Donald Trump controls the Department of Justice. It prosecutes his political enemies and looks past the transgressions of his friends. It is staffed with election deniers seeking his favor by undermining free and fair elections.

So when Trump says that election officials in California “will all go to jail for a long period of time,” we should take the threat literally and seriously.

For two years, people have speculated about the potential for a constitutional crisis. Let me be clear: we have reached one.

For more than a year, states have fended off the Trump administration’s unconstitutional encroachment on their power to set the time, place and manner of federal elections.

At first, this took the form of demands that states turn over their full, unredacted voter files to the DOJ. Thirty states and the District of Columbia, including California, resisted and were sued. Elias Law Group represented clients in each of those lawsuits.

The DOJ is 0-26 in the cases decided so far, and my firm is undefeated. The rest are pending.

Trump next tried to weaponize the U.S. Postal Service to obtain data on which voters were requesting and casting mail-in ballots. Once again, my law firm sued and won an injunction. In a separate case, the Supreme Court rejected DOJ’s efforts to defend the Postal Service’s scheme.

Interspersed with these attacks have been other data-collection schemes and attempts to intimidate state officials and lawful voters. In recent weeks, they have become so frequent that it has been hard to keep track of them all.

The through line of all of these attacks, however, has been the administration’s insistence that states disenfranchise voters whose ballots it does not want counted in the midterms.

Time and again, the administration has cloaked this scheme in false claims of noncitizen voting and election fraud, only to have the truth exposed on closer examination.