrats in Congress joined Nevada party officials and a California immigrant named Erick Jose Jimenez to challenge the Trump administration’s unprecedented voter fraud probes.

That lawsuit, also assigned to Boasberg, says Jimenez, a naturalized citizen since 2006, fears being “unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse).”

Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy advisor on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said there is “so much noise” around the election right now, in part because the administration has been making wild legal arguments about its authority over elections.

But he said “none of the federal government’s attempts to assert power that they do not have are working,” and voting “for 99.999% of the public” will remain “wonderfully normal.”

A US judge has ordered President Donald Trump to answer questions under oath in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC by 11 December.

Trump is suing the BBC over an episode of Panorama that edited together two different sections of a speech he gave before the riot at the US Capitol in 2021.

Charles Tobin, a lawyer representing the BBC, said in court that “we still haven’t been able to depose the plaintiff” with two months left in the discovery period.

Trump cancelled a previous deposition on 16 October, citing “matters of national importance” while he was campaigning in Georgia.

In US law, a deposition is an out-of-court statement made under oath in response to questions, which is recorded for use in later proceedings.

The judge in the case, US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, said that Trump must sit for the deposition by 11 December, unless the discovery period is extended.

Last week, attorneys asked that Lett compel Trump to face deposition after the last scheduled meeting did not take place.

On that day, Trump attended a midterms campaign rally in Dalton, Georgia and a fundraiser at his property in Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

In a separate filing on Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers said that the president could appear for the interview between 11 and 22 January next year, and claimed that the BBC was “wrong to claim that President Trump is avoiding his deposition in this action.”

Trump’s lawsuit – filed in Florida – accuses the BBC of “intentionally, maliciously, and deceptively doctoring” the speech he gave outside the Capitol on 6 January 2021.

The BBC apologised for the error and said that the broadcast gave “the mistaken impression that President Trump made a direct call for violent action”.

The broadcaster has since asked that the court dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the programme does not meet the legal criteria for defamation and was not available in the US.

In July, Trump’s lawyers conceded that they had no evidence that the documentary was available in the US on the BBC’s BritBox subscription service – as they originally claimed – or on the BBC’s website, BBC select or through US broadcasters.

Trump ultimately agreed to drop the lawsuit against BBC Studios, its commercial arm, after the BBC argued that it had “no role in creating or producing the documentary.

Typically, depositions take place in a lawyer’s office – rather than a courtroom – without a judge physically present.

Depositions, however, carry legal weight and take place under oath. They are recorded verbatim by a court reporter, and the transcripts can later be used as evidence during trials.

Class action could be first in Australia to blame social media for harming its users.

Meta and its social media platforms Facebook and Instagram are facing a class action lawsuit in Australia over allegations that addictive design features are harming children and teenagers.

The lawsuit, filed by MinterEllison in the Australian Federal Court, seeks to recover compensation for current and former users of Facebook and Instagram who claim they were exposed to harmful content or developed an addiction to social media as a result of using those platforms, the law firm said in a statement released on Thursday.

“This proceeding raises important questions about the design and operation of social media platforms and their impact on children and teenagers in Australia. Those questions will now be considered through the Federal Court process,” MinterEllison Partner William Nolan said in the statement.

The class action suit was filed on behalf of eight plaintiffs who allege they were harmed by Meta while they were below the age of 18.

In a suppression order on Monday, the court prohibited the reporting of any information that could reveal their identities and the statement of claim.

“We are aware of this claim and we will defend ourselves vigorously,” a Meta spokesperson said.

Litigation Lending Services said it was funding the class action for Australian families who “would have no practical means of pursuing these claims against a global technology giant”.

The lawsuit comes amid rising tensions between Australia and Big Tech after a world-first ban on social media for children below 16 in 2025, and newly proposed rules that could let users switch off algorithm-driven content on their feeds.

Meta agreed in August to pay $18bn to settle with nearly all US states to resolve claims that it designed social media to addict children.

Top Democrats in Congress have joined a California immigrant and the Nevada State Democratic Party in suing the Trump administration over its unprecedented voter fraud probes in both states and broader efforts to meddle in state-run elections nationwide — alleging they are a “pretext to seize control over elections.”

