Transcript of Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s California Election Scheme (ft. Former AG Eric Holder)

There was no noted dissent in the Supreme Court's ruling. Let's pull up the Supreme Court's ruling from moments ago. United States versus California: the application for injunction, pending appeal, presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the full court—to the court, so all Supreme Court justices—is denied. Mark Elias was the lawyer who was defending California in this case, and here's what he had to say: "SCOTUS, the Supreme Court, denied the Department of Justice application about the California election without even asking us to respond, and it was referred to the full court.

Not a single justice, not one Supreme Court justice, not even the Trump right-wing justices, noted a dissent at all. This is unprecedented. The Department of Justice is now being treated by the Supreme Court like Sydney Powell and Rudy Giuliani." The president's lawyers told the Supreme Court in their briefing that there's a huge emergency and that the court just shrugged it off, and the court was like, "Oh, you think there's a big emergency? Nah, no there isn't.

Go away." And the Supreme Court didn't even need to hear briefing from Mark Elias's legal team. Mark Elias got the W without even having to submit any opposition or paperwork to the Supreme Court. People were like, "Go away." This is how far the Department of Justice has fallen under Todd Blanch in the eyes of all of our courts, including the Supreme Court. Now, also earlier today, as it relates to those so-called 20,000 registered voters, as Ryan Goodman writes, "what you call game over," the DOJ admitted in court that their list of alleged 20,000 non-citizens registered to vote in California has a high error rate.

The case involves a temporary restraining order barring the Department of Justice threats to prosecute state officials. The DOJ admission will have reverberating effects in other cases. And as we reported, not just in this case in California, but also the case out of Washington, DC, the Trump regime basically was exposed that this list of 20,000 was like a fabricated list. It was like made-up names too. That's what was exposed in Judge Bosberg's case in DC. Here's what Chris Geiner reported, breaking: "In response to a question from Judge Trina Thompson, Northern District of California"—this was before the Supreme Court made that ruling—"the Department of Justice attorney just said it is fair to say that their list has a high error rate."

Just admitting, yeah, it's all errors, all errors, high error rate. Also, it should be noted that earlier today—this was new and breaking—another no-true bill in Washington, meaning a grand jury rejected another case brought to it by the federal prosecutors out of Washington, DC, from the Trump regime. This one was a purported voter fraud criminal case against someone who the Trump regime claimed voted twice in 2024, and the grand jury in Washington, DC, said, "Nope, we're not going to indict that person," and rejected the Trump regime from even getting an indictment there.

Now, there was other news this morning as well. A federal judge dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about Hunter Biden. A federal judge on Monday, earlier today, dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of lying to Congress about Hunter Biden, citing what he said was weaponization of President Donald Trump's Justice Department just before the midterm elections. In a scathing, hour-long ruling read from the bench, U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Farooqi said the investigation that produced the charges against Nikki Flores and Bradley Benavides was rushed, conducted at the behest of Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel, and dogged by critical mistakes that require the dismissal of the case.

"I am deeply troubled by what has happened here in this case," Farooqi said. "What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization by the Trump DOJ. I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend that I cannot read a calendar," Farooqi said, alluding to the proximity of the charges to the elections, which will determine control of Congress. And there, the Trump regime didn't even get an indictment. They just filed a criminal complaint because they know they're unable to get indictments. And by the way, when they went after James Comey, they filed a criminal complaint.

They haven't yet got an indictment in that case either. I want to bring in right now a very special guest. Let's bring on the former Attorney General Eric Holder to talk to us about the elections tomorrow, the Trump DOJ losing all of these cases. He's the former Attorney General. Let's bring in the interview I just did with former Attorney General Eric Holder. Now I want to bring on former Attorney General Eric Holder. Attorney General Holder, great to see you as always.

I want to start off by talking about the Trump regime and the Trump regime DOJ's attacks on election integrity, all of these lawsuits and efforts that they've engaged in to try to intimidate and harm people's ability to vote. They've lost these cases in resounding fashions, and I think a lot of these federal courts, based on the experience they've had with this DOJ and no longer a presumption of regularity, expect this DOJ just to lie to them.

