Marc: Congressman Dan Goldman, welcome back to Defending Democracy.
Rep. Goldman: Thanks so much for having me, Marc.
Marc: We really needed you back because we are witnessing an unprecedented attack on democracy in so many different ways. I'm hoping you can help us sort it out. I want to start with something that you are doing legislatively around the problem of political prosecution. Why don't you fill us in on that to kick this off?
Rep. Goldman: Sure. I am introducing a bill with Senator Blumenthal on the Senate side to address the blatant politicized and partisan prosecutions that the Department of Justice has been trying — and I say trying intentionally — to execute. It is unbelievably rare for a grand jury to reject an indictment. But with these political and partisan prosecutions where Donald Trump is ordering Pam Bondi to do them, and they are putting lackeys in office to do them, they're not even getting past the grand jury.
What we want to do is make sure that there are serious guardrails around doing this because regardless of whether or not they're successful — and I think even if they were indicted, they would be unsuccessful at trial — it completely degrades the entire Department of Justice. It means not only these political and partisan prosecutions are suspect, but everything that they do becomes suspect. You can't just separate and say, "This one is partisan, but that one is not." It starts to infect the entire department. It undermines its credibility, the rule of law, and our system of democracy.
This bill would require a lot of disclosure to Congress by the line agents and line prosecutors who are working on the case, who will have to make certifications under penalty of perjury that there were no partisan discussions or considerations when making a decision to move forward or not. There are other similar guardrails against more senior people in the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI.
I know from being a career prosecutor myself for 10 years, I would not be able to move forward with something like this. You might be able to rationalize moving forward if you're worried about your job, but if you have to certify something that you know to be false, and then you have to send any communications or a report to the Office of Inspector General or other ethics officials within the department, you will undoubtedly think twice or three times. That's the point of this bill.
Marc: You mentioned that we've seen instances now of grand jurors rejecting indictments and how rare that is. How do we know when that happens? There's some process that has been described in individual cases after an indictment is returned. I guess it goes to a judge, is that right? If it's been rejected, does it go to the judge? How does this work?
Rep. Goldman: You either get a true bill, which is when the grand jury votes to indict — the grand jury is made up of 23 citizens and you need a quorum of 16, and then you need to have more than half that vote to indict. When you return an indictment, that literally is when you go to the judge and return the indictment, you will return it almost always with a true bill. This means you voted in support of probable cause to believe that the crime has been committed. It's not beyond a reasonable doubt; it's probable cause.
In federal court, hearsay is allowed. You basically can put an FBI agent in there and just summarize all the evidence. There's no cross-examination, no defense witnesses, and no defense case. That's why you hear the expression that you can "indict a ham sandwich." If you're going to the grand jury with a case that you are expecting to convince a unanimous jury of 12 beyond a reasonable doubt, you better be able to get probable cause with half of a grand jury without a defense.
It's so rare that you would get what's called a "no true bill" where the grand jury rejects the indictment, but that would also have to be reported to the magistrate judge at the end of the day. It's a combination of people being there and observing it, or perhaps having sources inside where they're getting information that something like that has happened, but it is exceedingly rare except for this administration.
Marc: At what point in this process would your legislation kick in? Is it pre-indictment? Is it after that gets returned? Is it later in the process during discovery? Tell me where in this process would your new legislation add its protections?
Rep. Goldman: It would most likely be when you are presenting the indictment to the judge or beforehand. You would have to certify that there were no political considerations. It also heightens the requirement of presenting exculpatory evidence to the grand jury.
Marc: Right, and exculpatory evidence for everyone; that's evidence that would mitigate against a finding of guilt.
Rep. Goldman: That's right. If, for example, a witness that you're relying on has said something different in the past, you're going to have to explain that to the grand jury. Then it allows for essentially a right of action for a defendant to go to a judge and make an argument that there's selective and vindictive prosecution based on improper considerations. There will be a process where the judge can investigate that. That's really almost impossible right now.
It does exist in some cases on a motion to dismiss, but it's very hard to get information about whether there was anything improperly done within the grand jury because it's required to be confidential. But because of this bill, we're making it much more feasible to get the grand jury minutes and the grand jury presentation, and to require greater transparency and disclosure.
Marc: I want to turn to another thing that you have been working on, which has to do with the real risk — and the shameful fact that we even have to be talking about it — of an administration that could seize voting equipment and ballot boxes. We saw the search warrant executed in Fulton County, Georgia, related to the 2020 election. I know this alarms me, and I know it alarms a lot of people watching and listening. So what's your prescription there?
Rep. Goldman: I was particularly struck by that search warrant because it related to ballots in 2020. We are now in 2026. The vast majority of federal crimes have a statute of limitation of five years. We would be beyond that statute of limitations right now.
