Midterm Elections 2026: Justice Department’s Pre-Vote Blitz
The midterm elections 2026 are less than a week away, and the Justice Department has spent October pursuing a rapid series of high-profile cases and court actions that have put the department itself at the center of the campaign. With control of Congress on the line on November 3, the department has escalated an investigation of a Democratic member of Congress, brought charges against former FBI officials, renewed its effort to prosecute a former FBI director, and sued two states over how they handle ballots. Defense lawyers, Democrats, and other critics argue that the timing and the targets are no coincidence. The department, for its part, has presented each step as ordinary law enforcement, carried out wherever the evidence leads.
The argument over the department’s actions is now inseparable from the election itself. Early voting is already under way in much of the country, and the cases touch the mechanics of voting and the reputations of prominent critics of President Donald Trump. Whether the flurry of activity changes any votes is unknowable, but it has already given both parties fresh material for their closing arguments.
The October Blitz: Omar, Comey and Former FBI Officials
The most striking moves of the month concern people who have publicly crossed the president. On October 12, federal agents searched the home of Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, and seized her cellphone. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the administration is building an investigation into possible immigration fraud that could ultimately seek to strip the Somali-born lawmaker of her citizenship and deport her. The search of a sitting member of Congress’s home is, by any measure, an extraordinary step, and it landed in the middle of a campaign season in which Omar has been one of the president’s most frequent targets.
The department also brought criminal charges against two former FBI officials accused of falsely playing down what they knew about investigations involving Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joe Biden. And it revealed a fresh attempt to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, a longtime antagonist of the president who has already been at the center of several earlier legal battles. A separate effort to secure an indictment of a former White House aide, whose dramatic and disputed testimony described the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, did not succeed.
What has drawn particular attention from legal observers is how some of these charges were assembled. Prosecutors in Washington bypassed grand juries to file what amount to placeholder cases against Comey and the former FBI officials, an unusual maneuver in a city where prosecutors have repeatedly struggled over the past year to win indictments. Critics say the shortcut suggests speed mattered more than the usual process. Supporters of the department’s approach counter that prosecutors are entitled to use every lawful tool available, and that the prominence of the defendants does not place them beyond the reach of the law.
David Laufman, who served as a senior Justice Department official under both Democratic and Republican administrations and helped oversee the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, put the critics’ case in stark terms. “Never in the modern history of the Department of Justice has there ever been such a brazen disregard for time-honored norms and protocols in conceiving of or undertaking politically sensitive investigations,” he said. The department has long observed an informal practice of restraint in the run-up to elections, precisely to avoid the appearance that federal power is being used to tip a contest. The October blitz, critics say, discards that restraint at the moment it matters most.
California and Alaska: Ballot Lawsuits Days Before Voting
Alongside the criminal cases, the department has gone to court over ballots themselves. In California, it filed suit on October 15 and asked a federal judge to temporarily block the counting of mail ballots from more than 20,000 registered voters it described as likely noncitizens. The request arrived after early voting had already begun, and it asked the court to intervene in a state-run election weeks before polling day, a step that election lawyers described as exceptionally rare.
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge David Carter rejected the request after a hearing in Los Angeles. Carter, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, warned that a ruling for the department would “wreak havoc” and could leave thousands of registered voters at risk of losing a right that generations of Americans fought to preserve. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch,” he wrote. The department had earlier put the number of supposedly ineligible California voters at 190,000 before revising it to 20,000, and a preliminary review by Los Angeles County investigators found that more than a quarter of the people flagged on the list had a U.S. birthplace recorded, while others had already had their registrations canceled.
The California effort had already suffered a setback earlier in the week, when a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the department’s emergency request on procedural grounds, finding that the lower court had not been given enough time to rule. Judge Mark Bennett, an appointee of President Trump, wrote separately that he would also have denied the request on its merits. An appeal is expected either way, keeping the dispute alive into the final days of the campaign.
In Alaska, the department filed a lawsuit seeking to delay certification of the U.S. Senate result if Republican Senator Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. The department’s argument rests on a second candidate on the ballot, Dan J. Sullivan Jr., who it says could confuse voters and draw support away from the incumbent. Alaska’s Supreme Court has already ruled that the second Sullivan can appear on the ballot, and the state’s ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank both candidates. Peltola’s campaign and national Democrats have moved to intervene, and state election lawyers have asked for a ruling by Monday, the day before the election, in a contest that could help decide the battle for the Senate.
