subpoena

Federal investigators have sent Los Angeles County elections officials at least five grand jury subpoenas for individual voter records as part of a criminal investigation into illegal voting, according to partially redacted records reviewed by The Times.

The subpoenas — released in response to a public records request — appear related to a nationwide effort by the Trump administration to identify noncitizens who have illegally cast ballots in U.S. elections.

The subpoenas were issued in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. They were sent to L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan’s office at the request of prosecutors in the office of First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli.

“The enclosed subpoena has been issued in connection with an official criminal investigation being conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations,” Assistant. U.S. Atty. Michael Wheat — based out of the district’s Orange County office — wrote in a letter accompanying a Sept. 10 subpoena.

Wheat wrote that a custodian of records from Logan’s office must either appear before the grand jury to present the records or deliver the materials to a special agent from Homeland Security Investigations.

Four of the subpoenas — one issued on July 13 and three on Sept. 10 — request “any and all original and non-redacted voter records” from Jan. 1, 2020, to the present for a list of individual voters stretching across two pages. The lists were redacted by Los Angeles County officials, and it is unclear how many individuals each list contained.

Each of those subpoenas notes that records to be produced include information on individual voters, such as their “registration file” and “addresses listed, history and method of voting, [and] any and all attestation regarding citizenship status.”

A fifth subpoena, issued July 31, appears to request similar information for a single voter, and notes that the voter’s “ballot content or vote selections” should not be included.

Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for Essayli’s office, declined to comment on the investigations Monday.

The Times first reported the existence of the subpoenas, but not details from the records themselves, last week, after Logan confirmed that his office was complying with the federal inquiry despite having concerns that investigators may be using incorrect or outdated information to produce their lists of voters to investigate.

“We’re responding appropriately as directed through a subpoena, but that doesn’t afford the dialogue for us to get the background on what they’re looking for and how they came up with the names that they did,” Logan said. “There’s really no information being provided to us on that.”

President Trump has alleged for years that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread, though experts say the problem — which they acknowledge occurs — is exceedingly rare. Homeland Security officials have been leading a campaign in recent months to identify such fraud nationwide, and the subpoenas received by L.A. County appear to match others received by elections officials elsewhere in the country.

Essayli — a Trump loyalist who has not been confirmed to lead the Los Angeles prosecutor’s office by the U.S. Senate and whose de facto leadership has been contested in court — has been vocal about his office’s pursuit of voter fraud, including by noncitizens.

His office has announced two voter fraud cases in recent weeks, including one involving the arrest of 30-year-old Honduran national on two felony charges of falsely claiming U.S. citizenship and fraudulently registering to vote. That man, Darwin Jonathan Rivera-Flores, has pleaded not guilty and is out on bond pending trial.

Rivera-Flores and his attorney declined to comment.

The Justice Department also recently announced it had charged 16 noncitizens in six other states with illegal voting and other election-related crimes.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin publicly claimed in July — without providing evidence — that there may be more than 190,000 such voters on California rolls, a claim California officials dismissed as baseless.

Three of the five subpoenas received by Logan’s office ask that the voter information be shared with Al Rossi, the acting assistant head of Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles.

Reached by phone, Rossi referred questions to an agency spokesperson, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Wheat had asked that the subpoenas be kept secret, so as not to impede an open investigation. Logan’s office released the records in accordance with California public records law, but redacted the names of voters on the grounds that doing so “protects those individuals from undue attention, harassment, intimidation, or possible harm” and “protects the integrity” of the investigation.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld Trump’s expanded use of government data to search for noncitizens who are registered to vote. A lower court order had blocked use of the data over concerns — shared by the Supreme Court’s liberal wing — that the data are error-prone.

Voting rights experts have expressed concern that misuse of the data could lead to legitimate voters being purged from rolls.

States across the country, including California, have successfully fought off lawsuits from the Trump administration demanding the states’ complete voter rolls.

It is unclear why a subpoena for a single voter’s information would come between subpoenas for information on longer lists of voters. But it lines up with the case against Rivera-Flores.

In an affidavit filed with a criminal complaint against Rivera-Flores, Special Agent Christopher Kuzma — the same agent listed on the July 31 subpoena requesting a single voter’s information — said he received a series of texts he believed were from Rivera-Flores, who had previously been issued a misdemeanor citation on suspicion of disrupting immigration law enforcement operations at the federal building in Camarillo.

One text sent in April 2026 stated, “Your not the good guy I can’t wait until the mid terms you dont have qualified immunity then we can start and indict all you guys one bye one.”

Kuzma said in his affidavit that he took the message to mean Rivera-Flores “has both an interest in the voting process and an intent to participate in the election process.”