So I actually think that was helpful, this past experience. But I want to get your take, obviously, as the former AG, what you saw here. I mean, they're clearly not done. They're going to keep this going on until after the election. But where do you see things right now?

It's a whole-of-government approach. I mean, yeah, they're using the Justice Department, but they're also using DHS. They're coming up with all kinds of ways in which they can try to cast doubt on the fairness of the system in the hope that people won't participate. I think in some ways that's a goal. And it also lays a predicate for challenges that they might want to file once the election is done and the ballots are in the process of being counted, and looking at what they can do at the state level with regard to certification, and ultimately with regard to certification when it comes down to the federal level.

So what happens when the DOJ is not prosecuting the bad guys, but when they are the bad guys, when they're engaged in the bad conduct, and then anybody who challenges them, they go, "No standing, no standing," because it was believed that the DOJ and the various divisions would be taking care that laws are executed and going after the bad guys. That, to me, is a hard part to grapple with as they make all these arguments, "No standing, no standing." And all of these cases feel a bit collusive in the way it's Trump and Trump DOJ and Trump AGs working together.

We put a lot of brakes on that which the Trump administration otherwise tried to implement. Cases in Alaska, California, a whole different places. And I suspect that's going to continue to be the barrier. And the courts have done a pretty good job, I think, in responding. Today we just say, I guess, it was a lawsuit that or an attempt to indict a couple of FBI agents, not related to the election specifically, but this whole Hunter Biden laptop thing.

And there you had a judge throw the case out and with very, very harsh language question the motivation behind that which the Justice Department was doing. Now, that's a criminal case, supposedly a criminal case, that got thrown out. But there have been other instances where lawsuits have been brought by private parties that have been, I think, pretty effective in stopping the Justice Department. And I expect that they're going to see that continue. I mean, I've been involved in a whole variety of tabletop exercises, working with people on the Hill, working with folks from various interest groups, trying to anticipate all the kinds of things that we might have to face both in the lead-up to the election, the election itself, and then post-election so that we're in a position to respond.

What was the response going to be? Really focused on how can we do things in response effectively and quickly. That is one of the drivers of all of the activity. How do we get into court and do things as quickly as we can, resolve things as quickly as we can, so as not to allow them to inflict the damage and then try to have to undo it? I mean, how do we stop them before the damage is actually done? And I left that tabletop exercise.

I did another one. It's been publicly reported with Hillary Clinton at my law firm, with a whole range of interest groups. And we had big TV monitors up on walls. And as we were in the process of talking about a variety of things, then the TV monitor would come up and say, "This report's just coming in from, I don't know, pick the state California, and the following has occurred." And then we have to say, "Okay, what are we going to do in this instance?" And again, the same thing. What's the response? Who are the people who should be responding?

How do we quickly make sure that we are doing things as effectively as we can? And there's a ton of legal talent that is spread out around this country, ready to go, ready to go. But I think in some ways, the ultimate power is the American people. If people come out and vote in really substantial numbers, and the margins are very large, that crushes almost everything that the Trump administration might try to throw at us. But we got to be prepared for some close elections in some places and them being as, I say, creatively evil as they are.

But it also backfired because I guess they didn't expect Democrats, I'd just say pro-democracy people who still care about the rule of law, to fight back and say, "All right, well, if you're doing that, we're going to do it. We're going to open it up to a vote for the public. We're not just going to force it through. We're going to make it a thing where citizens get to decide for themselves what they want this to look like." So talk to us about your experience with the redistricting question.

And as you say, let the people decide whether or not that's something that they want to do. Do it on a temporary basis. File lawsuits in places like Utah and Missouri, won those lawsuits, galvanized the people in a variety of states. Georgia and South Carolina immediately come to mind, so that they went down to the state legislature. And we're loud, peacefully did it, nonviolently, but in great numbers, so that people in the state legislature who might have thought about going along and doing something along the Texas model knew that there was going to be a political consequence.

And so Georgia and South Carolina, at least for the time being, have backed off on doing that. And so that's the way in which that effort failed. And they also didn't do whatever it is they were trying to do. They didn't do it particularly well. I mean, they based a lot of their assumptions on the 2024 election. And that's going to result in, I think, a dummy mander, probably, in Texas, I think also in Florida, and a lot of seats that they thought were not going to be competitive, in fact, are going to be competitive.

