Weekend Law: Elections Raid, Windmills Win & The Minions

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1:57The Cincinnati Insurance Companies. Let them make your bad day better. Find an independent agent at CINFIN.com. This is Bloomberg Law with June Grosso from Bloomberg Radio.

2:15June Grasso:There's something sinister going on here. There's something bigger than just the FBI confiscating the records that they took. And Fulton County Chairman Rob Pitts says they're asking a federal court to order the FBI to return the roughly 700 boxes of ballots, voter rolls and other election records seized in a raid about a week and a half ago. Pitt warned that the raid foreshadows further federal action on elections elsewhere in the country. This is, I think, probably the first step in whatever they're going to do in order to depress voter participation, voter registration, making whatever changes they think are necessary to help their case in 2026, but more importantly, in 2028.

3:02This says the Justice Department has sued 24 states and D.C. for refusing to turn over voter data. And President Trump has been doubling down on his calls to nationalize elections. I want to see elections be honest. And if a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it. Of course, the Constitution gives the authority to administer elections to the states. My guest is Barbara McQuaid, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney. Barbara, the FBI seized the records using a grand jury subpoena as part of a criminal investigation.

3:42What do you think is going on here? It's unknown, of course, but we have some hints. I mean, one is they got a search warrant, which means a magistrate judge found probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found there. And we know from the public filing that what they obtained were ballots, tabulation tapes and voter rolls. Now, 2020 is six years ago. And so it would seem that anything that occurred during that year would be time barred by the five-year statute of limitations. But of course, that's not something that a magistrate judge should take into consideration at that stage.

4:26Perhaps there's some allegation of an ongoing conspiracy that could keep that allegation fresh. I don't know. But also, you can't ignore the simultaneous civil request that Trump's DOJ has been making to try to get voter rolls from a number of states, including Georgia. They have failed in states where decisions have been made, like California and Oregon, where judges have said, no, the federal government is not entitled to this stuff. So are they simply using criminal process to get that which they could not obtain otherwise? But the fact that a magistrate found probable cause suggests that there is more information there than we currently know.

5:07The prosecutor whose name was on the warrant was not the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, but the St. Louis U.S. attorney, Thomas Albus, who's been appointed by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate so-called election integrity cases nationwide. How unusual is that sort of skipping over the local U.S. attorney? Yeah, it's really unusual, but not illegal. I mean, so much of what the Trump administration does is technically lawful, but either unusual or, you know, discretion, you'd rather see someone not exercise, I suppose. Ordinarily, you would expect the U.S. attorney from the Northern District of Georgia to oversee any search conducted within his jurisdiction.

5:52That's the way it's done in 99.9 % of the cases. The attorney general does, however, have the authority to appoint a special attorney to investigate any matters that she chooses. And we've seen this done over the years. For example, Pat Fitzgerald, who was the U.S. attorney in Chicago at the time, handled the Scooter Libby case. I think that was an effort to just sort of get it out of Washington so that it wouldn't have the stench of politics. I know that Ann Tompkins out of North Carolina handled the prosecution of General Petraeus, for example. John Durham, before he was the special counsel looking at the origins of the Russia investigation, actually investigated CIA torture at one time.

6:35So it's not unprecedented. It's often in sort of politically charged cases where the attorney general may appoint somebody outside of Washington, who's a U.S. attorney, but doesn't have to be, to handle maybe sensitive cases. And I think it's especially true if the case might transcend the boundaries of a particular judicial district. So maybe this case is going to include not just Georgia, but some other states. So that might make some sense. I worry a little bit. I don't know Thomas Albus, but I do know that he comes from Missouri. And he's got sort of the association with election deniers that causes me some concern.