According to the affidavit, Kuzma said he conducted several record checks through public databases, including on the California secretary of state’s website, which “disclosed an online voter registration record” for a “Darwin Rivera” at Rivera-Flores’ address.

In July 2026, Kuzma said in the affidavit, he reviewed records from California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office for “Darwin J Rivera,” which showed the applicant had checked a box stating he was a U.S. citizen.

Kuzma’s affidavit said in August 2026 he received certified voter registration records from Los Angeles County.

The spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a question about whether Kuzma’s July 31 subpoena was specific to Rivera-Flores, but the office has previously said Wheat is prosecuting the case.

When Rivera-Flores’ arrest was announced, Essayli said it was “the first of many to come.”

With the deadline for mailing out millions of California ballots nearing, Los Angeles County’s top election official welcomed the U.S. Postal Service’s recent assurance that it will process those ballots as normal — not under the untested new vetting system backed by President Trump and rejected as unworkable by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“That certainly serves as a stabilizing force, as we’re literally weeks away from mailing the ballots,” said Dean Logan, head of the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office.

Still, there are other Trump administration challenges to deal with, he said — including unsubstantiated public claims of widespread voter fraud, refusals by top-ranking officials to rule out deployments of armed federal agents to polling places, and behind-the-scenes criminal probes into local voter lists.

Since March, Logan’s office has received a series of federal grand jury subpoenas demanding voter registration and other information on dozens of individuals who the Trump administration says may not be U.S. citizens, Logan confirmed to The Times.

Logan said his office is now in the “interesting place” of having to comply with the subpoenas despite suspecting that the Department of Homeland Security relied on inaccurate or outdated voter information to compile the names to investigate.

“We’re responding appropriately as directed through a subpoena, but that doesn’t afford the dialogue for us to get the background on what they’re looking for and how they came up with the names that they did,” Logan said. “There’s really no information being provided to us on that.”

The subpoenas appear to mirror others received by elections officials elsewhere in the country as part of a new Homeland Security effort to identify noncitizen voting, which Trump has long alleged without evidence is widespread.

In July, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin publicly claimed, again without evidence, that there may be more than 190,000 such voters on California rolls. On Friday, the Justice Department announced it had charged 16 noncitizens in six states with illegal voting and other election-related crimes following investigations alongside its Homeland Security partners.

California Secretary of State Shirley Weber dismissed Mullin’s claims. Independent elections experts and Democratic officials say voter fraud should be taken seriously, but is exceedingly rare. California has more than 23 million registered voters.

Mullin’s remarks and the subpoenas appear part of a much larger and unprecedented federal effort to bolster allegations from Trump that the upcoming Nov. 3 elections are unsafe and corrupted by noncitizen voters.

Trump issued two executive orders, one requiring voters to provide additional identification and proof of citizenship, and one ordering the Postal Service to refuse mail ballots it deems illegitimate. The Justice Department has sued California and other states for their voter rolls, and Homeland Security has threatened state elections officials with criminal sanctions if they don’t purge noncitizens from their rolls.

Trump gave a speech in July alleging that the American election system is “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” Earlier this month, he encouraged his supporters to “cheat like hell” to keep Republicans in power, and told them they would receive $5,000 each if they succeed — which many experts derided as a “bribe.”

Last week, FBI Director Kash Patel refused to rule out sending federal agents to polls.

Despite all that, California officials and independent elections experts have maintained the election will be safe — in part because Trump’s executive orders and the Justice Department’s many lawsuits seeking state voter rolls have all been blocked by the courts.

“The bottom line for voters in California right now is nothing has changed. We’ve had safe and secure elections, and we will continue to do so,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).

Logan said it “is clear that the administration is aggressively pursuing their narrative” about voter fraud being widespread as part of Trump’s old “playbook” of questioning votes he expects to lose — but that the election in California will nonetheless “be fair and secure and transparent.”

The fight over fraud

At least three subpoenas have been issued to Logan’s office — one in March, one in July and one this month — including from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of California, The Times confirmed.

U.S. Atty. Adam Gordon, who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in San Diego, did not respond to a request for comment. First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli, who leads the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles and has announced two voter fraud cases in recent weeks, also did not respond to questions about his office’s election work.

Essayli did say Saturday, in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom touting new state laws aimed at safeguarding California elections from Trump administration interference, that no state law can prevent the Justice Department from investigating voter fraud and that his office “will continue to investigate, arrest, and prosecute all violations of federal election laws.”

Additional information, including how the subpoenas may relate to Mullin’s claims, wasn’t immediately available.