Marc: Right. The last conceivable date would presumably be Jan. 6th, 2026, which would have been five years after Jan. 6th, 2021, the date that Congress certified the Electoral College. So at that point, whatever ballots did or didn't do was no longer relevant.
Rep. Goldman: That's exactly right. There was that, but there was also the very unusual circumstance where the Director of National Intelligence was present. First of all, it's just very weird; it is unheard of. I can't imagine that you would even have the Attorney General present at a search, or the Director of the FBI when the FBI is executing it. It's even weirder when you have the Director of National Intelligence because that's not a law enforcement body. That's an amalgamation of all the intelligence agencies within our government that is fighting ostensibly foreign interference in our elections and otherwise, but is not a law enforcement agency.
Why would they be involved in a search warrant to collect information from the past? The only thing that the DNI and the intelligence community should be focused on is the future and what's going to happen in the next election. My antenna went up with that. But it is clear that they're not actually trying to show that anything was wrong with the 2020 election. First of all, that's been exhaustively litigated, as you well know, perhaps better than anyone. So that's not even really on the table.
When you combine that with another action that Pam Bondi made — by writing a letter to Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, were included in one of the conditions to withdraw the immigration officers who were terrorizing the city of Minneapolis was to hand over the voter rolls. What does one have anything to do with the other? They don't, and they shouldn't. Pam Bondi does not supervise or oversee ICE or CBP or any of the immigration officers who were there, so it's even unusual that she would be talking about that as a condition as the Attorney General.
Again, you have these two situations where they're seizing voter information, and the only real conceivable reason to do that is essentially to purge the voter rolls, because the federal government does not have a role in registering voters or ensuring that voter rolls adhere to state law. The only real conceivable reason they would want this stuff is because they intend to mess with the voter rolls for the next election. What we've seen since then is even more open and notorious declarations of nationalizing this election and interfering in the election. Secretary Kristi Noem said "We want to make sure that the right people are voting for the right officials." That has nothing to do with this phantom notion of undocumented immigrants or non-citizens voting, which we know is just not a thing.
You don't have to take our word for it; the Heritage Foundation, the author of Project 2025, has found that voter fraud just doesn't exist. There have been exhaustive studies of voter data that have found 10 or 20 instances of voter fraud out of millions and millions of votes. It does not affect any election. It's not a thing. So they are trying to create this problem that they now want to solve with this SAVE Act, which is effectively a voter suppression bill. It's all part of a much larger picture of trying to undermine the free and fair election in this upcoming November that started with their efforts to do partisan gerrymandering and have evolved as those efforts have failed.
Marc: I want to come back to the free and fair elections. Utah did a recent review of all of their voter registration records and identified one non-citizen who was registered, and the person didn't vote. That's how rare it is. That was done by the state itself, which had motivations to find whatever there was to find.
I'm going to pick your brain as a lawyer and former federal prosecutor. As we read the affidavit supporting the search warrant in Fulton County, it didn't purport to establish any state of mind. There weren't any allegations from the affiant that anyone intentionally did anything wrong. A number of people have pointed this out as a flaw in the affidavit, that it should have included some evidence that some election official did something willfully or intentionally. Is that true? In your experience, is that unusual?
Rep. Goldman: The requirement to get a search warrant is that you show there's probable cause that a crime was committed and that there's probable cause to find evidence of that crime in whatever you are searching. I don't know that you would have to show direct intent to show probable cause that a crime was being committed because, in theory, you could show probable cause through completely circumstantial evidence. In order to indict someone, you would have to show their individual intent, but a search warrant based on probable cause does not necessarily need that.
Marc: Okay, I'm glad you cleared that up. Let's talk about the upcoming elections because we're both painting very similar pictures of what we're worried about — an effort that Donald Trump has actually said out loud. In Washington D.C., we sometimes assume that if there isn't a cover-up, there must not be a crime. But Donald Trump has proven he's willing to just say out loud the things that he's doing, and that doesn't make them any less bad.
Just to review: we've got Donald Trump telling the New York Times that he wished he'd seized the 2020 ballots, and now his Department of Justice seized ballots from Fulton County. There is the statement that you referred to where he believes Republicans need to "take over" the elections in 15 places. He specifically mentions Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta. He has repeatedly said, incorrectly, that the states are just the agents of the federal government in counting ballots.
Then as you point out, we have the Department of Justice suing 24 states to gain access to their sensitive voting data. The voter rolls are the most sensitive data on voting that states have, and there's no reason why the federal government would need or want it for any good reason. They tried to leverage gaining access to that in Minnesota. When you take all of those things together, Congressman, what picture does that paint for you? What do you worry most about?