7:12And you remember in 2020, there was a different U.S. attorney, Trump appointed, in the Northern District of Georgia by the name of B.J. Pack. And he resigned in December of 2020 when Trump started asking Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State there, to fine me 11 ,780 votes. So you wonder if it isn't the case that these U.S. attorneys who've got backgrounds as federal prosecutors, as the current U.S. attorney there in northern Georgia does, I think his name is Hertzberg. You know, he's a career USA, but Trump's not going to make the same mistake twice, right? He's going to make sure he's got somebody he can trust that Pam Bondi has handpicked to handle this very sensitive operation, as opposed to the person you would ordinarily assign this case to.

7:59And actually, the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office resigned from his post about a week before the agent served the Warren and there was no public explanation. Yeah, that's another, you know, red flag, I suppose. And I don't know whether he resigned or was fired. And I don't know why he left. I know Kash Patel has been firing agents who had anything to do with either the Trump investigations or the January 6 investigations, which itself is improper. There's no allegation they engaged in any misconduct. They just don't like the cases that they worked on. So we don't know why. But again, that would be another safeguard there.

8:38the special agent in charge of the FBI runs the FBI office in Atlanta. That office was tasked with conducting this search. And so the special agent in charge would be someone who would be in a position to push back and say, no, we're not going to do this. I don't think it's lawful. I don't think it's an appropriate use of our power, or at least let's talk about this. And the fact that he was either fired or resigned, again, is just one more red flag and another irregularity among many. And yet another irregularity. Fulton County officials say they're typically given copies when records are taken, but they weren't given any copies this time by the FBI.

9:21And there was no chain of custody inventory taken when the records were seized. So basically, they don't know exactly what records are missing. And when the FBI returns the records, they won't be able to verify if they've gotten everything back. Oh, what a mess. I didn't know that. So, you know, the chaos of the Trump administration never ceases to amaze me. I mean, of course, ordinarily, when the FBI conducts a search, there is a whole protocol for how that's done. They get training at Quantico for how to do this. There is an agent who leads the search, and then there are other agents assigned to the search.

10:00They assign various agents, at least two, to every room that gets searched. When there are computers involved, they track what it is they're taking or whether they're just copying it. And documenting that carefully is critically important, number one, so that everybody knows what was taken, so the rightful owner of the property can request it back. But also, if you're going to use this at evidence at trial, you have to authenticate it and show that chain of custody so that the jury knows this isn't something that you just manufactured once you got back to the FBI office, that you can have a witness testify, I am the one who showed up at the Fulton County Election Office on such and such day.

10:41I took this document into my hands, or I copied it from a computer or whatever it was. I put my initials on it. I put it in an evidence bag, I labeled the drive, whatever it is, so that that chain of custody can be retrieved at trial. It makes me wonder whether they're obtaining this evidence, not so much for any future criminal case, but for some other purpose. I don't know what that purpose would be. And I was saving the biggest irregularity for last, Barbara. The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard was at the raid. She initially said that President Trump had asked her to be there, but there have been shifting explanations from the administration about why she was at the scene of a domestic law enforcement operation.

11:29Listen to what Attorney General Bondi said when asked about that.

11:33June Grasso:D and I, Gabbard and I are inseparable. We are constantly together, as are the people behind us. We constantly talk. We collaborate as a cabinet. We're all extremely close. They may be inseparable, but Bondi wasn't at the raid in Georgia. And in addition, Gabbard facilitated a call between the president and the FBI agents after the search. All of this highly irregular and bizarre. So there are two reasons it's bizarre to me that Tulsi Gabbard was there. Number one, a person at her level, the director of national intelligence, like she should have better things to do, right? They have trained agents for this work.

12:16You would not expect the attorney general to be there. You would not expect the head of the FBI to be there, right? This is in the trenches kind of work that agents are trained to do and do every day. So the idea that she's there and she's there like, you know, in a ball cap and everything. Like, what, is she rolling up her sleeves and grabbing evidence? I don't think so. So just bizarre that she's physically present at the scene, first of all. Second of all, this really feels like something way beyond her remit. Her job is to coordinate intelligence collection among the 18 intelligence agencies in the federal government and then to report to the president about the results of those findings to answer any questions he may have, to advise him about threats to the national security.