Mullin in July alleged in a letter to Weber that a federal review of unspecified data found “as many as 190,832 non-citizens registered to vote in California.”

Weber responded in writing that she had “serious doubts about the reliability” of that analysis, as California election officials “work every day to maintain accurate voter rolls” and have never shared their rolls with the Trump administration — despite the administration’s failed lawsuit demanding them.

Weber criticized Mullin for having made such claims with “no detail whatsoever that my office can use to evaluate the veracity of your allegations,” and asked that he provide a “detailed description” of the data and methodology used to reach such conclusions.

Weber’s office said Mullin’s letter was “part of a broader effort to intimidate Californians and make it burdensome to participate in our democracy.”

In a statement to The Times, a Homeland Security spokesperson said the department offered to meet with Weber and her staff “to engage in a collaborative good faith discussion” about identifying noncitizens on state rolls, which she declined.

The spokesperson said Mullin’s count of potential noncitizens on California rolls was based on “publicly available data from states’ voter rolls” that was cross-referenced with its own lists of “known” noncitizens. “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Independent experts also have questioned Mullin’s claims, pointing to investigations elsewhere — including in Texas — that found Homeland Security data on alleged noncitizen voters were substantially inaccurate. A federal judge recently blocked the use of a Trump administration database known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program based on the likelihood that it could lead to legitimate voters being purged from rolls.

Last week, Padilla and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) released a Homeland Security whistleblower report alleging that department leaders, under a new “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” were requiring poorly trained employees to identify at least five potentially illegal voters per hour — one every 12 minutes — using questionable data the department said it compiled using “magic.”

In a letter to Mullin, the senators demanded the initiative be halted, arguing that work at such a “breakneck pace” is bound to produce errors and that agency officials appeared to be circumventing court orders blocking their access to state vote rolls by gathering such information “by any means, regardless of state laws.”

Padilla on Friday asked California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office to investigate the whistleblower’s claims. A spokesperson for Bonta’s office said the allegations “describe yet another fishing expedition by the Trump Administration to uncover evidence of widespread voter fraud despite repeated findings that there is none,” but otherwise declined to comment.

The Homeland Security spokesperson rejected the whistleblower claims, saying its work has been “conducted diligently and professionally” as part of a “commonplace law enforcement” effort. The spokesperson said that the agency cannot comment on active investigations, but that its investigative branch — Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI — is “actively rooting out and investigating election fraud wherever it can be found.”

“There is no quota on criminality. DHS will pursue each and every illegal voter to the fullest extent of the law,” the spokesperson said.

Fears and reassurances

Recent polling has shown that fewer than half of Americans expect the midterms to be “free and fair,” and that Californians are more concerned about Trump administration interference than voter fraud.

Election experts said some of the worst threats have already been blocked, but acknowledged remaining worries.

Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA Law, said he is concerned the Trump administration will try to deny the outcome or seize ballots in close congressional races — but only if control of the House or Senate rests on them.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College and co-director of Bright Line Watch, said he worries that isolated incidents of federal agents intimidating voters or seizing ballots in key races will throw the legitimacy of the entire election into question — and that the Trump administration will capitalize on that to serve its own agenda.

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), part of a Democratic task force preparing for such issues, said that Trump and other administration officials are trying to interfere in the election because they know they have “failed to deliver for the American people” and the Republican Party stands to lose power as a result.

Schiff said that Democratic leaders are fighting back “and largely succeeding,” but that “the best way to uphold the integrity of our elections” remains voters making their voices heard.

Padilla said the attempt by Homeland Security to push its way into elections has been “shoddy” in part because “they don’t have the expertise [and] it’s not their charge,” but also because Trump has put Mullin and other election “conspiracy theorists” in charge.

“If you install a conspiracy theorist into these roles, then they’re gonna come out with these claims that are not based on facts, not based on evidence, not based on any data,” he said.

Padilla said Trump and his supporters are “absolutely laying the groundwork” to question November election results they don’t like, but voters should know that “there’s even more of us standing up and fighting back and protecting their right to vote.”

Sept. 16, 2026 3:10 PM PT

WASHINGTON — The House approved a resolution Wednesday holding billionaire Leon Black in contempt of Congress, referring the matter to the Department of Justice after he defied the Oversight Committee’s subpoenas in its investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The action was swift and without a formal vote, and now leaves it to the Justice Department to decide whether to seek criminal prosecution. Black has refused to respond to the subpoenas’ requests to appear and to turn over any potential nondisclosure agreements involving the investigation into Epstein.

Republicans and Democrats from the Oversight Committee joined in a bipartisan effort to advance the resolution forward.