The department has pressed similar demands elsewhere. In Washington state, it asked election officials to set aside the ballots of 400 people it alleges are noncitizens. In Nevada, an administration claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens were on the voter rolls collapsed on inspection: the figure was later reduced to 185, and state records then showed that all 185 were citizens. Democrats and election groups have sued over what they describe as threats against states, pointing to an October 13 demand that California withhold ballots and to warnings that administrators could face prosecution if they refused to purge voters from their rolls.
The Trump Administration’s Election Push and the Norms Debate
The ballot lawsuits are part of a wider October push by the trump administration that reaches beyond the Justice Department. On October 7, the president established a White House committee to investigate alleged mortgage fraud by Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, authorizing Justice Department personnel to take part in proceedings that could lead to her removal. Cook denies wrongdoing. The move added a central bank official to a list of targets that already included lawmakers, former law-enforcement leaders, and state election officials.
For the democratic party news cycle, the pattern has become a central charge: that federal power is being aimed at the opposition and at the machinery of voting itself, in the closing weeks of a contest in which the president’s party is fighting to hold both houses of Congress. For republican party news, the counterargument is that the cases involve genuine questions of fraud, citizenship, and eligibility, and that enforcement should not stop simply because an election is near.
The deeper question is what the department’s role should be in the final days before voting. For decades, attorneys general of both parties have tried to keep the department visibly separate from campaign politics, worried that even the appearance of interference could damage public confidence. The current leadership has taken a different view, arguing that the duty to enforce the law does not pause for elections. Legal scholars note that the merits of each case will be tested in court, but that so many sensitive actions landing at once is itself a break with precedent.
Monitors at the Polls: What the Department Told a Court
The same week brought a separate but related development: a court filing clarifying who will actually watch the polls on Election Day. The department told a federal court in Washington on Wednesday that no FBI or Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees will serve as election monitors for the midterms, in a case brought by the NAACP. Instead, monitors will be drawn from the Bureau of Prisons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. All monitors will be barred from carrying firearms and trained not to interfere with any voter or election official, according to the filing, which described the monitoring as consistent with past practice going back decades.
The filing landed against a backdrop of anxiety among state and local election officials, some of whom have said they are preparing for federal interference at polling places. The president had earlier declined, in a May television interview, to rule out sending National Guard troops or immigration agents to voting locations, saying he would do anything necessary to ensure honest elections. Administration and military officials have since said there are no plans to deploy troops or immigration agents to polling sites, and the department says its monitors will observe and take notes rather than administer elections or decide who may vote.
Even so, voting-rights groups argue that the presence of federal monitors, particularly in liberal-leaning areas with large Hispanic populations that have been told to expect them, could feel like scrutiny of the voter rather than protection of the vote. The department says it prioritizes jurisdictions required to provide language assistance and areas covered by consent decrees from earlier election problems, and it has promised a full list of counties early next week. Tens of thousands of volunteers organized by parties and civic groups are also preparing to watch the polls, setting up an Election Day in which the watchers themselves will be closely watched.
What Happens Next Before November 3
The immediate calendar is crowded. Alaska’s courts have been asked to rule by Monday on the certification lawsuit. The California dispute is expected to return on appeal after Judge Carter’s rejection. The criminal cases against Comey and the former FBI officials will move through their early procedural stages, where defense lawyers are likely to challenge both the charges and the unusual way they were filed. And the department’s promised list of monitored counties will give election officials their first complete picture of where federal observers will be stationed.
For voters, the practical consequences are narrower than the headlines suggest, but they are real. The California ballots at issue will be counted unless a higher court orders otherwise. The Alaska Senate race will be decided by voters ranking their choices, whatever the courts decide about certification timing. And the criminal cases, whatever their merits, will not be resolved before Election Day. What the blitz has already done is sharpen the stakes both parties describe: Democrats warn of an election conducted under federal pressure, while Republicans argue that the pressure is simply enforcement of laws that protect the vote.
The 2026 midterms have always been framed as a verdict on the president’s second term, with the battle for the House and the battle for the Senate determining how much of his agenda can advance. The Justice Department’s October actions have added a second question to that verdict: whether voters believe the institutions that run and police elections are neutral arbiters or participants in the contest. That question will not be settled on November 3, but the way the department conducts itself in the remaining days, and the way courts respond, will shape how it is answered in the months that follow.
Source: The Associated Press