Newsom Threatens Felonies, Calls Illegal-Voting Claims ‘a Lie.’ Prosecutors Charged Six More Noncitizen Voters the Same Day.

Gov. Gavin Newsom went on camera the day before the midterms and warned anyone thinking about helping President Trump with California’s election that they would be “prosecuted with a felony,” and that no presidential pardon would save them. In the same video, he called the administration’s claims of widespread illegal voting in his state “a lie.”

That was Monday afternoon. Earlier Monday, federal prosecutors in Los Angeles had charged six more green card holders accused of registering and voting in American elections, bringing their California operation to 34 defendants. The same day, the Justice Department announced 63 people charged with election crimes across 15 states. Twelve of them were in California.

The governor posted the roughly two-minute video to his own X account with a warning in capital letters: “If you interfere with our elections, California WILL come for you. No presidential pardon will save you.”

What he threatened

Newsom aimed the video at the administration’s attempt to have about 20,000 California mail ballots set aside, the ballots federal officials flagged as likely cast by noncitizens. He said Trump had “been setting this up for months and months” so he could call the election stolen, and he accused the Justice Department of hitting local election workers “with criminal grand jury subpoenas to intimidate them.”

Then he turned to everyone else.

“So let me speak clearly and directly to anyone thinking about helping them,” he said. “If you interfere with our voters, you will be prosecuted with a felony. If you tamper with our ballots, you will face justice. It doesn’t matter who gave the order.”

“Two months ago, I signed a law giving our state prosecutors new tools to make sure of that,” Newsom added. His office’s election-eve release spells out which ones. AB 282 makes it a felony to seize ballots, election records or voting machines before results are certified, and a felony for anyone “with authority to direct” others to order such a seizure. SB 259 makes it a felony for a person in authority to direct someone to interfere with mail ballots. A third law, SB 884, bars police from making most arrests within 200 feet of a polling place on Election Day.

Notice who those “with authority to direct” clauses are written for. Not a stray troublemaker at a polling place, but supervisors: the people who give orders to agents and officers. Newsom’s own words, “it doesn’t matter who gave the order,” say the same thing out loud.

The release also says that over the weekend the governor wrote to the chief judges of all four federal district courts in California about how to evaluate search warrant requests for election materials. A governor lobbying federal judges on how to handle warrants in federal investigations of his own state’s election is not something you see every year.

The part he got right, and the part he left out

On pardons, Newsom has a point. The Constitution lets the president pardon “Offences against the United States,” meaning federal crimes. A state conviction is out of his reach.

What the governor didn’t mention is a rule that started in California. In 1889, Deputy U.S. Marshal David Neagle, assigned to guard Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field, shot and killed a man who attacked the justice at a train station in Lathrop. San Joaquin County jailed Neagle on a murder charge. The Supreme Court ordered him freed in In re Neagle (1890), holding that a state can’t prosecute a federal officer for doing what federal law authorized him to do.

Lawyers call it Supremacy Clause immunity, and it still stands. A California felony statute can reach a federal agent who breaks the law. It can’t turn a lawful federal investigation into a state crime. Think of it like a referee: a home team can boo the calls all it wants, but it doesn’t get to eject the referee.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said much the same thing the day Newsom signed the package in September. “Just so there’s no confusion, nothing a state governor signs can prevent @TheJusticeDept from conducting lawful investigations into voter fraud,” he wrote on X. “We will continue to investigate, arrest, and prosecute all violations of federal election laws.”

‘A lie’

Newsom says illegal voting in California is a myth. His state’s federal prosecutors keep filing cases.

The six charged Monday in L.A. County are lawful permanent residents from the Philippines, Mexico, Israel, Canada and Iran. Prosecutors say each claimed to be a citizen to register, voted, then swore on a citizenship application that they never had. Essayli said every one of the 34 defendants is on the same list of 20,000 that the governor’s office says was “proven false almost immediately,” and that when Los Angeles County sampled 200 names from it, all 200 came back foreign-born. We laid out the six cases earlier today.

Twenty thousand is not 34, and charges are only accusations until a jury says otherwise. But “a lie” is a strong word for a problem that has produced dozens of federal criminal cases in one state in two weeks.

Whose hotline?

Newsom closed the video by telling Californians: “If anyone gets in your way, call 1-877-321-VOTE.”

That number belongs to the California Democratic Party. The party’s own site lists 1-877-321-VOTE as the “CADEM Voter Protection Hotline,” and its voter flyers carry a “Paid for by the California Democratic Party” line. So the governor of the whole state, in a video about protecting every voter, sent them to one party’s hotline.

The same goes for his poll-watching push. On Oct. 29, Newsom announced he was “deploying election lawyers to key battleground districts.” His campaign said the 134 attorneys, more than 800 poll observers and 54 hotline operators were organized in coordination with the state Democratic Party, and they’re concentrated in five competitive House districts: the 6th, 13th, 22nd, 45th and 48th. Those are the seats that could decide who runs the House.

What happens next

Polls close in California at 8 p.m. Tuesday. The Justice Department has said it will send about 1,000 monitors to counties around the country, and the Sacramento County registrar confirmed federal observers will be there. The Supreme Court on Monday declined the government’s request to make California keep the 20,000 flagged ballots separate, so those ballots will be processed with the rest while the cases continue.

Newsom has promised prosecutions. Essayli has promised more arrests. The difference is that one of them has already brought 34 cases.