MAGA official accuses Trump of meddling in county elections: report

President Donald Trump is apparently tampering so thoroughly in elections that even a staunchly MAGA official is raising alarms about it.

“[Maricopa County Attorney Rachel] Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager,” wrote MS NOW’s Ja'han Jones on Wednesday. “Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.”

Yet despite Mitchell’s impeccable MAGA credentials, including endorsing Trump’s 2024 campaign, Jones reported that she has filed a lawsuit against America First Legal, White House adviser Stephen Miller’s right-wing activist group that is trying to make sure Trump does not lose control of Congress during the 2026 midterm elections.

“The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona,” Jones reported. “And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and ‘take over the voting’ in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.”

Jones added, “In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken ‘an unprecedented power grab.’” Her lawyers argued that “the Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview.’”

Overall Jones concluded, “The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.”

Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Common Cause Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation Dan Vicuña said that Trump’s various voter repression policies — including trying to stop mail-in voting, demanding voter files, gerrymandering, supporting voter ID laws and stating he will deploy law enforcement to voting places — are all part of a larger plan to steal the midterms. Common Cause is a nonprofit good government group with a distinguished pedigree tracing back to 1970.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”