This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Tennessee’s Republican-dominated state Legislature has approved a new congressional map to carve up the state’s only Black-majority district in an effort to help Tennessee Republicans secure all nine House seats. Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee quickly signed the bill into law.
Similar efforts to rapidly with redraw maps are underway across Southern states following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week. The gerrymandering is just one part of a larger Republican push to overhaul the nation’s electoral system. A new investigation by Reuters details how the Trump administration is seeking to gain federal control over elections in at least eight states, using investigations, raids and demands for access to balloting systems and voter ID records.
We’re joined now by Reuters investigative journalist Ned Parker. Earlier this week, he and his colleagues at Reuters won a Pulitzer Prize for documenting how President Trump has used the levers of government to punish his political enemies.
Ned Parker, congratulations on the Pulitzer. We want to get to that investigative series that you did, but we want to begin with your latest investigation. It’s headlined “How Trump is moving to control U.S. elections, one state at a time.” Start off by just laying out how he’s doing this.
NED PARKER: Right. What we did in this piece is we really examined the ways that the federal government, the Trump administration, is probing the boundaries of state and local administration of elections by doing things such as the raid in Fulton County, Georgia, in January, having a senior Justice Department official contact two election clerks in Missouri to see if he would — if they could get access to their voting machines. We’ve also found out about investigations in Ohio by Homeland Security into voter fraud. So, there are things across the board, the questioning of the secretary of state’s office in Nevada by the FBI about data related to the 2020 election.
All of this I would describe as a probing by the federal government about what’s possible, how much more they can exert power over states and localities regarding the coming election. And it’s a black box, really, how far this goes. The election experts we spoke to, they really see this as a testing of the waters. And what comes next is really an open question.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ned, President Trump has mentioned in the past trying to federalize elections, which are clearly — always have been run at the state level. But what you’re seeing is a state-by-state effort to basically go under the radar?
NED PARKER: Right. Well, what we did was we documented the eight states where there have been operations. So, this is everything from the raid in Fulton County, Georgia, ongoing federal investigations in Arizona into the 2020 election, a similar effort in Nevada, and then things like a former Trump administration official, now a lobbyist, who made calls to Republican clerks, county clerks, in Colorado, representing himself as working on behalf of the White House, seeking access to voting machines. And in one case, a clerk from a large county said he received a call from a senior cyberdefense official from Homeland Security to seek access to his county’s voting machines, and he said no. When we asked the White House about this and Homeland Security, while they said that they — the White House declined to comment about the lobbyist, and Homeland Security basically declined to answer about whether or not there was a call from a senior cyberdefense official in their agency to this local county clerk, who’s Republican. And what’s really interesting in all of this is that you see real pressure on local officials, certainly state officials, but on local officials. And this cuts across the board. It’s a nonpartisan issue. We’re talking about Republican clerks, clerks who are Democrats, people who are independent, who administer elections.
And as you said, elections have always been administered by state and local officials. And what we’re seeing is, is the Trump administration, in some ways, is seeking to relitigate the 2020 election, and they’re also seeking to impose federal authority over the administration of elections. And this is the local issues we’re talking about, and then things like the Trump administration’s executive orders seeking to create a national registry of voters, seeking to require documentary proof of citizenship. There are, like, many, many aspects to this, a top-down effect with both Trump, the Trump administration, and Republicans in Congress trying to create these proof-of-citizenship requirements to register to vote. And then this, what we were describing as these efforts, whether with raids or contacts to local officials or investigations that are impacting officials who, day in, day out, are just doing their jobs in counties and states.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, your investigation also notes that at the same time, the Trump administration is slashing the budget and the staff of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Could you talk about what that agency’s role is and why its efforts are being curtailed?
NED PARKER: Sure. Well, CISA was created in the first Trump administration. And the head of CISA — that’s the Cyber Defense Agency — the initial, the original head was fired in 2020 shortly after the presidential election, when he said that election was fair, honest and one of the best elections in U.S. history. And since the president was disputing the his successor Joe Biden’s victory, he fired the first head of CISA. And what we’ve seen in this term is that the very beginning of his administration, the Trump administration basically cut the budget of CISA and laid off many of its staff.
Along with that, secretaries of state and other senior election officials have described how they’ve stopped receiving intelligence briefings about threats to elections. That has not happened, according to them, in the first Trump — in this, since Trump returned to power, was reelected. Likewise, local officials, county clerks who had received security assessments from CISA, no longer receive those, and they’re having to resort to hiring contractors. So, it kind of creates strain, stress. It results in the spending of money. If counties have that money to try to bolster their cybersecurity, there’s a vacuum, in effect, and there’s a sense of disfaction on the state and local level regarding services that they had received before to help create a secure environment for elections.
AMY GOODMAN: Ned Parker, tell us about the lobbyist Jeff Small. Three clerks told Reuters he raised the possibility of White House partnerships with their offices and discussed accessing voting machines?
NED PARKER: Right. So, what we were able to confirm is that he contacted about 10 clerks, all Republican clerks, in Colorado. And Small had been in the first Trump administration working in the Department of the Interior. He then worked for Congresswoman Lauren Boebert. And recently, he joined a lobbying firm that works in D.C. and out west. And he did this outreach, introducing himself as working on behalf of the White House.
And with some clerks, he spoke about wanting to access machines and to have a partnership with local officials. He arranged one call — in one call with a clerk that we spoke to from El Paso County in Colorado, a senior member — the clerk said he then received a call from a senior official from CISA, the Cyber Defense Agency, who then made the ask that other clerks say that Small had made to them. This cyberdefense official asked for access to the El Paso County Clerk’s voting machines and talked about how he wanted a partnership between local clerks and the Trump administration to advance the president’s election agenda, because it wasn’t moving quickly enough. That’s what the clerk said.
