01:06 Jacob Soboroff Good evening from Los Angeles. 01:07 I'm Jacob Soboroff in for Chris Hayes. 01:09 We are 258 days away from possibly the most consequential midterm election in American history. 01:16 And Donald Trump, the aspiring authoritarian in the White House, is desperately looking for ways to turn the math in his party's favor. 01:24 One way to do that would be to try to add voters to his coalition. 01:28 The other is to subtract voters from the equation entirely. 01:32 In fact, you might have caught the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, last week saying her department was going to help make sure the right people were going to elect the right leaders. 01:42 And it turns out that is exactly what they are trying to do. 01:46 New reporting from MS Now tonight says DHS is being deputized to hunt for voter fraud. 01:51 and suppress the vote. 01:53 We're going to have more on that report in just a moment with the great Carol Lennig, but it is becoming obvious that Plan A, trying to figure out how to sell voters on MAGA, is not working for them, as Trump's average approval rating has sunk to 41 percent. 02:07 That is its lowest point in a year. 02:10 Last night, with just weeks before the first election primaries, dozens of White House aides, including Trump's chief of staff and his top pollster, gathered for a closed door midterm strategy session. 02:21 Sources tell MSNOW that in that meeting, officials concluded that the economy, the economy will be the top issue and Trump's historical advantage on immigration was gone. 02:30 So the Republican plan to add voters to their coalition is to talk about affordability, a word Donald Trump says is made up, and avoid talking about the border, which Trump constantly obsesses about. 02:44 Just pretend that everything's going great, that the wild scandals enveloping the White House are worth ignoring because the Dow. 02:53 Pam Bondi None of them asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein. 03:03 How ironic is that? 03:04 You know why? 03:05 Because Donald Trump, the Dow, the Dow right now is over, the Dow is over $50,000. 03:14 I don't know why you're laughing. 03:17 Jacob Soboroff I don't know why you're laughing. 03:19 If that case doesn't sound like it'll convince enough voters, Trump and the Republicans have another strategy, an old favorite of President Trump's, subtracting votes from his political opponents. 03:30 At his direction, Republicans have started to redraw congressional districts in red states to gerrymander blue seats out of existence, but Democratic states have responded in kind. 03:40 So now Republicans are pushing a voter suppression bill 03:43 in Congress. 03:44 It's called the SAVE Act, and it would mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote as well as photo ID to vote and to request a mail-in ballot. 03:53 The bill could make voting a hardship for millions of Americans who live abroad, as well as women and transgender people whose last names do not match their birth certificates. 04:03 And it would require states to hand over their unredacted voter roll data to the Department of Homeland Security. 04:10 That bill has already cleared the House of Representatives, but faces an uncertain fate in the Senate. 04:15 Late last week, Trump posted that if Congress doesn't pass the SAVE Act, he would try unilaterally to make it a law by executive order, saying, quote, there will be voter ID for the midterm elections, whether approved by Congress or not. 04:31 So, yeah, he can't do that. 04:33 But Trump is committed to preventing free and fair elections by any means necessary. 04:40 Donald Trump The Republicans should say, we want to take over. 04:43 We should take over the voting in at least many, 15 places. 04:49 The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. 04:52 We have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes. 04:56 We have states that I won that show I didn't win. 05:01 Jacob Soboroff Ground zero for Trump's effort has been Fulton County, Georgia, the urban locale whose votes cost Donald Trump the state and the election in 2020. 05:10 Late last month, Trump's FBI raided the Fulton County Election Office, taking away 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election, apparently on the basis of the same false election conspiracy theories that he was spreading back then. 05:23 Today, the Republican-controlled Georgia State Board of Elections met for the first time since that raid, and just after, Trump shared an article to social media calling for the state to take over Fulton County's elections. 05:34 They may take up that issue as soon as tomorrow while Trump is in Georgia for a campaign appearance. 05:42 This is all a repeat of 2020 of trying to commandeer an election based on gross claims with no evidence to support them. 05:51 As I found out back then, trying to get details from then Trump campaign proxy and now Trump administration official Rick Rennell. 06:00 Hey, Rick Grinnell, we're live on MSNBC right now. 06:03 Can you talk about the evidence? 06:04 You're claiming thousands of illegitimate votes here in Nevada. 06:07 What's the evidence? 06:08 You should go in and ask the question of the Democratic Party, which you haven't done yet. 06:11 You guys just made the claim. 06:12 No, in fact, you also said there's no election observers. 06:15 There's Democratic and Republican election observers inside. 06:19 And on top of all that, as I mentioned earlier, we now know that the Department of Homeland Security will be playing a role in this year's election, as Kristi Noem let slip last week. 06:30 Kristi Noem I would say that many people believe that it may be one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust is reliable, and that when it gets to election day that we've been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country. 06:47 Jacob Soboroff So what do you mean by the right people voting? 06:50 According to documents reviewed by MS Now, the Department of Homeland Security's chief investigations arm this week launched a broader nationwide campaign to investigate and prosecute naturalized citizens who may have improperly voted in past elections before they became citizens. 07:07 This is a plan ordered by the White House. 07:10 As part of its investigation, MSNOW has also learned that senior DHS and Justice Department appointees have held a series of meetings to discuss sending law enforcement to polling places to, quote, secure elections. 07:22 Law enforcement agents tell MSNOW they worry the administration's true goal is to intimidate voters from showing up in future elections. 