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., late Tuesday, accuses President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche and the agencies they lead of using “shoddily compiled lists of supposed noncitizens” and “coercive threats of legal retaliation against state officials” to assert federal control over the Nov. 3 midterms.

In addition to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and several national Democratic groups, the plaintiffs include Erick Jose Jimenez, an “active California voter” and naturalized U.S. citizen since 2006 who now “fears that he will be unlawfully targeted for voting and disenfranchised (or worse)” given the Trump administration’s track record of misidentifying naturalized citizens as noncitizens.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that while “Democrats and the media continue to dismiss concerns about voter fraud, the Trump Administration is taking decisive lawful action to protect our elections,” including by “prosecuting election crimes, strengthening election infrastructure security, and protecting vulnerable voters from fraud and coercion.”

“Anyone who illegally votes in our elections will be held accountable,” Bis said.

A Justice Department spokesperson said “election integrity is a top priority” and that the department’s actions are “grounded in the law and being litigated in open court.” A Homeland Security spokesperson said it is “laser focused on prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and preventing the dilution of the votes of U.S. citizens.”

Officials from both agencies have asserted that California and other states have ineffective policies for ensuring noncitizens do not vote — relying in part on voters attesting to being citizens — and staunchly defended their own processes for identifying noncitizens on state rolls.

Democrats and leading elections experts say isolated voter fraud does occur and should be taken seriously, but that there is no evidence of widespread fraud.

Tuesday’s lawsuit cites Trump administration claims of thousands of potential noncitizens on Nevada voter rolls crumbling amid state scrutiny. It also cites an administration list of 20,000 “likely noncitizens” allegedly on California rolls being “proven remarkably slapdash” and inaccurate in recent litigation between the administration and California.

The lawsuit alleges a coordinated effort between Trump and other administration officials — in violation of the 10th Amendment and other federal law — to intimidate state and local elections officials nationwide into removing voters from rolls, denying ballots to legally registered voters and segregating the ballots of others “based on spurious and unreliable claims that they are not citizens.”

It says the president is pushing the above efforts not “in a vacuum,” but in the face of repeated steps by Congress and the courts to block his election agenda.

The lawsuit, backed by prominent Democratic elections attorney Marc Elias, follows another filed in the same court last month 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.

That ongoing lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s use of unproven federal databases to allege registered California voters are not citizens, which it says risks misidentifying eligible voters and has left naturalized citizens frightened — the same argument made by Jimenez.

Jimenez, who could not be reached for comment, has “eagerly and consistently exercised his right to vote” since becoming a citizen two decades ago, and plans to vote in the Nov. 3 election but fears being misidentified as a noncitizen and targeted, Tuesday’s lawsuit says.

Administration officials have defended the accuracy of their lists, including in the lawsuit the Justice Department filed against California last week. In that case, the Trump administration has asked the court to force California to set aside the ballots of the 20,000 “likely noncitizens” it flagged until their citizenship is confirmed.

First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, the lead federal prosecutor in L.A., has said that list was compiled using public California voter registration records and third-party and law enforcement data, and that federal authorities have “overwhelming evidence” that those voters are ineligible.

On Monday, federal authorities filed fraudulent registration and other election-related charges against 28 lawful permanent residents in California, which Essayli said “prove our list is accurate and that noncitizens are actually voting.”

However, other administration officials have acknowledged the lists may not be entirely accurate. Acting Deputy Atty. Gen. Trent McCotter said Monday that “there may be some names on there who, it turns out, ultimately are citizens.” A Homeland Security official said in a court filing Monday that “discrepancies” have been found in about 189 of the records.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office — both named defendants in the California case — have accused the Trump administration of illegally interfering in state elections and trying to purge voters in the immediate lead up to an election in violation of federal law using inaccurate data.

Logan’s office said Tuesday that a preliminary analysis of a subset of the administration’s list found many were born in the U.S., weren’t registered or had never voted.

The four-year legal battle of a former member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. who sued the organization behind the Golden Globes over allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and breach of contract, has ended.

Husam “Sam” Asi, a long-standing member of the HFPA who had been expelled from the group in 2022, filed to settle and dismiss his lawsuit with prejudice on Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.

Asi was not immediately available for comment.