And Homeland Security, when we asked them for comment about this, they did not address the content of Small’s call. They said that Jeff Small did not represent the DHS in any formal way. They didn’t dispute that there was some connection, but they said there was no formal relationship. And they did not comment on the senior cyberdefense official who the clerk said had called him.
But this is an example, I believe, of this kind of probing we’re talking about. We also saw this in Missouri, where a senior Justice Department official called two county clerks and made a similar ask, and that was in September. The calls in Colorado were July. The calls to Missouri were in September. And what’s interesting in all of this is that these clerks, who are conservative, they believe in their job, their work and the law, and they saw these requests to access machines as violating state law, and they said no. And all of these clerks really describe an immense pressure on them. They see elections as becoming so highly politicized, and it makes their work so much harder.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ned, I wanted to ask you about another investigation. And congratulations for winning the Pulitzer, you and your colleagues at Reuters, on this story about the Trump administration going after its perceived enemies. You and your colleagues at Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership. Could you talk about that?
NED PARKER: Sure. Well, thank you for the congratulations for myself and my colleagues. Yes, what we did was we created a criteria of what we would define as retribution, and that was looking at efforts to intimidate and punish opponents of the Trump administration based upon either personal feuds or ideological feuds or attempts to just assert power. And what we found in our count of 470 targets was that it really cut across all aspects of American society. We are looking at corporations, law firms, universities, the media, politicians, former members of the military — it’s quite striking — people like Dr. Anthony Fauci. And it just showed how so much had happened so quickly, where this administration had really sought to assert its dominance against people, businesses and institutions that if viewed as enemies.
AMY GOODMAN: So, one of the people mentioned in your Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters investigation is Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka. Last year, ICE agents arrested him outside the newly opened ICE jail run by GEO Group called Delaney Hall in Newark. Mayor Baraka was there with three Democratic members of Congress from New Jersey for an oversight tour. I want to go to Mayor Baraka speaking to Democracy Now! last year.
MAYOR RAS BARAKA: They arrested me without any evidence, like the judge said. They arrested me as a preliminary investigation. You investigate first, then make an arrest. You don’t arrest people, then investigate it. I mean, that’s exactly what happened. And they fingerprinted me. They took a mugshot of me. They did it twice: once at one time when I got arrested, and the other time when I was in court. You know, I think it was overkill. Something of that — that small, I should have got a blue summons. They could have mailed that to my house and told me to appear in court for some kind of violation. But they humiliated me. They cuffed me. They dragged me in the car, took me to the cell. They did all of these things that wasn’t warranted. It was completely unwarranted.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ned Parker, can you talk about what happened to Mayor Baraka and also to New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, who was indicted as she tried to protect the mayor?
NED PARKER: Right, well, and that’s a great example, because all of these cases, we had to debate them as we went through every single one, about: Was there a political motivation for these efforts at what we’re calling retribution? And with the arrest of Mayor Baraka, he was — that seemed to us to be very clear. One, he had left the facility, and based on different accounts and research, it seemed there had been consultations about deciding to arrest him. And then, of course, the charges were dropped.
And with the congresswoman, I thought what was very significant was, formerly, the Justice Department — and it still exists, but it had a section called the Public Integrity Section, that was sort of a guardrail against politically motivated investigations. And this unit was decimated this year. It went down from being in the double digits to just a handful of people. And at the time, through our own reporting and investigations, at the time of this incident in Newark, the administration had ultimately decided not to consult the Public Integrity Section about whether or not it could target and prosecute a mayor and a congresswoman. So, all of that spoke to us about how the president and his administration were flexing their muscles and trying to assert themselves on charged issues against those they would see as oppositional voices. And, of course, the congresswoman’s case is still going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Lastly, and we just have a minute, how does President Trump’s retaliatory efforts compare to Richard Nixon and his notorious enemies list? Do you see these retaliatory efforts breaking from long-standing norms?
NED PARKER: Well, of course, I’m a journalist and not a historian, but — and each time in history and in American history is distinct. But certainly, from the experts we spoke to, historians, students of political science, President Trump and his administration, in the way they’re going after their, quote-unquote, “enemies” or opponents across the different sectors of American society, it is a bending of norms, in their view. I think what they did say to us regarding President Nixon is that he wasn’t able to — despite his efforts to go after perceived enemies, he wasn’t really able to, I suppose, use the apparatus of government in the same way to so effectively target his opponents. So, that’s what I would say. And we’ll see where this goes from here.
AMY GOODMAN: Ned Parker, investigative reporter at Reuters, he just won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize. We’ll link to your prize-winning investigations, as well as your most recent piece, as you report on “How Trump is moving to control U.S. elections, one state at a time.”
Coming up, Arizona Congressmember Adelita Grijalva. She just went into two ICE jails. We’ll talk about a border wall that’s destroying Indigenous lands. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Streets of Minneapolis” by Bruce Springsteen, performing at Democracy Now!‘s 30th anniversary at Riverside Church in New York. I’m here in Minneapolis. Juan González is in Chicago. I’ll be at the Main today, which is a movie theater that’s showing Steal This Story, Please!, then with Juan González at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago tonight and tomorrow afternoon and tomorrow night — check out our website, democracynow.org — then on to Milwaukee at the Oriental Theatre on Sunday.