Justice Department Wins Election Case By Abandoning It
The Justice Department secured a landmark victory for election integrity Friday by voluntarily dropping its lawsuit seeking to segregate roughly 20,000 California ballots cast by voters it suspected, but had not proved, were noncitizens. The triumph followed four court losses and arrived one week before a hearing at which government lawyers would have been asked to verify their claims with evidence. By withdrawing before that unpleasant encounter, the department completed the respected legal maneuver known as winning somewhere beyond the jurisdiction of observable reality.
President Donald Trump praised the dismissal as proof that his administration had protected democracy from the dangerous possibility of its allegations being examined. “We won this case very strongly by making sure there was no case left to lose, and the judges wanted evidence, which is very unfair because allegations are always strongest before evidence gets involved,” Trump said. Administration officials said the withdrawal demonstrated confidence, noting that only a deeply secure government would flee an evidentiary hearing while announcing that everyone else had surrendered.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the administration had “thrown in the towel,” apparently overlooking the Justice Department’s position that towels are routinely thrown during victory ceremonies. The celebratory retreat came after the Supreme Court declined to intervene and a federal judge scheduled proceedings to examine the accuracy of the government’s voter list. Justice Department officials continued to maintain that thousands of “likely noncitizens” voted in the midterms, while explaining that producing reliable proof would politicize their neutral effort to discard ballots using information delivered on a password-protected thumb drive.
The dismissal establishes a durable precedent for future election litigation: Federal officials may announce mass fraud, lose repeatedly, abandon the lawsuit before their evidence is inspected and cite the disappearance of the case as confirmation that the allegations were correct. By avoiding further judicial scrutiny, the administration preserved every accusation in its original, pristine and fact-free condition. The Justice Department therefore proved conclusively that the disputed ballots were illegal by ensuring no court could conclude they were.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.