First Assistant US Atty. Bill Essayli – the Prosecutor of the loyal organization of President Trump in Los Angeles – has not been shy in recent days about his intention to eliminate voter fraud in the primary elections of California and to prosecute those involved.
He announced that his office has “multiple election fraud investigations going on” in cooperation with the FBI, urged Californians on social media to bring evidence of “possible fraud” directly to his office, and said that he would “be charging some people” with election fraud — as soon as California verifies its vote count and his office “can prove some of the allegations.”
Essayli’s public outcry and promises are highly unusual and directly contradict the Justice Department’s guidance on federal vote fraud investigations, which says federal prosecutors should not publicly pursue these allegations during vote counting.
The Justice Manual – which governs the actions of federal prosecutors across the country – states that the department “should not engage in overt criminal proceedings in matters involving allegations of vote fraud until the election in question has been concluded, its results verified, and all recounts and electoral contests have been completed,” in part because doing so “risks chilling the investigation and interfering with the campaign itself. The decision of any subsequent election contest.”
Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for Essayli’s office, said neither Essayli nor the office had any comment.
Essayli has repeatedly admitted in other interviews that he has no evidence of widespread fraud that could sway the results of races, even shooting down one prominent Internet conspiracy that accused the Democratic Alliance of rigging the Los Angeles mayoral race.
But he also pointed to more isolated incidents of fraud as indicators of bigger problems. He added that there is no evidence of such widespread fraud, in part because of California’s refusal to submit to a federal audit of its voter statistics.
Essayli’s comments are part of a broader battle over whether or not to prioritize fraud in California, with Republicans citing individual cases of alleged fraud as evidence of a specific scheme by Democrats to steal elections from them, and Democrats — and many election experts — saying there is no evidence that a single crime indicates fraud on a large enough scale to affect the election.
His remarks added fuel to baseless claims from Trump and other powerful voices that California’s election was marred by coordinated Democratic “rigging.” They have made Essayli one of the Trump administration’s most prominent figures in the national debate over election integrity — which election experts expect to intensify ahead of the November midterms.
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Essayli has made his case in recent days on alternative and right-wing news programs and podcasts, saying California’s slow vote-counting process has eroded public trust and needs to be audited.
On One America News Network, Essayli said his office has been “raising the alarm about California’s election system” because it is ripe for fraud.
“We believe it is very dangerous. We believe that California does not have adequate safeguards to ensure that only eligible US citizens vote in California elections, which is why we wanted California’s voter rolls to be audited,” he said.
On NewsNation with Chris Cuomo, Essayli said he “doesn’t care what the outcome of the election is,” but wants voters to “trust the programs, and that the rules are being followed.”
“I assure you, when we bring cases, we will have a lot of evidence that will prove beyond doubt, in a court of law – that’s how we work,” he said.
In a podcast by opposition commentator Glenn Beck, Essayli said he was “restricted from discussing ongoing investigations,” but that “election fraud is not a theory” but a “real thing” — noting that his office recently received a lawsuit from a woman who paid homeless people to register to vote.
He said California is a “fraudster’s paradise,” and accused the state Legislature of “going out of its way to make it easier for people to commit fraud,” and complaints often include California’s lax ID policies, its mail-in policies that send ballots to the wrong places, its vote-gathering policies or “ballot-gathering policies” that allow “ballot-gathering policies” to be filled out. ineligible voters.
Essayli said all of that makes his job “incredibly difficult,” because “California has eliminated the paper trail, eliminated the chain of custody, eliminated any meaningful way for us to do a thorough investigation of where the vote came from,” but even so, he will be bringing election fraud charges “in the next one to two months.”
State and local election officials in California have defended the state’s policies as helping to get as many eligible voters to the polls as possible, which they say is more important than a quick count. They said there were strict procedures in place to ensure votes were cast correctly and counted correctly, as well as to identify any problems and audit the results.
Election experts say cases of fraud exist, in California and elsewhere in the country, but that strong efforts over the years to investigate and identify widespread fraud that could affect the election – including Trump and his lawyers but also outside the organizations – have always failed.
