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Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, February 2nd, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What A Day. The show that hopes the release of two Black journalists over the weekend, former CNN host Don Lemon and Minnesota reporter Georgia Fort, is a sign of better things to come in Black History Month. Both were arrested for covering an anti-ICE protest at a church last month. Fort told CNN, quote, “If they can criminalize a journalist here in Minnesota, whether you’re independent or not, I think that we’ve seen a track record where this is just going to continue to escalate.” In the immortal words of my late grandmother. Mm-hmm. [music break] On today’s show, here we are again. The government is partially shut down. This time Congress debates reining in immigration enforcement and a massive trove of Epstein files drops. It’s shady as hell and probably nothing will happen. But let’s start with elections. Texas was the site of two big Democratic wins this weekend. First, Christian Menefee won the state’s 18th congressional district on Saturday, winnowing down the Republican majority in the U.S. House to just four seats. Then in Tarrant County, Democrat and Air Force veteran, Taylor Rehmet, pulled off a 14-plus point victory in a state Senate special election, taking a district President Donald Trump won by 17 points in 2024. It’s that second race that attracted Trump’s attention. He posted about it multiple times on Truth Social before the election, demanding, quote, “All America First patriots in Texas’ 9th State Senate district vote for the Republican candidate.” But I guess all the America First Patriots in the Texas’ ninth state Senate district were busy. And anyway, Trump made it very clear at Mar-a-Lago on Sunday that he actually didn’t care about or know anything about that race. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I don’t know, I didn’t hear about it. Somebody ran where? 

[clip of unknown reporter 1] In Texas. Special election for a legislative seat. 

[clip of unknown reporter 2] The ninth seat, senate seat. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] I’m not involved in that. That’s a local Texas race. 

[clip of unknown reporter 3] You [indistinct].

[clip of President Donald Trump] You mean I won by 17? 

[clip of unknown reporter 1] Yes.

[clip of President Donald Trump] And this person lost? Things like that happen. 

Jane Coaston: Sure. But Trump is very, very concerned with one election, the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to President Joe Biden, a fact Trump cannot seem to move past. Which might be why, last Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seeking records related to the 2020 election. Speaker Mike Johnson tried to put some lipstick on that particular pig on Meet the Press on Sunday. Here he is speaking to host Kristen Welker.

[clip of Kristen Welker] Is it healthy for this country’s democracy, for the sitting president to be questioning the 2020 election five years ago, something, claims that have been deemed to be false, again now that he lost?

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] What’s healthy for our country and our democracy is for everyone to be laser focused on election integrity. If you don’t have free and fair elections–

[clip of Kristen Welker] But that’s not election integrity, Mr. Speaker. 

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] Well yes it is. Wait a minute, yes it is.

[clip of Kristen Welker] This this was asked and answered and litigated and re-litigated. 

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] The–

[clip of Kristen Welker] The page has been turned, he’s still talking about an election that he lost, allegations which have been deemed claimed– 

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] The president–

[clip of Kristen Welker] –false. 

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] –is keeping the focus on election integrity. It must be in the forefront of everyone’s minds because if you don’t have a free and fair election, you cannot maintain a constitutional republic. 

Jane Coaston: Fact check. Trump cares about election integrity for one candidate and one candidate only, himself. And even then, I don’t think the integrity part is really what he’s focused on. This raid is just one of many ways the president has challenged the American election system since taking office a year ago. With the midterms just months away, I spoke to Marc Elias, the founder of the voting rights news and election tracking site, Democracy Docket. We talked about some real threats to U.S. election integrity, many of which are coming from the White House. Marc, welcome to What A Day! 

Marc Elias: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: On Wednesday, we saw the FBI seize 2020 election ballots from a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia. And on Thursday, during the president’s cabinet meeting, Trump said the search found, quote, “burn bags” of information detailing, quote, “how corrupt the 2020 election was.” So what the hell was the FBI doing in Fulton County? 