“The HFPA is pleased to resolve its litigation with Dr. Asi on mutually agreeable terms and wishes Dr. Asi the best in his future endeavors,” said a spokesperson for the HFPA in a statement to The Times.

Asi sued the HFPA in May 2022, three months after the organization put him on probation following allegations of sexual misconduct that were first reported in the Wrap, prompting a third-party investigation into him.

At the time, he denied the misconduct allegations, calling them baseless. “Of course, I deny them, I deny them all, they are ludicrously absurd,” he told The Times then.

Asi represented the United Kingdom and the Middle East for the association from 2010 to 2022 and was a Palestinian journalist for the BBC Arabic service and a columnist for pan-Arab newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. In his lawsuit, he alleged that the HFPA was “weaponizing false sexual misconduct allegations” in retaliation for “his attempts to hold it accountable.”

According to his lawsuit, Asi said he had “been subjected to and endured a pattern of sexual harassment, hostile behavior, racial epithets and discrimination, and retaliatory conduct, none of which was ever investigated or handled according to HFPA’s bylaws and procedures.”

Asi further alleged that the organization issued a news release announcing that it was putting him on probation “without informing him or communicating with him and contrary to their own bylaws.”

The HFPA denied Asi’s claims.

A flurry of litigation ensued over the next four years.

In July 2022, the HFPA filed a special motion to strike nine of Asi’s 14 causes of action under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, arguing its statements to the press were protected activity.

In October 2023, a year after an L.A. County Superior Court judge denied the HFPA’s anti-SLAPP motion, an appeals court reversed much of that decision and granted the organization’s motion to strike seven of the 14 accusations Asi had filed against it.

The HFPA filed another motion to dismiss Asi’s complaint, based on his “failure to comply with the court’s orders,” in August, stating that it planned to file a motion “to deem Asi a vexatious litigant.”

According to the court docket, a contempt hearing was scheduled for November.

The organization has undergone a series of reforms and changes over the last five years in order to rehabilitate its image and revive its relationship with Hollywood.

NBC had dropped the broadcast of the 2022 Globes and studios including Netflix and WarnerMedia cut ties with the HFPA following a 2021 Los Angeles Times investigation that raised questions about the group’s ethical and financial lapses and revealed that not one of its then-87 members was Black.

Todd Boehly, the billionaire chairman of private equity firm Eldridge Industries, acquired the Golden Globes in 2023, dissolved the nonprofit HFPA and converted the awards show into a for-profit enterprise.

In July, original founding HFPA members filed an antitrust lawsuit in federal court against media mogul Jay Penske, Penske Media Corp., the Golden Globe Foundation and others, alleging the acquisition of the popular awards show was a “sham process tainted by fraud.” The plaintiffs are seeking damages of at least $150 million.

Two women filed a lawsuit Thursday against former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, saying they were sexually exploited by him and other men in violation of a federal anti-trafficking law.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Orlando, Fla., comes nearly two years after the House Ethics Committee said the Florida Republican had regularly paid for sex, including once with a 17-year-old girl, purchased and used illicit drugs, and violated state laws while a member of Congress.

Gaetz had left office when the report was released and denied wrongdoing. But the report helped to tank his nomination to become attorney general in President Trump’s second administration.

Two women said they were in their early 20s in 2017 when they met Gaetz through Joel Greenberg, who was a tax official in Seminole County and is now in prison for a raft of crimes, including a sex crime.

Gaetz provided drugs and paid the women for sex, out-of-state travel, lodging and other expenses, according to the lawsuit.

“Much of the conduct alleged against me is false,” Gaetz said in response.

“The lawsuit relies almost exclusively on a Congressional Committee report that didn’t allow me to confront my accusers. Now I will finally have that chance,” he said in a statement.

Gaetz also appeared to mock the women on the social platform X, sharing a 2018 social media photo of the backs of three women in bathing suits looking at the ocean in the Bahamas.

“I’m shocked nobody responded to their repeated cries for help, posted to instagram,” he said Thursday.

The lawsuit also names Greenberg, another man and businesses tied to Greenberg’s family.

“Every part of this venture ran on an exploitative power imbalance,” the women’s attorney, Spencer Kuvin, said in the lawsuit. “On one side stood a sitting congressman, an elected tax collector, and a former state legislator, men with public office, private homes, and money to spend. On the other stood young financially vulnerable women in their early twenties.”

