Latest / Burn the Playbook with Michael Starr Hopkins / They Said 190,000. They Charged 28.

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They Said 190,000. They Charged 28. · Burn the Playbook with Michael Starr Hopkins

• 0:00
  Federal officials claimed California had a hundred ninety thousand non-citizen voters. The Justice Department later charged twenty-eight people. Charges can establish what prosecutors allege about those defendants.
• 0:11
  They cannot validate every name on a much larger list. It's October twentieth, 2026.
• 0:17
  California faces a fight over whose ballots get counted, while two other federal cases show how wrongdoing can hide behind an ordinary business explanation. Start with California.
• 0:27
  In July, President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin put forward the hundred ninety thousand figure.
• 0:33
  California's Secretary of State asked in writing how officials reached it and had not received a response. On October thirteenth, a password-protected thumb drive reached Los Angeles with a forty-eight-hour deadline.
• 0:45
  Federal officials said it contained more than twenty thousand names of non-citizens on California's voter rolls. Those names had not reached the Secretary of State.
• 0:53
  On October twenty-fourth, the Justice Department told California counties to set the associated ballots aside. The Ninth Circuit agreed to hear its emergency bid to prevent them from being counted.
• 1:03
  Agreeing to hear that request was not a ruling that every flagged voter was ineligible.
• 1:08
  Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter warned that officials who knowingly counted those ballots risked aiding and abetting a federal crime. Trump shared the letter and threatened long prison terms.
• 1:18
  Now consider the cases the department actually brought. On October nineteenth, it charged twenty-eight people. Eleven were arrested, all green card holders. Those arrested were on the larger list.
• 1:29
  None had been convicted. The department's release described registrations going back to 2002, 2006, and 2012.
• 1:37
  For five of the thirteen people charged out of Los Angeles, it listed registration and a false answer on a naturalization form without describing a vote. That does not settle the other cases.
• 1:47
  It does mean registration, an alleged false statement, and an illegally cast ballot cannot be treated as interchangeable.
• 1:53
  Los Angeles County's own review found canceled registrations, inactive registrations, and people listed as born in the United States. Texas ran all eighteen million of its voters through the federal system.
• 2:05
  One in five flags turned out to identify a citizen. The Justice Department had also filed thirty-one lawsuits seeking states' unredacted voter rolls. Twenty-six had lost and none had won.
• 2:16
  Those results did not establish the outcome of the remaining cases. The public needs the method behind these lists. Twenty-eight charges neither prove a mass voting claim nor prove that no other violation occurred.
• 2:28
  Courts must decide the charges. Election officials need reliable evidence before a spreadsheet becomes a reason to exclude a ballot.
• 2:35
  California voters can use the Secretary of State's Where's My Ballot tracker to confirm receipt. A threatened prison sentence does not repair a faulty match.
• 2:44
  The next case concerns equipment reaching a Russian missile plant. For four years, Extreme Networks told Reuters its gear reached the plant through a front company it did not know about.
• 2:54
  The plant builds the S300 and S400 systems. A federal filing on Tuesday described Russia-based Extreme employees hiding the buyer from their own compliance team across eleven purchase orders.
• 3:05
  The outcome included a penalty of about nine hundred seventy-six thousand dollars and a non-prosecution agreement. Extreme Networks blamed a stranger. The stranger was on the payroll.
• 3:15
  That finding concerns the employees described in the filing. It does not establish that the compliance team knew what they concealed.
• 3:22
  Finally, an Oregon contractor pleaded guilty to paying four hundred sixty-five thousand dollars in kickbacks. An insider at a prime contractor steered him postal service repair jobs across five states.
• 3:34
  Federal prosecutors said the bribes were built into inflated estimates and invoices. Money billed as repair costs helped cover the kickbacks. The insider's identity was not provided here.
• 3:44
  An invoice can make a bribe look like maintenance. A voter list can make a disputed match look like proof. The public should be able to demand what sits behind both before paying the bill or losing a vote.
• 3:56
  Subscribe free at burn the playbook dot news for the reporting and next update. [upbeat music]