Marc Elias: Okay, so first of all, whatever the FBI was doing here in Fulton County, and I don’t have any inside information, I rather doubt there were burn bags sitting there with 2020 materials, right? Trump likes going with the burn bags thing, like this is not the first time he has rolled that out. But um look, this is actually quite dangerous. The Department of Justice executed a search warrant against Fulton County to seize ballots related to the 2020 election. This is after Donald Trump told the New York Times, remember, in the Oval Office that he wished he had seized the ballots in Georgia back in the 2020 time frame. And as we head towards 2026, I worry, yes, I worried about the lies that this will reopen and spread around the 2020 election. What I’m really worried, though, is that this is just a dry run in him figuring out how one seizes ballots as we head towards 2026. 

Jane Coaston: Can you talk a little bit more about that? Because I know that midterm elections are run by states and localities. So what would that look like? If Trump wanted to steal the 2026 midterms, how would he do it? 

Marc Elias: Yeah, so all federal elections are run by the states. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Marc Elias: In fact, you know, it used to be conservatives who would gleefully point out that there is no such thing as federal elections, there are just state elections that elect people to federal office. But there’s truth to it, right? Which is that the state of Georgia runs elections for federal office, whether it’s for presidential electors, whether its for members of the House, members of the Senate. Uh. And there really isn’t a role for the federal government outside of Congress passing laws. And there’s really no role at all for the president. But you know what I worry about, or I think a lot of people worry about is basically a two-part strategy on the part of this president. The first is before the election to get access to the nationwide voter file, and that’s something that’s going on right now, so that he has the private voter information on every single American. And before the election, they use that to try to threaten states or cajole states, or in some places, just work with states to remove large numbers of voters en masse, you know, through voter challenges, something we have dealt with before, where right-wing outside groups do this, but never before we’ve seen the Department of Justice do it. So that’s number one. But number two is after the ballots have been cast, the concern is, and what we just saw in Fulton County, is that, you know, the next morning, Donald Trump sends the FBI in to you know some congressional district in a close congressional race or in a statewide race for Senate and says, we’re seizing the ballots and we’re going to count them. And that’s what I am so worried about, I’ve been worried about this for months. I’ve been writing about this and talking about this from months. You know, if he figures out once how to seize ballots and issue false results and that the legacy media winds up reporting these in kind of the on the one hand on the other hand, he will have scored an enormous victory as we head towards 2026 and 2028. 

Jane Coaston: FBI seizures are not the only way the Trump administration is trying to get voter data. Since May, the Department of Justice has asked nearly every state to hand over some form of voter data, and it’s suing states that haven’t done so. Attorney General Pam Bondi even sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz suggesting that the government would pull back on its immigration enforcement bananas bullshit there if the state handed over data involving its voter rolls. What’s at stake here if the Trump Administration is able to get the data they want? 

Marc Elias: Okay, so look, I have said this is the biggest legal issue of this year, and yeah, I know I know how many other big legal issues there are. But if you care about democracy, the single biggest fight to watch in court is over access to these voter rolls. It may very well be one of the top political stories right now, and it’s not being adequately understood. Here is the deal. If you’re the a Democratic campaign, you want to turn out voters. What do you need? You need a list of the voters. You need to know who they are and where they live and how to reach them. Well, if you need to suppress voters, if want to mass disenfranchise voters, you need the same thing. And so the Department of Justice has told every state in the country that it expects them to turn over the full unredacted voter file. That means your name, your address, your social security number, a specimen of your signature in many places, your gender, your race, whether you’re a registered Democrat or Republican, whether you voted by mail or voted in person, whether you’ve moved and changed registration, whether you canceled it or updated it, whether you’ve ever been had your ballot challenged before or not, whether you vote early or on election day, whether you’ve ever voted provisionally, voted overseas. It is a complete 360 look of every voter at the individual level. This is not data that any department of justice has ever sought before because they have no legitimate reason to want it. The only reason why the department of justice wants this data is because it is the foundational building block for them to disenfranchise voters at scale in the run up to the election or after the election to disenfranchise them in accounting. So let’s say that Department of Justice decided the day after the 2026 election, the morning after the 2026 election, that it wanted to seize the ballots. Well without counting the ballots, it could make rough cuts and just say, look. All of the people who voted in this precinct, their votes don’t count. All of the people who voted by mail in this way, their votes don’t count. And how would they do that in these rough categories? They do it by having the voter file. And I’m proud that my law firm and I are litigating in all 24 jurisdictions, 23 states and district of Columbia, to fight against this. And any other places that they sue to try to get these, we will fight. So far we have won the first few cases, but there are a lot more to go. 