Gaetz hosts a political talk show on One America News Network. He was recently appointed to the board of Triumph Gulf Coast, which oversees how Florida spends money recovered for damage from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

White writes for the Associated Press.

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.

NEW YORK — Lawyers for the BBC say President Trump is trying to delay sitting for a deposition in the defamation case he brought against the British broadcaster until January 2027.

In a filing this week, they asked a Florida court to compel the president to appear in the $10 billion case after they say he canceled an agreed-upon date this week, citing “matters of national importance.”

“Two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” attorney Charles D. Tobin wrote in the filing. “Those delays have flouted the cooperative spirit of discovery and precluded the BBC from obtaining the evidence necessary to robustly litigate its defense.”

Trump, who has a history of avoiding depositions, filed the lawsuit against the BBC last December, seeking $10 billion in damages as he accused the British broadcaster of defamation as well as deceptive and unfair trade practices related to a documentary, “Trump: A Second Chance.”

Britain’s publicly funded national broadcaster admitted filmmakers spliced together quotes from different sections of the speech Trump delivered to his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, before the storming of the U.S. Capitol, to make it seem like he was directly urging violence.

The 33-page lawsuit accused the BBC of broadcasting a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction of President Trump,” calling it “a brazen attempt to interfere in and influence” the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

The broadcaster apologized to Trump over the edit and the head of the BBC and the British broadcaster’s top news executive both resigned. But the broadcaster has denied Trump’s claims that it defamed him.

In the filing this week, BBC lawyers said that they first requested dates for the deposition in July, and followed up repeatedly. Both sides, they said, eventually agreed on Oct. 16.

However, after weeks of silence, they wrote, “Plaintiff’s counsel responded on September 28, 2026, indicating that ‘the President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance’ and that counsel would ‘endeavor to provide you with a replacement date by the end of this week.’ He did not.”

Instead, they said, they were told last week that Trump “has no availability whatsoever for a deposition” before discovery is set to close on Dec. 18. and were told that Trump would instead make himself available the second or third week of January.

In a statement in response to the filing, a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not address the reasons for Trump’s delay, but repeated its allegations against the BBC and said the president was holding the broadcaster “accountable for its defamation and reckless election interference just as he has held other fake news mainstream media responsible for their wrongdoing.”

Trump voluntarily dropped a $500 million lawsuit he filed against his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen in 2023, days before he was set to give a deposition in that suit.

Colvin writes for the Associated Press.

California sued the Trump administration for the 100th time in under two years Thursday, challenging the practice of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting people for civil immigration violations at or near state courthouses.

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said such arrests have long been barred because they are unconstitutional and deeply disruptive to the rule of law and the rights of victims, witnesses, defendants and other parties to court proceedings.

“We’ve seen serious criminal charges dropped and entire cases jeopardized because victims and witnesses are too scared to come to the courthouse to testify,” Bonta said. “Our justice system cannot function this way.”

Bonta said his office having to take the Trump administration to court 100 times in less than two years, often alongside other Democrat-led states, was a “sobering milestone” and a reflection not of political interference on California’s part — as the president and his supporters have cast it — but of Trump’s nearly unbridled lawlessness.

“It’s very troubling when the most powerful person on the planet and the president of our country is the one trampling over the Constitution, breaking the law so blatantly and brazenly, so consistently, so frequently,” Bonta said.

Independent legal experts said several factors have driven the wave of lawsuits.

Presidents of both parties have increasingly flexed their executive power, and state attorneys general have increasingly sued in response. During Trump’s first term in office, California — under the leadership of then-attorney general and current gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra — sued the Trump administration more than 120 times over four years. Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton — now a Republican candidate for Senate — sued the Biden administration just over 100 times in four years.

Trump in this term quickly began implementing an array of policies leftover from his first term or outlined in the Project 2025 policy blueprint, many of which Bonta and other Democratic attorneys general were prepared to sue over, experts said.

Trump was also able to appoint a host of loyalists with the help of the Republican-controlled Congress, who helped advance policies that less loyal agency heads would have balked at, and which were sure to draw additional legal challenges, experts said.