12:59These are threats coming from foreign actors. So that suggests that there is some foreign nexus to this search. I can't imagine what that would be. It kind of goes back to some of those conspiracy theories. Remember when Sidney Powell was saying things like, I do. Dominion falsely, I'll add. Dominion voting machines were programmed by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Like, what? And then, I remember there was some tie to Italy that caused William Barr to actually travel there with John Durham when they were investigating the origins of the Russia investigation. They never found anything there. The inspector general never found anything relating to these things.

13:41It seems like it was all just wild, crazy stuff that was manufactured. But here we are again with some suggestion that there's some foreign nexus to all of this. I don't know what it is, but if there's not any foreign nexus, highly improper for Tulsi Gabbard to be there. But if she's there, it does raise this specter of is there some foreign nexus to this? And I just can't imagine where this is going. But brace yourself, June. I've been bracing myself every day. Thanks so much, Barbara. That's Professor Barbara McQuaid of the University of Michigan Law School. Coming up next, the score is windmills 5, Trump 0.

14:22I'm June Grosso, and you're listening to Bloomberg. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card and the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com.

14:54June Grasso:Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Smart Talks with IBM. I recently sat down with IBM's chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna. And I asked him, how can companies use AI to its fullest potential to create smarter business? My one advice to them, pick areas you can scale. Don't pick the shiny little toys on the side. For example? If anybody has more than 10 % of what they had for customer service 10 years ago, they're already five years behind. If anybody is not using AI to make their developers who write software 30 % more productive today, with the goal of being 70 % more productive.

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16:54June Grasso:And paid for by Public Holdings. Brokered services by Public Investing. Member FINRA SIPC. IPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors. SEC Registered Advisor. Crypto services by ZeroHash. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures. You know, I know windmills very much. I've studied it better than anybody. You see these things all over the place. They destroy everything. They're horrible. And the most expensive energy there is, they ruin the environment. They kill the birds. They kill the wealth. Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight, but the winds stop blowing and I can't watch.

17:35June Grasso:There's no electricity in the house, darling. You want to see a bird cemetery? Go under a windmill sometime. You'll see the saddest. President Donald Trump has been a vehement critic of wind power for years, deriding wind turbines as bird-killing eyesores and falsely claiming it's the most expensive form of energy, causes cancer, and drives whales crazy. And Trump has aggressively tried to cripple the wind power industry in his second term. Within hours of returning to the White House in 2025, he issued a directive that froze new permitting for wind energy and ordered officials to consider terminating any existing leases.

18:18We don't allow windmills. We're not allowing any windmills to go up. And so in December, the Department of the Interior ordered a pause on five multi-billion dollar wind farm projects under construction, saying it was due to unspecified national security concerns. Well, this week, for the fifth time, a federal judge found that the administration's permitting freeze was illegal and granted a preliminary injunction to block its stop work order. Now all five of the wind farms planned in federal waters have gotten a go-ahead from judges, although the Trump administration says it will keep finding them in court.

19:00My guest is an expert in environmental law, Pat Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Pat, tell us what happened when five different judges took a look at the Interior Department's stop work orders on these wind farm projects. projects. So Trump is 0 for 5, basically, in these cases. And the interesting thing is, these are a variety of judges. Two of them were appointed by Trump. And a third one, Royce Lamberth, who just issued the final nail in the coffin for this stop work order, he was nominated by Ronald Reagan. So, you know, we're not talking about woke judges. We're talking about conservative judges, all of whom, without exception, have said that this order, this stop work order on five offshore wind projects, which, by the way, is six gigawatts.

19:52Okay. It's designed to serve more than two and a half million homes and businesses all up and down the East Coast. So, you know, this is a really, really significant amount of electricity that this stop work order has tried to halt. So there's a preliminary injunction against all of the stop work orders at this point. The Trump administration, the Interior Department, has said that they're suspending these because of national security risks. It didn't disclose the security risks, but it claimed that the Department of Defense provided new classified information about advances in adversary technologies that could raise national security issues with offshore wind projects.