Jane Coaston: The Trump administration, it’s worth mentioning, they’ve been working to change the mechanisms of American elections on a lot of different fronts. 

Marc Elias: Yeah. 

Jane Coaston: And honestly, even though we’re just a year in, it’s been hard to keep track of. How does this raid fit into the bigger picture of what Trump has tried to do with elections? 

Marc Elias: Yeah, so it’s interesting. Remember, Donald Trump in 2017 appointed a election fraud commission because he said that he in fact had won California in 2016 and that it had been stolen from him. He has said that he won New Jersey. He had said that he won Minnesota three times, right? Like he has been spreading lies about the elections and that those underpin certain choices about how people vote and how ballots are counted. So in Donald Trump’s ideal world, um and this is informed not just by his own pathology, but by what the RNC has told him would benefit Republicans. They would like no early voting, just election day. No vote centers, just precincts. No mail-in voting at all, right? And we see them take these approaches in the court cases they are bringing. We see this in the executive orders that Donald Trump is trying to issue because they believe that if they got to that place, they would disenfranchise Black, Brown, and young voters at higher rates than they’d disenfranchise anyone else, and that that could swing the outcome of future elections. Like I said, the good news is that they don’t actually control, the states control these things, not the federal government. 

Jane Coaston: On top of that, last year, Trump kicked off an unusually aggressive round of gerrymandering that has gone in a bunch of different directions. We’ve talked about this, you and I, and we’ve talked about this on the show, but can you explain why this is so unusual? 

Marc Elias: Yeah, so, you know, the Constitution says that there’s a census every decade and there’s redistricting every decade. And in the early 2000s, there was a mid-cycle redistrict in Texas, Tom DeLay did this, and it was really viewed as a one-off. And we could go into the reasons why, I mean, I was against it at the time, but but but there was there were reasons having to do with the change of control legislature, why Texas Republicans did that. What’s really different this time is that the mid-cycle redistricting is not being spurred by any legislative chamber control or any governmental control, it’s simply being spurred because Donald Trump told these Republican legislatures to engage in mid cycle redistricting. And we have seen them do it in Texas. We’ve seen them do it in in Missouri. We’ve see them do in North Carolina. We are about to witness them do it in Florida. And in all of those states, and this is I think the key point I want people to take away, in all those states you already had extremely gerrymandered maps. Well, now with computers and big data, they found a way to draw a more gerrymandered map. And that is what you are seeing in all of these Republican states. And it is because they know that if they don’t do this, and they don’t engage in voter suppression, election subversion, they’re going to lose control of Congress. They’re for sure going to loose control of the House. They may very well lose control of the Senate. And that would be the stumbling block that Donald Trump fears the most. 

Jane Coaston: It’s interesting because I think that Trump seemed to believe that he could gerrymander, but Democrats just wouldn’t respond. But now you’ve got Texas, you’ve got California and a bunch of other states in various stages of changing their maps. So where are we right now? 

