Justice Department Steps Up Illegal-Voting Prosecutions

[MUSIC] >> Federal agents search Congresswoman Ilhan Omar's home as part of a criminal investigation. Plus, ahead of the midterms, the Trump administration is stepping up prosecutions of people it says voted illegally. >> Justice Department officials say that this is actually supposed to instill confidence in the voting process, but skeptics and critics of this effort say that it could have its chilling effect at the polls, even if you can vote. And EV sales might be in a slump, but EV charging is actually getting a lot better. It's Monday, October 12th. I'm Alex Oselef for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. [MUSIC] First on today's show, the journal has learned that federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security searched the Washington DC home of Minnesota Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar. The journal understands that it's part of a long-running criminal investigation related to immigration. The Justice Department said the agents executed a court authorized search in the DC area but declined to elaborate. Last month, Secretary of Homeland Security Mark Wayne Mullin told a conservative podcaster that there was a federal investigation into Omar that was looking at, among other things, how her family came to the US. Omar's office strongly objected to the search calling it an abuse of power. In other immigration news, the Justice Department has been stepping up its prosecutions of illegal voting ahead of the midterms. It's focusing on people who voted that weren't supposed to because they weren't citizens. These prosecutions are a priority of President Trump's. He has long alleged that US elections are vulnerable to widespread fraud, especially from non-citizens voting. Sadie Gerben, who covers federal law enforcement for the journal, is here to tell us more. Sadie, the DOJ has charged about 60 people in the past few months for non-citizen voting. What do we know about these defendants? And what crimes are they being accused of? They don't have very many similarities. They range in age from the early 20s to late 70s. They come from like 28 different countries. And so they seem to be very isolated incidents that the Justice Department is finding. And these people are primarily being charged with two crimes, a misdemeanor, which is voting as an alien. And then the other crime is a felony, which is lying about your citizenship in order to vote. So that's like more like a fraud charge. And that charge carries, if you're convicted, five years in prison. Who have these people voted for and what led them to vote? It was actually interesting to take a look at their registrations. These were a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and people who said they had no party affiliation. I talked to somebody who had actually voted for Trump. And then I talked to another person who had voted for Biden. But what I did find in a lot of cases was that people said they didn't know that they couldn't vote. Many of these people are longtime legal permanent residents here with green cards. So a lot of people just walked in, cast their vote. One interesting example that I found was the case of an Indian grandfather, 69-year-old man, who is living in Texas. He's been here for decades as a legal permanent resident. So he can't understand English very well. He goes to the DMV to renew his driver's license. And while he's there, he is asked to sign a form. And there's a box on this form, and he doesn't understand what it means. And he checks it. And sure enough, it's him saying that he wants to register to vote. And then a few weeks later, he gets a voter registration card in the mail. And just assumes that he could head down to the polls. And he voted in 2024 at the local library where he spends a lot of his time. And then there's others that are intentionally voting. I talked to a person who came here from Mexico when he was 14 years old. And he was living under an identity that he purchased when he arrived here. And so he voted under that identity intentionally multiple times. So the president says that election systems are broken and vulnerable to fraud. What do election experts say about those allegations? He's talked about this widespread fraud. That has not been borne out by any of the actual prosecutions. There's no sign of any coordinated conspiracy or an actual effort to undermine the election outcome, at least not in these cases. Election experts say that justice departments own prosecutions prove what they've been saying all along, which is that this is a very rare crime, very isolated. It's so difficult to find. So the midterms, of course, are coming up. What impact might these prosecutions have on those elections? Well, justice department officials say that this is actually supposed to instill confidence in the voting process. But skeptics and critics of this effort say that it could have a chilling effect at the polls, even if you can vote. If the justice department promotes these kind of fraud cases, the way that they've been doing it, which is very public, and they're trying to go for maximum attention, I think there's also some concern that people just will lose confidence that their vote would even matter. If that was WSJ reporter, Sadie German, thank you, Sadie. Thank you. As we discussed on this morning's show, President Trump's deal to buy Russian diesel is getting a strong reaction in Washington. While Ukraine and Europe try to tighten the economic screws on Moscow, Trump is doing the opposite. WSJ National Security reporter Robbie Grammer joins me now to discuss. Robbie, walk me through this strategy. How does the Trump administration think that this carrot, as opposed to stick approach, could help end the war with Ukraine? What you hear from administration people is this diesel deal is something to dangle in front of Putin to say, look, there are these economic benefits for you. If you start playing, if you come back to the negotiating table, and in the meantime, two birds, one stone, let's help ease some of the price pressures to the American consumers with spiking diesel prices. The counter-argument here to the Trump administration is Ukrainians, Europeans, even some American officials, they all widely agree that Putin has not changed his strategic goals in the war. And that is to subjugate Ukraine. Shortly after Trump claimed this energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, saying, quote, "effective immediately, Russia struck energy grid in Karkiv, a Ukrainian city." And so clearly, Russia is not agreeing to abide by this. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said earlier today, we held back on further strikes on Russian energy infrastructure overnight, just to see if Russia would start abiding by this deal at this point they haven't. At the same time, today, we saw Alexis Greenkevich, NATO's top military commander and a U.S. Air Force general lay out a plan for how to protect Europe from Russian aggression in an effort to reassure anxious Europeans. With the amount of activity that's going on in terms of sabotage in Arsene, I think our populations around the alliance are a bit nervous. And what I want to do is assure the 1 billion citizens of our alliance that we've got this. We know what we need to do, we know how we would do it, and it's going to take all of us working together, but we've got this. So, Robbie, are Europe and Ukraine getting some mixed messages here from the U.S.? They're somewhere between confused and addressing it with a collective shrug and a bit of reassurance. They're hearing multiple things from multiple corners of the United States right now. On the one hand, the U.S. has boosted its arms shipments to Ukraine through Europe purchasing these arms. It's increased intelligence sharing and a lot of cooperation behind the scenes. And then at the same time, you have the Trump who suddenly declares a diesel deal with Russia offers this economic lifeline and symbolic victory to Putin. And then at the same time, on top of that, you have a top American general saying we have a plan of attack to help defend NATO countries here. But also, there's the massive European posture of view going on right now within the Pentagon. And that's military jargon for saying we might take some troops out of Europe. At a time when Russia seems to be getting increasingly aggressive. And so, the allies are really going to start to feel the squeeze and still be pretty vulnerable to Trump's mood swings here on how he views the alliance. That was WSJ National Security Reporter Robbie Grammer. Coming up, the two American economists who won the Nobel Prize for work on economic stability and why luxury giant LVMH's growth slowed last quarter. Those stories and more after the break. Two U.S. economists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences. Stanford Professor Robert E. Hall and Columbia Professor Michael Woodford will split the prize for their work on the role of household and business expectations of economic stability. The Nobel Organization said their work provided a framework for understanding why economic policies first proposed in the 1930s by John Maynard Keynes failed. And the research emphasized the importance of clear communication from governments and central banks to households and businesses about their plans and why they're intervening. The Nobel Committee today broadcast Woodford speaking by phone from New York. My work has stressed that the understanding of the people who are in the markets and making decisions about spending and so on, that their expectations and their understanding of what policy is likely to be like in the future are actually crucial to the effects of policy. And so creating a framework that allows governments to talk to the public about what they're doing, I think is also important and that was one of the. Both Hall and Woodford said the award came as a surprise. In markets today, geopolitical tensions kept oil prices climbing. Russia is still attacking Ukrainian energy targets while Houthi militants are striking Saudi Arabia. Brent Crude, the global benchmark, rose 1.8 percent to more than $106 a barrel. Stocks traded mixed, with the Dow closing up 0.4 percent while the S&P and the Nasdaq both ticked lower. Meta has released a new AI model that it says competes with other cutting-edge models from open AI and in Thropic. The company says the model, called Muse Wonder, includes better memory and more expertise in the health, finance, and legal fields. One important test will be whether the model can make Meta's personal assistant agent muse more popular. Though it's been downloaded 9 million times since it was introduced last month, sensor tower data shows that downloads have started to slow, and its retention is behind ChatGPTs. Today, Meta's stock closed up more than 3 percent. Across the Atlantic, French luxury giant LVMH says a slowdown in Chinese demand is weighing on its fashion business. Sales growth slowed last quarter from the previous one, but was still in line with analyst expectations. However, its fashion division, which includes brands Louis Vuitton and Dior, saw a 5 percent drop in sales. And that came in below what analysts expected. The slowing sales growth is raising concerns over the broader luxury sector, which has been hoping that a recent rough patch is behind it. And supermarket chains Albertsons and Kruger are headed to trial next week. Albertsons sued Kruger after their grocery merger failed two years ago. And as part of that lawsuit, Albertsons wants Kruger to pay at least $8 billion for lost merger premiums and interest, as well as a $600 million break-up fee. Kruger representatives didn't immediately comment. And finally, the US electric vehicle industry is in a dark moment. Vehicle sales are down by half this year compared to last year, since President Trump got rid of tax credits and fuel economy regulations that had boosted the industry. But there's a bright spot in EV charging. The data shows that so far this year, the US has added more than 12,000 plugs. That's more or less on pace with last year. Journal Detroit Bureau Chief Patrick George told our Tech News Briefing podcast why the charging experience has gotten way better for EV owners. For a long time, the public charging experience was kind of infamous for having slower plugs in really inconvenient locations, you know, like somewhere behind a big box store out by the garbage. And now these charging providers and property owners are installing these stations in more convenient locations with amenities, restaurants, restaurants, things nearby. They're making the speeds better too, so that these things can replenish an EV more quickly, and they're adding more plugs per site more frequently, meaning that there's more places to go than just like back when you would only have like maybe two plugs in one location. And if they were both taken, that meant you were driving down the road somewhere else. Patrick says the industry is building for future growth when they expect more Americans to switch to EVs, but they're also building to current demand. I've talked to a lot of executives who have said they're just aren't a lot of EV chargers out there for people who are driving those cars right now that just more is always better. There's also been a big influx in used EV owners, and a lot of those people aren't necessarily homeowners. They're apartment dwellers who need a place to refuel too. Lastly, the autonomous vehicle space is overwhelmingly electric, and so they're kind of building in anticipation of more more rideshare fleets and AVs that are going to need power sources somewhere. To hear more from Patrick, listen to tomorrow's episode of Tech News Briefing. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon. Today's show is produced by Pierre Bienna-May with supervising producer Tally Arbell. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.