National News

President Donald Trump's executive order demanding states put new procedures in place for mail-in voting and turn over information about who is voting by mail is almost certain to be struck down in court, Jim Saksa wrote for Democracy Docket on Friday — but that's not the only way it could derail Trump's ambitions.

That's because this order could also undermine one of the main arguments Trump's Justice Department has used in court to defend the lawsuits filed against dozens of states to seize their voting rolls.

"In those lawsuits, the DOJ has claimed it needs millions of voters’ private sensitive data in order to ensure the states are complying with federal laws that require states to take steps to ensure accurate rolls," said the report. "But outside of court, DOJ officials like Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon have undermined that claim by boasting that the state voter records they’ve already obtained have been used to verify citizenship status using the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program."

After judges began ruling against the lawsuits on these grounds, DOJ officials backpedaled somewhat and said there was no plan to help the Department of Homeland Security build a national database of voters.

Trump, however, may have blown that excuse by outright acknowledging in his executive order that he "directs DHS to create a nationwide voter registration database," noted the report.

"Along with Dhillon’s statements and Trump’s orders, the DOJ’s courtroom attestations have been impeached repeatedly," wrote Saksa. For example, "last week, CBS reported that DOJ and DHS were working to formalize a data-sharing agreement for the voter rolls. And on the same day Tucker was assuring a federal judge that the DOJ wouldn’t share state records with DHS, Eric Neff, acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Rights Section, admitted to another judge in Rhode Island that they, in fact, would."

Trump's lawsuits for state voting data are not just limited to Democratic-controlled states, but even some Republican-controlled states where GOP election officials have concluded sharing the data would be illegal. Some of these lawsuits have run into legal blunders, including the revelation that there was no proof the suit against Washington State was properly served.

MAGA financial pundit Eric Bolling revealed that President Donald Trump's Wednesday night address to the nation had likely "triggered" a 60-cent spike in gas prices.

During a Thursday interview on the War Room podcast, Bolling said he had been giving MAGA influencer Steve Bannon updates on the oil market as Trump was speaking about the war in Iran.

Bolling noted that oil was trading at "$98 a barrel" before Trump started speaking.

"It really didn't move very much during the speech. I kept updating you. When he talked about the part where he said, we're going to send them back to the Stone Ages, I think that triggered something because that's really where it started to tick up to $99 a barrel, $100 a barrel," he recalled. "When he finished, I think traders were hoping to hear some sort of legitimate off-ramp, and it just spiked 101, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 108 or so."

"This morning I got up, Steve, and I was just shocked. $11, $12 a barrel, that's $13, $14 a barrel higher," he said. "Unfortunately, that turns into about a 60, 70 cent move up on the pump price just on the overnight alone, what it did overnight."