“No one is above the law,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the Oversight Committee chairman, said in a statement. “We will continue to seek transparency for the American people and justice for survivors in our investigation of the federal government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell criminal cases.”

California Rep. Robert Garcia, the panel’s top Democrat, called the vote “an important step toward justice and accountability.”

Black’s lawyers have denounced the Oversight Committee’s pursuit of the former head of a private equity firm as an abuse of congressional power. They said he “had no knowledge of any of Epstein’s heinous conduct.”

“The Committee has continued to insist on looking for information that does not exist,” attorneys Susan Estrich and Aaron Cutler said in a statement. They called the action “politically motivated” and have sued the committee and asked the Office of Congressional Conduct to open a probe into Comer’s tactics.

“This an outrageous action that ignores the facts and the truth about Mr. Black,” they said.

Epstein investigation churns in Congress

Black is the latest among several prominent figures, including former President Clinton and Bill Gates, who have been asked to appear as part of the Oversight Committee’s long-running probe of Epstein. Survivors of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse have told personal stories of being young women in a trafficking enterprise organized by Epstein and his colleague Maxwell.

In June, Black did appear for a voluntary interview at the committee. Lawmakers said later that he refused to answer their questions about the nondisclosure agreements.

The committee issued two subpoenas seeking to compel Black to produce the NDAs and to appear for a deposition July 16. The committee said it had accommodated Black’s request to delay the deposition to Sept. 3, but he refused to appear.

On Tuesday the Oversight Committee voted unanimously to approve the contempt recommendation, sending it to the full House.

Black co-founded the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and stepped down in 2021 during the fallout over his ties to Epstein. Lawmakers have alleged that Black paid Epstein $180 million during their years-long relationship.

A 2021 review commissioned by Apollo found that Black paid Epstein $158 million from 2012 to 2017, after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. The review said the payments were for “bona fide tax, estate planning and other related services.”

Mascaro writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Billionaire investor Leon Black refused to appear for a sworn deposition before Congress on Thursday and instead sued the House Oversight Committee, asking a federal court to block subpoenas issued as part of its investigation into disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The House Oversight Committee served Black with two subpoenas during a closed-door voluntary interview in June after lawmakers said he refused to answer questions about nondisclosure agreements. One subpoena demanded Black produce nondisclosure agreements and other documents, while the other compelled him to return for a deposition before the committee.

Black’s lawsuit argues the subpoenas exceed the committee’s authority by seeking private information unrelated to Epstein or any legitimate legislative purpose. It asks a federal judge to declare the subpoenas invalid and prevent the committee from enforcing them.

“The Committee is on a fishing expedition that oversteps its authority and completely ignores its responsibility,” Black’s attorney, Susan Estrich, said in a statement. “This is no longer about finding the truth about Epstein. It is about trying to destroy Mr. Black.”

Top Oversight lawmakers threaten to hold Black in contempt

The top Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the committee both criticized Black’s lawsuit and said they planned to discuss later Thursday whether they would hold him in contempt of Congress.

“This is unacceptable. We’re very disappointed,” said House Oversight Chair James Comer. “Of all the powerful billionaires and political people we’ve brought in for interview and depositions, this is the first time anyone’s filed suit.”

Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, called the lawsuit “laughable” and that Black is “trying to slow the process down of getting us the information.”

“Today, the process of contempt has to begin,” Garcia said.

Being held in contempt opens up a witness to criminal prosecution. If the House approves a contempt resolution against Black, it would fall to the Justice Department to decide whether to bring charges against him.

Black paid Epstein over $150 million during their yearslong relationship

Black is the co-founder and former chief executive of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. He stepped down in 2021 during the fallout over his ties to Epstein.

Lawmakers have alleged that Black paid Epstein $180 million during their yearslong relationship.

A 2021 review commissioned by Apollo found that Black paid Epstein $158 million from 2012 to 2017, after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor. The review said the payments were for “bona fide tax, estate planning and other related services.”

Black is among a number of influential figures to appear in the investigation into Epstein and the web of wealth and influence around him. Other figures to have appeared for the investigation include former Democratic President Bill Clinton, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Black is mentioned repeatedly in files that the Justice Department has released related to the Epstein investigation. He also appears in a collection of birthday messages sent to Epstein that were released by the House committee last year, including a poem attributed to Black that refers to “Blond, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically.”

Before the June 26 appearance before the committee, Black maintained that he was not aware of Epstein’s “nefarious activity” until 2019 and that he paid Epstein for legitimate purposes, in part due to his “unrivaled network of relationships” with influential figures.

Cappelletti writes for the Associated Press.