Marc Elias: Yeah, so the way I think about the math is this. We can set aside the whether they perform or not, but essentially five seats in Texas for Republicans, five seats in California for Democrats. Then Republicans added one seat in Missouri, added one seed in North Carolina. Again, I’m not giving up on those races. I’m just like using rough strokes here. Democrats, uh thanks to a lawsuit that my law firm brought, look like they will pick up a seat in New York. And we are waiting to see what Maryland does. They are currently considering it. And then you get to the two wild card states, which are Florida for Republicans and Virginia for Democrats. Virginia have undertaken a process that requires passing things through the legislature and then a ballot initiative that, if successful, could yield four more Democratic seats. Ron DeSantis has said he is going to call the Republican legislature back into session in April in Florida, and that could be three or four seats. And the big wild card, the big thing that everyone is watching is the Supreme Court and its decision in a Voting Rights Act case out of Louisiana. If that decision comes late enough in the cycle, regardless of what comes out, won’t have an impact. If it comes early enough, like in the next month, then you could see Republicans try to gerrymander another dozen or more seats, mostly in the deep south, by taking away Black opportunity. 

Jane Coaston: It feels incredibly overwhelming to be seeing these bullshit ICE operations and feel like we’re just engulfed in crisis. And then this feels almost quiet in comparison for Trump to be pushing this narrative that our elections are not secure, or I think more accurately, elections Republicans don’t win are not secure or are fraudulent. The midterms, as you’ve mentioned, are just a few months away. And you said that what we saw in Georgia, quote, “Looks like a dry run for 2026.” I know you’ve been talking about this, but can you just make the point again? Like, what do you mean? 

Marc Elias: Look, we saw what happened in 2020, which was a lot of rhetoric, and people told us not to worry. And then we saw, after he lost, him bring 60 plus lawsuits. I was proud to represent President Biden and the Democratic party in leading the effort to beat those, and we won. And then what did we see? We saw violence, right? We saw violence on January 6th. And then, we’ve now seen the Department of Justice seize those ballots. Well, now let’s just take those lessons from Donald Trump’s standpoint. We have already seen the rhetoric. He has already bad-mouthed elections. We have seen the legal actions, right? They’re trying to get these voter files, but they are losing. So what comes next? Well, we have seen the terrible violence that has already taken place in Minneapolis. And we have seen how that violence is now being leveraged into the next phase, which is how do they get control of the vote counting, the ballots, disenfranchised voters at scale, and I think if you do not believe, if you do not understand that he will use the tools available to him, then you’re just not paying attention to what he has already done, what he’s already said he wished he had done in 2020, and what we are seeing him already start to do in 2026. 

Jane Coaston: Marc, as always, thank you so much for joining me. 

Marc Elias: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. We’ve got more news coming up, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple podcasts, or even check us out on YouTube. And don’t forget to share with your friends, more to come after some ads. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Kristen Welker] Are you confident that the government will reopen on Monday with Republican votes? Do you have enough Republican support? 

[clip of Speaker Mike Johnson] Well, let’s say I’m confident that we’ll do it at least by Tuesday. 

Jane Coaston: House Speaker Mike Johnson had more to say to Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. He answered questions about the latest shutdown debacle. Are you feeling deja vu yet? The U.S. Government partially shut down Saturday morning after lawmakers missed the January 30th deadline to pass a spending bill. Senate Democrats want to rewrite the House’s proposal after two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota. Not to mention the general concerns about abuse of power and lack of oversight at the Department of Homeland Security. They’re demanding changes before they agree to back its funding. Senate Democrats succeeded in stripping DHS funding out of the original package and replacing it with a two-week stopgap to give Dems time to negotiate with the White House. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries reiterated the changes Democrats want to make on ABC’s This Week Sunday. 

[clip of Hakeem Jeffries] Body cameras should be mandatory. Masks should come off. Judicial warrants should absolutely be required consistent with the Constitution in our view before DHS agents or ICE agents are breaking into the homes of the American people or ripping people out of their cars. 

Jane Coaston: With a thin majority in the House and some Republicans fraying on immigration enforcement tactics, we’ll find out if Johnson can keep his historically lock-stepped party in line. Mmm.

[clip of Dana Bash] Among these new files is a list compiled by the FBI just in August of numerous salacious and to be really clear, unverified allegations about President Trump. Why did the FBI create this list last year and have all of these claims been investigated by the DOJ? 