Daniel Farber, a professor at UC Berkeley Law School and author of “Contested Ground: How to Understand the Limits on Presidential Power,” said California’s raft of lawsuits is a result of the current Trump administration “doing more aggressive things right off the starting block” — but also repeatedly targeting California specifically.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. However, it has consistently derided Bonta’s litigation against the administration as baseless and misguided.

When Bonta claimed in August that his lawsuits had saved California more than $200 billion, namely by reversing Trump cuts to federal funding meant for the state, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Bonta should stop “filing frivolous lawsuits” and “focus on addressing problems in his own state.”

ICE, which also did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has defended its arrests near courthouses as a “common sense” approach to apprehending offenders at times and locations where authorities know they will be.

The 100th case

Bonta’s lawsuit argues that such arrests are arbitrary and capricious given the chilling effect they have on justice in the state. They violate the Immigration and Nationality Act as intended by Congress, and interfere with California’s rights under the 10th Amendment to execute its “core sovereign judicial and police functions,” Bonta’s office said.

His arguments echo those made by other state officials in the past. During Trump’s first term, for example, then-California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye called the arrests “disruptive, shortsighted, and counterproductive.”

Arrests at or near courthouses began to rise again after Trump took office in January 2025. An ICE memo, issued in May 2025, said agents could conduct “civil immigration enforcement actions in or near courthouses when they have credible information that leads them to believe the targeted alien(s) is or will be present at a specific location.”

Incidents quickly began cropping up. In June 2025, ICE agents arrested two women outside a Los Angeles courthouse after a hearing in a local criminal case. The same unfolded across the state.

Alejandro Barraza, a criminal defense and immigration attorney, said he has witnessed the impact firsthand.

In October 2025, a client was arrested driving home from a hearing at the Riverside Hall of Justice. In December, another client was arrested leaving the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse. And a third client chose to plead guilty in his criminal case rather than go to jury trial, despite Barraza’s advice that the case was worth fighting, for fear of being arrested by ICE.

“The victims are losing. Our clients are losing their rights to due process. Everyone is losing,” Barraza said.

In June, U.S. District Judge P. Casey Pitts in San Francisco struck down ICE’s expanded courthouse arrest policies nationwide. Although the lawsuit focused on immigration courthouses, the ruling also covered state criminal courthouses, restoring earlier restrictions that barred civil immigration arrests in or near courthouses except in limited circumstances. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.

Since then, California court officials have tracked arrests by federal agents and reported them to the Judicial Council of California. Thirty people were taken into custody in June, 29 in July, 19 in August and 14 in September.

State legislators have tried to push back. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law strengthening California’s protections against civil arrests for people traveling to, attending or leaving courthouses for lawful purposes. The measure extends those protections to public ways within 1,000 feet of court facilities, while preserving an exception for arrests made under a valid judicial warrant.

Bonta said his lawsuit is necessary despite the new California law, in part because the Trump administration thinks that “no state law applies to them,” and courts have in some cases agreed — including the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which this week blocked a state law that would have required federal immigration agents to display identification while working in the state.

The wider legal battle

Bonta’s office has had substantial success in halting some of the Trump administration’s biggest policy moves — including its plans to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of immigrants, its worldwide tariffs, its deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, and its withholding of billions of dollars in federal funding allocated to the state by Congress.

Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, said many of California’s lawsuits have been “legally meritorious,” as there is a “whole lot of legal error” coming out of the Trump administration — with a “lot of the overreach” having been “facilitated by the lack of internal checks” from loyal Trump agency heads.

However, he also said that as a California taxpayer, he doesn’t “appreciate having government using my tax dollars for what essentially are in many cases ideological lawsuits, even if meritorious,” because private litigants can and often do bring lawsuits of their own. He said he felt the same way about many of the lawsuits brought against the Biden administration by Republican states.

Bonta said he is proud of his team for challenging the Trump administration every time they believed it had broken the law and harmed California, despite Trump’s intentional effort to make that difficult.

“It was a shock and awe. It was flood the zone. It was trying to overwhelm with speed and volume, and we kept pace every time,” he said.

What happens next, he said, will depend on Trump. If he keeps breaking the law in ways that hurt the state or its residents, he’ll keep getting sued by California.