President Donald Trump strongly defended his administration’s legal strategy in California elections on Saturday, praising Los Angeles’ top federal prosecutor while sharply criticizing federal courts for rejecting a push to set aside thousands of disputed voter registrations.
Writing on social media, Trump commended First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli as “one of the best, EVER!” and asserted that the prosecutor had uncovered substantial evidence of potentially illegal voting. The president’s remarks followed a 2-1 ruling Friday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected an emergency Justice Department request to force California election officials to separate ballots tied to roughly 20,000 individuals suspected of being noncitizens.
The appeals panel upheld a lower court decision by U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, concluding that there was no practical way to identify and isolate the disputed ballots without severely disrupting the ongoing election process and potentially disenfranchising eligible voters. In his social media statement, Trump compared the setback to his unsuccessful legal challenges following the 2020 presidential election and vowed to continue a yearslong legal fight over election integrity ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.
Trump also took aim at the Senate confirmation process, denouncing the blue-slip tradition as a “SCAM” that he claimed allows opposition lawmakers to block nominees. Essayli has been operating at the center of the administration’s confrontation with California election authorities, which began after California Secretary of State Shirley Weber and Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan declined to comply with federal demands to review the contested voter rolls within the requested timeframe.
Ahead of the appeals court ruling, Essayli warned that potentially ineligible voters might already be casting ballots as local election offices process mail-in votes. “If you look at California’s own papers, they said they’ve already processed over 300,000 ballots just for LA County,” Essayli stated. “So this is going on as we speak.” He argued that every minute the state continues processing ballots without verifying registrations dilutes the votes of American citizens.
Alongside the election dispute, Essayli faces a separate judicial challenge regarding his authority to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. Senior U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright ruled Tuesday that Essayli was unlawfully serving as a de facto U.S. attorney, finding that the administration bypassed formal appointment requirements by assigning him successive titles after an initial acting appointment expired.
While Seabright’s ruling bars Essayli from supervising two specific criminal prosecutions, the judge delayed the order while the government pursues a stay pending appeal and declined to dismiss the underlying indictments. Essayli has indicated that the appointment dispute will likely ultimately be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court.