And depending on what the results of the election are, we're going to see a lot of unexpected pro-democracy results.

How do we think about this? Do we say, "All right, I guess we got to be back to old school now and do it the way it used to be?" Or do you say, "You know what? I saw what they did over there, and they did that for bad." But there's a lot of power that's been unlocked, apparently, based on what the Supreme Court has said is acceptable, which we've never really even thought of. So how do you think through those issues? Because I think through them, and it's an important debate that we need to have when we're out of this hell.

We have to do all of those kinds of things. But we also have to progressives and Democrats, I say this all the time, we are uncomfortable with the acquisition and the use of power. And we got to get past that. We got to get past that. If we have, for instance, a trifecta after the 2028 election, president, control of the Senate, control of the House of Representatives, we got to use that power, not in the way the Republicans do for their special interests and giving tax breaks to oligarchs and that kind of stuff, but to come up with ways in which we shore up our democracy.

One of the things would be to look at, I'll be very frank here, the hires that have been done, for instance, in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department by Harmeet Dhillon. Those people, a lot of those people, would not be qualified under the old standards, Republican or Democratic standards, to come into the department. They just weren't that qualified. And if they are Trump, Dhillon, zealots, just move them out of the Justice Department. And again, because of what the Supreme Court said, kind of under the unitary executive theory, that power does reside in the next attorney general, in the next president.

And so I think that's the kind of power that we have to consider. And then people say, "Well, wait a minute, what's going to prevent Republicans from doing it once they get?" I don't know. I don't know. But I do know that we cannot leave in the Justice Department people who are not committed to its traditional mission.

As a law professor, I don't want to recommend to my students to work there, which I wouldn't care before if it was Republican or Democrat. I'm just not sure I think it's a good place to work. So what do you think when this all ends? I mean, is top DOJ talent going to come back? I mean, do you still have confidence that it could be restored? Because that's something that I wonder, and I don't even know what to tell my law students and undergrad students about it.

But I think we need to be thinking about things like maybe expedited background checks of people who are in the Justice Department and who were forced out, but who want to come back. Same thing with regard to the FBI, agents who were fired or forced out, but who nevertheless want to come back to the FBI. Again, you got to go through background checks, but you can do these things. There's just one thing. Do that on an expedited basis so that you can get good people back into these organizations as soon as possible. But the point you make about reputation, that in some ways is going to be the more difficult thing.

I mean, I think I can repopulate the department, repopulate the FBI, repopulate the ATF. But when it comes to reestablishing the trust between the American people, the judiciary, and the Justice Department, that is something that's going to take some time. That presumption, as you said, of regularity, that presumption that a lawyer from the Justice Department is telling the truth, that isn't necessarily something that is felt by the people or by judges. And it's going to take a longer period of time to reestablish that.

What's your message? What's your message to people right now on election day, Attorney General Holder?

The American people are slow to rouse, but once they get focused on an issue, we are a mighty force. And it also means we control the future. What's the future of this nation going to look like? I mean, I think Trump and his folks thought with regard to their gerrymandering attempts that the reaction from the pro-democracy side was going to be that we clutch our pearls, I'd write an op-ed, I'd come talk to you on your very popular show, and that would be the end of it. And what happened was we fought back.

And we should learn from that experience that when you push back, when you fight back against these guys, you win. I mean, those law firms, those universities, those corporations who bent the knee, how do you feel about that now? How do you feel about that now? And how are you going to feel about that when we get to 2029 and people start looking back and ask, "Where were you in 2026? Where were you in 2027?" So I think lessons can be learned from prior experience. Those who bent the knee are going to have reputationally been damaged, and that's a negative thing.

And those who fought have shown that as pessimistic as we might have been, as dire as the situation might have seemed back in 2025, if you fight, we win. And so that's what I would tell the American people. The biggest weapon that we have as average citizens is the ability to cast a ballot. So we ought to do that, but then stay involved. Stay involved in our civic institutions. Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

But here's the deal. It doesn't bend on its own. It only bends when people like us put our hands on that arc and pull it towards justice and away from that which the Trump administration wants to do.