Rep. Goldman: It really is remarkable how Republicans especially just seem to give Donald Trump a pass if he says the illegal and unconstitutional things he's doing out loud. Chairman James Comer of the Oversight Committee literally said when asked why he is not investigating Donald Trump taking a $400 million plane and foreign investments in his own crypto companies, his response was, "Because he's doing it out in the open."
It is scary, but as we know from studying Donald Trump for 10 years, he always eventually reveals what he's thinking and what his plan is. For a while he can keep quiet, but eventually he doesn't. He said we're going to nationalize the elections and then said on the same day that we shouldn't even have elections.
Marc: That's right. I skipped that one. He did say we shouldn't have elections.
Rep. Goldman: Separate from the 24 states that they're suing, there are a dozen or so states that are just handing over their voter rolls. The reason I imagine they want this data is that they will go through and "DOGE" the voter rolls, which means they will indiscriminately and arbitrarily start purging people from the rolls. Requiring re-registration for some might be a way they can get around it. This will be done solely to reduce the number of Democratic voters. Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta are overwhelmingly Democratic cities. If those are the only ones that need to be federalized, then we know what he's trying to do.
The other thing I'm very concerned about is seizing ballots or voting machines, which he said he should have done in 2020. There was a draft executive order in 2020 for ordering the Department of Homeland Security or the Pentagon to do that. This is part of the reason why I have been insisting throughout this DHS funding discussion that we have to make sure the Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from unduly and unlawfully seizing voting machines and voter rolls.
Then there are two more elements. One is just pure intimidation: to put ICE officials or other militarized law enforcement officials at voting booths or polling precincts to scare away naturalized citizens. Who knows, they could demand citizenship papers and use excessive force. And then the last thing is the SAVE Act they're pushing, which is truly a voter suppression bill masquerading as a phantom solution to this non-problem of voter fraud.
Marc: On the SAVE Act, I wanted to get your sense. It passed out of the House over the objections of Democrats. Every Republican voted for it, and now it goes to the Senate. This bill requires proof of citizenship. If you don't have a U.S. passport, how do you prove you're a citizen? A driver's license doesn't prove citizenship. Even a Real ID doesn't prove citizenship, except in five states. That leaves you with your birth certificate. I called the Bureau of Vital Records in New York, and they were telling me it would be months to get a certified copy of a birth certificate. This is not something that you can necessarily get immediately. This will be a real obstacle to a lot of people being able to vote. Is that a feature or a flaw from your Republican colleagues' standpoint?
Rep. Goldman: That is 100% a feature because traditionally, poorer people vote Democrat. Broadly speaking, there are going to be more Democrats that do not have a passport than there are Republicans. If you don't have a passport, you are relegated to your birth certificate. I have no idea where my birth certificate is right now, and I imagine there are many others.
They are gaslighting the American people. Mike Lee, who's a lead sponsor in the Senate, responded to my tweet saying this is a voter suppression bill by saying there are other ways of proving your citizenship. I responded, "What are they?" and got no response. There aren't others, other than those five states where you have a Real ID. What they have done very craftily is they have amended the last bill, which was the SAVE Act, which just had the citizenship requirement for registration. What they have done now in the Save America Act is they've added that you also have to have a valid ID when you show up at the ballot box.
While that is a more reasonable requirement than the citizenship requirement, it amounts to a poll tax because non-citizens do not vote in any material numbers. You're adding another layer where people have to get IDs which many people don't have. It disproportionately impacts communities of color and poorer communities, and that's going to have a disproportionate impact on Democrats. They're trying to make the argument that we're preventing all of these illegal immigrants from voting by simply requiring an ID. That is not what is happening.
Marc: The law actually prohibits states from allowing IDs issued by educational institutions. The law says you need state-issued photo ID, but then the Republicans put a provision that says even if your state-issued university ID meets all of those qualifications, it can't count. They have essentially dictated to the states one specific kind of photo ID that cannot count. That seems completely calculated to target a population that doesn't vote Republican.
I went back and looked at the excuses that your colleagues gave when the Freedom to Vote Act was up. The Republicans who said they support voting rights but they don't believe in dictating to the states what election rules are — where did all the "states' rights" people go?
Rep. Goldman: There's Lisa Murkowski, who is probably the only one and she made that exact point. We all know that the Republicans will literally say whatever they need to say to either pass something or defeat it. They're lying to the American people in an effort to fix the election. There still is the filibuster, so this needs 60 votes in the Senate. But there are a lot of rumblings that they're talking about changing the rules of the filibuster. I don't think they have the votes to do that yet, but this is a real massive effort on their part to suppress the Democratic vote.
Watch the full interview here >>>
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