Essayli’s efforts have drawn heavy criticism from election experts, leading Democrats and former prosecutors in office.
Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who studies elections and was a senior policy adviser on democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Essayli did — making unspecified allegations of fraud in the midst of an ongoing election and before he built a case — was “absolutely ridiculous” and “not what real prosecutors do.”
Before the current administration, the “mantra” of federal prosecutors, he said, was “only hold a press conference about pending investigations when the public knows about a major crime,” such as a mass shooting. “Other than that, you wait for the facts to come out, then you see if there’s been a violation, and then you issue a press release – usually accompanied by a conviction or conviction.”
In elections, Levitt said the standard is very high, and “the ethos of a federal prosecutor should be to never be an issue, and never to make the work of the prosecution itself influence an investigative election.”
In an interview with MS NOW, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in the LA office, blasted Essayli as seeking fraud to please Trump — despite it and other efforts to please Trump, including immigration, causing an exodus of experienced prosecutors from the office.
Schiff said Essayli was “basically making a public appeal: ‘Please send me proof. I’m asserting that there is fraud. We don’t have proof of that, but please send me something. I need to please the boss.'”
One former prosecutor in the office, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, said Essayli is pursuing election fraud charges as aggressively as he is because “Trump told him to,” and “he’s always looking for a big DC job in case he gets fired from his current one.”
Essayli is not the US representative of Los Angeles – only the “first assistant” – because he could not win the confirmation from the US Senate and remains in charge through an official opening.
An investigation into the works
It is unclear what specific issues or incidents Essayli’s office is investigating.
Essayli said his investigation so far has relied on individuals and not networks, and he told the California Post that he will investigate reports that thousands of people have registered to vote in homeless shelters with very few beds.
His office also looked into false allegations that the Los Angeles County election night ballot review did not include votes for Spencer Pratt, the Republican candidate. He said his office “reviewed official county records” and found the claim to be false.
“My office will continue to monitor the election counting process and will follow the evidence where it leads,” he said.
One person involved in the investigation of the case was an assistant US Atty. Robert Renner, who joined the office in March after serving as deputy general counsel for the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit law firm in Washington, DC, where he worked on cases focusing on free speech issues, according to his LinkedIn page.
A worker handles ballots at a Los Angeles County ballot processing center.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Renner, who referred questions to the office’s spokesman, visited the L.A. County ballot processing center as part of the investigation, where he questioned election officials about reviewing the ballots, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Election officials said their numbers were always correct and that the discrepancy was based on a one-minute delay in a review of Pratt’s votes by the Associated Press, which also confirmed the backlog.
Renner also asked election officials about whether postal officials had postmarks on the backs of ballots sent after Election Day so they could be counted, the source said.
Essayli’s promotion to the top prosecutor position in LA was part of a broader push by the Trump administration to fill key Justice Department roles with people loyal to the president and open to skepticism in his election. Earlier this year, a Times investigation detailed how former L.A. County prosecutor Eric Neff was named the “acting chief” of the Justice Department’s voting division.
Neff led an election-integrity lawsuit in the LA County district attorney’s office that was dismissed after an internal review revealed it relied on the voice of “Stop The Steal” activists who pushed Trump’s view that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.”
It was one of two election integrity cases Neff tried throughout his career before he was promoted to chief polling officer by Asst. He said. Gen. Harmeet Dhillon, another proud Trump supporter from California.
Michael Sanchez, a spokesman for Dean Logan, head of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, said the office has never received requests for official documents or investigative notices from Essayli’s office, only “general inquiries about operations.”
What will come of Essayli’s investigation is also unclear. He will have to prove any allegations he makes in court – he has often appeared hostile in recent interviews.
“Instead of putting the burden on the process of verifying people [that] only legal citizens vote, one person one vote is the law of the land, and the burden on the system to assure us that there is integrity and we can believe in it,” he complained to Beck, “they turned it around and now it’s up to us to prove all the allegations of fraud.”
