DNC Sues Trump Over Potential Plan to Send Federal Agents to Polls

The Democratic National Committee is suing the Trump administration for some clarification on any plans to send armed federal agents to polling places amid the president’s threats to “nationalize” elections.

“To ensure that the American people obtain timely knowledge of potential threats to free and fair elections and to enable the D.N.C. to take appropriate action to ensure voting rights are protected, the D.N.C. now seeks this Court’s aid to enforce” Freedom of Information Act requirements, reads the lawsuit, filed on Tuesday.

While President Trump himself hasn’t made public plans to send agents to ballot boxes, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have both refused to rule it out. And Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to nationalize voting. This lawsuit would compel the administration to confirm or deny under oath any “plans” to send federal agents to the polls this election.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast last month. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

Donald Trump opted not to attend the dignified transfer for the seventh U.S. service member killed during the war with Iran.

Several prominent Trump officials attended Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington’s funeral procession at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Monday, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. But Trump—who earlier this week was lambasted for wearing a self-aggrandizing baseball cap to another dignified transfer—was noticeably absent.

Instead, Trump was at his golf club in Doral, Florida, with lawmakers for the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat. His schedule indicated that he was flying back to Washington at the time of the procession.

Pennington died Sunday after sustaining injuries earlier this month at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. He was the seventh U.S. military member to die amid the current Middle East conflict. Six other slain troops were transferred to U.S. soil on Sunday, though the honorary service was overshadowed by Trump’s fashion choices, which included wearing a Trump-branded, white-and-gold baseball cap that he kept on even as the flag-covered coffins passed by.

The president has not been shy about his casual and callous disregard for America’s troops. He has requested that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades; refused to visit a World War II graveyard; derided deceased soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”; and claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Trump doesn’t have any military experience of his own thanks to a conveniently timed bone spur diagnosis that helped him skirt the Vietnam War draft in 1968.

Meanwhile, the president is privately warming to the idea of deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, showing “serious interest” in the possibility of keeping a small contingent there for “specific strategic purposes,” NBC News reported. Trump’s vision for Iran involves controlling the government, securing its uranium, and leeching off its oil supply, similar to how the White House infiltrated Venezuela in January, according to internal sources that spoke with NBC.

The U.S. could have had the schematics for Iran’s Shahed drones, but the Trump administration said no.

Roughly seven months ago, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the White House the technology to destroy Iran’s inexpensive, low-flying drones, going so far as to compile a PowerPoint presentation to sway the admin. The intel was battle-proven: Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”).

The decision to snub the offer is now being discussed as one of the biggest miscalculations thus far in the Iran war.

“If there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it,” a U.S. official told Axios Tuesday.

Ukraine developed its own home-grown, low-cost interceptor drone to combat the design, along with air defense systems and sensors. At a closed-door White House meeting on August 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered the defense tech to Donald Trump. It was extended in an act of good will—an attempt to strengthen ties with the U.S. amid increasing tension over Russia’s invasion. Trump was reportedly interested and “asked his team to work on it, but they have done nothing,” an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

The Shahed drones are capable of flying low and slow, a facet of their design that has made them difficult targets for U.S. air defenses, particularly as the U.S. and its allies run low on interceptor munitions.

Military officials have stressed since last weekend that fighting Iran has drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

In the days since, European Union defense officials have warned that the U.S. is no longer capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid its war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.

President Donald Trump was caught in an obvious lie about the military strike on a girls’ primary school in Iran that killed 175 people, many of them children. 

Speaking at a news conference Monday evening, Trump floundered when asked whether the United States would accept responsibility for the deadly strike after it was reported that the strike was conducted with a Tomahawk missile—a weapon primarily used by the U.S. military. 

Trump said that Tomahawk missiles were “one of the most powerful weapons around” but were also a “generic” weapon that the U.S. sold to many countries. Iran was in possession of some, and an investigation would reveal “whether it’s Iran, or somebody else,” he said.  

“Mr. President, you just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war,” asked New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh. “You’re the only person in your government saying this. Even your defense secretary wouldn’t say that when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday. Why are you the only person saying this?”

The president struggled to back up his claim for even a moment. 

“Because I just don’t know enough about it,” Trump said. “I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have Tomahawks, they buy ’em from us. But I will, certainly whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report.”

Trump said Saturday that it was his “opinion” that the strike was done by Iran. “They’re very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stood lurking behind the president, had done his best to dodge the question, saying that the strike was under investigation, “but the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”

Jen Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, said Monday it was “highly unlikely” that Iran fired at its own school. Tomahawks have to be fired by submarines or warships, she explained. Other militaries in possession of Tomahawk missiles are the British, Australian, and Japanese militaries. Not Iran.

“I think the president knows that, he just knows that this is a, certainly a mistake, a big mistake. And it’s being investigated, but he’s trying to muddy the waters by talking about the Tomahawks,” Griffin said. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s old congressional seat in Georgia could flip to the Democrats in a special election Tuesday.

Since Greene’s resignation took effect at the beginning of the year, the special election in Georgia’s 14th congressional district has Republicans and Democrats running on the same ballot. And with a crowded field in the normally safe Republican district, a Democrat could benefit. In all, there are 12 Republicans, three Democrats, one libertarian, and one independent on the ballot, and if none of the candidates receive a majority of the votes, a runoff election would be held on April 7.

Donald Trump has endorsed Clay Fuller, a district attorney, but his chief Republican opponent is Colton Moore, a former state senator and staunch opponent of Trump’s indictment for election fraud in the state with broader support from the far right. The leading Democrat in the race is Shawn Harris, a cattle farmer and retired brigadier general, but he’ll have a tall order in what the nonpartisan Cook Report considers the most Republican-leaning district in Georgia, which went for Trump by 37 points in 2024.

Trump’s endorsements do not have a good track record in the state. In 2022, he endorsed former NFL player Herschel Walker for the Senate, who ended up losing to Democrat Raphael Warnock. His pick for governor that year, David Perdue, left the Senate to take on Republican gubernatorial incumbent Brian Kemp and lost. Likewise, Trump’s choices for attorney general and secretary of state, John Gordon and former Representative Jody Hice, respectively, lost to Republican incumbents Chris Carr and Brad Raffensperger.

Greene, who became a strong critic of Trump last year before resigning, has refused to endorse anyone in the race “out of respect to my district.”

“I truly support the wonderful people of Georgia 14 and want them to pick their Representative,” she said in a post on X in November. “So anyone claiming they have my endorsement would not be telling the truth.”

Harris will hope to replicate the upset wins of other Democrats during Trump’s second term, many of which took place in areas that lean heavily Republican. With fewer Democrats in this race, he has pretty good odds of making it to the April 7 runoff. If Trump and the GOP’s approval ratings are still abysmal by November, he could pull off a massive upset.