07:30 Two current and former DHS officials told MSNOW they have never heard of an initiative like this being run by the department ever before, calling it not normal. 07:42 Carol Lennig is a senior investigative reporter for MSNOW. 07:45 She is the author of Injustice, How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department. 07:50 She was the lead reporter on that story about DHS hunting for voters. 07:53 And she joins me today. 07:55 Now, Carol, it's good to see you. 07:57 We have heard so much. 07:59 I think Walls told me, Newsom told me, Pritzker told me they were worried about federal agents showing up at polls on Election Day. 08:06 Sounds like now there may actually be a plan in place to have some version of that. 08:12 Carol Lennig Well said, Jacob. 08:13 I feel like I've been hearing from sources just like you have for a long time that they're really worried and have been worried about an effort to kind of chill and frighten people away from the polls. 08:25 And here we have two ways in which that looks like it's coming true. 08:29 First, 08:30 The issue of Invest Abroad national investigation of open and closed investigations into possible fraudulent voting by naturalized citizens. 08:42 Let's break that down. 08:44 When the HSI, which is the investigative arm of DHS... 08:48 goes about these investigations, what do they do? 08:51 They send letters and they conduct interviews with naturalized citizens asking them, when did you vote? 08:58 When did you register to vote? 09:00 Let me see your paperwork to determine that you're a naturalized citizen. 09:04 It doesn't take very long for you to frighten somebody who's basically gotten through a legal asylum process, an immigration process, about themselves, their family, their status, and all of their friends. 09:18 and all of their family members and all of their community. 09:22 This is viewed as a way to ask a lot of questions, stir up a lot of dust in 50 states, all led by the Department of Homeland Security. 09:33 And then... 09:34 We'll see if maybe fewer people show up to the polls. 09:38 The second part, which I'm so glad you focus on, is about armed law enforcement. 09:44 We are hearing about a series of meetings, and we reported it first today for MS Now, that DHS and DOJ officials have been conducting over the last several weeks to basically plot and plan how to send armed law enforcement to the polls. 10:00 As you know very well, Jacob, you know this material. 10:04 It is against federal law to send the military or armed law enforcement within a thousand feet of the polls in any way that would intimidate voters. 10:15 This has been one of the biggest fears of Democratic activists and free and fair election advocates. 10:22 And here we now know it's essentially in the works. 10:26 Jacob Soboroff You cite, Carol, in this report, multiple sources who tell you that the driving force behind the sweeping HSI investigations, which, by the way, HSI is normally investigating human trafficking, sex trafficking, other forms of illicit activity that basically in which people are the victims. 10:44 You say is White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. 10:48 Talk about what Stephen Miller's role is here. 10:50 Why does it concern insiders so much? 10:54 Carol Lennig So what's so interesting about this is it's not typical for the White House deputy chief of staff to be telling the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice what to do about potential violations of law. 11:07 But Miller is viewed. 11:09 viewed by both the DHS sources I spoke to and DOJ sources as the architect and the driving force between this effort to investigate naturalized citizens to figure out, did they vote before they were naturalized? 11:24 Did they register to vote before they were naturalized? 11:27 Did they make any mistakes that could be claimed to be fraud in their paperwork? 11:31 And that they, at DHS at least, have been having weekly conference calls with Miller and his staff about doing this. 11:40 As well, we learned today in our reporting that the DHS has been asked to essentially provide 11:47 Report back to the White House directly when they decide not to charge some of these individuals who are viewed as suspected fraud voters. 11:58 Any open or closed cases that they're asked to review. 12:02 Now, if they choose not to charge someone, they've got to tell the White House, which is, again, unprecedented for any law enforcement activity. 12:10 Jacob Soboroff Carol, what are the number of people potentially that we're talking about? 12:14 Am I right that I read in your reporting is around a thousand for starters? 12:18 And what does that mean in the larger scheme of things? 12:20 We have tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people in this country, tens of millions who are voting, maybe more. 12:27 You know, this is about ultimately, it seems, the impact that will have on people that are beyond this 1000 people, I guess is what I'm trying to say. 12:36 Carol Lennig Yeah, yeah, yeah. 12:37 No, really smart question. 12:39 So in the timeline of our reporting, and my colleague Laura Lopez and Vaughn Hilliard were critical to this. 12:48 Let me just give them a shout out. 12:50 In this reporting, what we learned was that in the summer of 2025, HSI was given a list of 1,700 potentially or suspected fraudulent voters who were 13:04 either foreign-born citizens, immigrants in the process of becoming naturalized citizens, 1,700 cases. 13:12 But that rapidly expanded as of this memo that we reviewed that came out on Friday, in which there are potentially hundreds of thousands of naturalized citizens that will be reviewed. 13:25 The White House, by the way, I want to emphasize something. 13:28 When we spoke to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, she said, look, 13:34 It's fair for the administration to be looking for criminals, people who are engaged in fraudulent voting. 13:42 The problem with that is that all of the research done, including by the pro-Trump Heritage Foundation, have concluded that over the course of a decade, there were only 24 identifiable cases of non-citizen voting. 13:59 voter fraud. 14:01 So, you know, expanding to look at further and further and further concentric circles to try to find fraudsters when so far there are so few is raising a lot of hackles with people who want to protect the election and protect voters from being intimidated. 14:18 Jacob Soboroff Caroline, incredible reporting as always. 14:20 Thank you so much for joining me tonight. 14:23 Carol Lennig Thank you, Jacob.