[clip of Todd Blanche] So look, it’s not about President Trump, it is about a ton of people, multiple, multiple, people that that were, quote, “in the Epstein files.” 

Jane Coaston: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche brushed off President Trump’s newest appearance in the Epstein files in conversation with CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. That’s after the Department of Justice released its largest batch of files yet related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The trove includes unverified tips about Epstein’s relationships with powerful figures, many who you’ve heard of and some you may not have. And according to the New York Times, about 4,500 documents mention President Trump, including more than a dozen tips collected from the public. But Blanche says many of the tips involving Trump are anonymous or secondhand and are therefore quote, “not something that can be really investigated.” I seem to recall that never stopping Trump before. And curiously, according to The Hill, the documents containing the Trump-related tips disappeared from the DOJ’s website and were not back by Sunday morning. Nothing to see here, folks. Blanche said this is likely the last major release of files and made clear that even these new documents were probably not going to satisfy the public’s interest in this case. You can say that again. 

[clip of Margaret Brennan] What role would you want in a future Venezuelan government? Because even President Trump says you may have a role in the future. Would you run for president? 

[clip of María Corina Machado] I will be president when the time comes, but it doesn’t matter that it should be decided in elections by the Venezuelan people. 

Jane Coaston: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado appeared confident, speaking with Margaret Brennan on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday. A strangely confident tone, some might say, after President Trump publicly questioned her viability as a leader, saying she, quote, “doesn’t have the support or the respect within the country.” Machado said she thinks Venezuela’s political shift is inevitable, even if there isn’t currently an election scheduled on the books yet. Is Machado secretly furious that she’s not the one leading Venezuela? Possibly, but she’s clearly playing the long game. But she also knows how to speak fluent Trump, and nowhere is that clearer than here. 

[clip of Margaret Brennan] Why did you give your Nobel Peace Prize to President Trump after you’d already dedicated it to him? 

[clip of María Corina Machado] Look, I think this is a matter of justice and it’s a matter of what’s in the superior interest of our country. We the Venezuelan people are truly grateful for what he has done and we’re confident in what he will do in the in the days, weeks and months to come. 

Jane Coaston: Sounds like fluent Trump to me. Do you remember seeing images of a boy wearing that blue bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack surrounded by immigration officers? That’s Liam Conejo Ramos. The five-year-old boy and his father were detained by immigration officers in Minnesota last month and held at an ICE facility in Texas. Now, following a judge’s order, they’ve been released. The government claimed his father entered the U.S. illegally from Ecuador in 2024. The family’s lawyer said he has an asylum claim pending that allows him to stay in the U.S. Texas Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro visited Liam and his dad while they were at the detention facility. Castro spoke with PBS NewsHour ahead of their release. 

[clip of Representative Joaquin Castro] We could not figure out why they were snatched up off the street. They had another asylum hearing coming up, I believe is what Liam’s father said. And these were people that followed every rule. They used the CBP One app to get permission to come into the United States and wait while their asylum claim was being processed. So they followed the rules. They did it in an orderly way. They didn’t rush the border. And still, the Trump administration picked them up off the street and dumped them in rural Texas. 

Jane Coaston: In his order granting the release, U.S. District Judge red Biery blasted the administration, writing, quote, “The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children.” Castro said in a post on Twitter that he picked Liam and his dad up Saturday night and escorted them back to Minnesota Sunday morning. He wrote, quote, “Liam is now home, with his hat and his backpack.” And that’s the news. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Do not let First Lady Melania Trump see New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s review of her little documentary and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how Dowd wrote quote, “Melania is where she wants to be, in the bosom of a corrupt family that is prostituting the people’s house.” Like me, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and Dowd also wrote, quote, “Melania, the movie star, lives up to the message on the infamous jacket she wore to a migrant child detention center. I really don’t care, do you? It turns out she does care, for herself.” Woof. [music break] What A Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Allport. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Ethan Oberman, Greg Walters, and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of News and Politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]