20:35I'm not sure what that means. And Judge Lamberth looked at those confidential documents and said he didn't get it. He didn't see the security risks. Right. He said there was no proof of imminent threat to national security at all. On the other hand, he said that stopping the work orders was going to cost these companies$2 million a day. One of the projects, Vineyard Wind, was 95 % complete. It's already sending some electricity to the grid. And two of the other projects, one of them was 40 % complete, the other one 65 % complete. So you got to remember, these are projects that have gone through an incredible amount of vetting, including Department of Defense vetting, including clearance from the Department of Defense.

21:24Of course, that was the Department of Defense before Trump. So when Trump now comes up with these secret classified documents demonstrating a threat to national security, and as you point out, Judge Lamberth looked at them and said, I don't see it. it does raise the serious question is this all just a pretext for trump's you know well known animosity outright hostility to wind power and it all comes from the fact that he owns a golf course in scotland and from his golf course you can see wind farms off the coast of scotland generating all kinds of clean electricity he doesn't like the look of them he's come up with all kinds of reasons why they're bad.

22:06They cause cancer. No, they don't. They kill a disproportionate number of birds. No, they don't. They're unreliable. No, they're not. They're too expensive. No, they're not. So that's where we are. Pat, you left out that Trump says they drive the whales crazy. Oh, the whales. Don't forget the whales. Yeah. And all of this has been true, you know, years and years, not only of vetting in the agencies, but the whale issue in particular has been up and down the courts in the First Circuit and the Second Circuit repeatedly. And none of the cases have found a serious threat to the whales. Believe me, if there was a serious threat to the whales, you'd be hearing about it from me.

22:44That's true. I know all the work you've done on preserving wildlife and endangered species. Do you think another reason that Trump may object to wind power is that he wants more power to be generated from natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy. There's also the fact that former President Joe Biden supported renewable energy with things like tax credits. Yeah, anything that Biden supported, he's going to kill. And, you know, these arguments just fall apart. The studies that have been done by banks, serious people, right, all say that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy to bring online quickly.

23:27Not that they're going to solve all of our problems. They're not. You need baseload electricity. But when it comes to really costing out, you know, the life cycle costs of these various energy transmission options, and you look at everything from where do you get the materials, you know, whether it's fuel or other things to build these systems, and then how much does it cost to buy the fuel for these systems? Just think about it. The wind is free. The sun is free. Once you've installed these systems, these wind turbines offshore, you don't suffer the fluctuations of gas prices. You know, you don't have oil spills.

24:08You have wind spills, but not oil spills. So the sober analysis of renewables is saying to meet the growing demand for electricity, including the huge one from AI data centers, you need more wind and solar. You need all kinds of forms of energy, but you in particular need projects that are almost complete and ready to go. The White House said they're going to continue fighting in court. Do you think that appellate courts might have a different viewpoint? They might. You know, you always have to leave open the possibility that a different panel of judges would reach a different conclusion. But the point is that the evidence here of a national security threat consists of a document or documents, right?

24:58And so you don't have witnesses. Yeah, I mean, some other judges might look at these documents and reach a different conclusion than Judge Lamberth did. But the rule is the trial court's decision to issue an injunction, if it's reasonable, right, if it's based on an analysis of whether the government's stated reason for these stop work orders passes muster, I don't think the courts of appeal are going to overturn these preliminary injunctions. The cases are proceeding. The proponents of these projects, primarily Orsted, the Denmark firm, they're bound and determined to work with the Trump administration to resolve whatever their questions are.

25:37The real question is, with the signals coming from these wind turbines to the grid, would they interfere with military radar readings? That's what it comes down to. And, you know, the companies are saying, hey, look, if you need more safeguards and more mitigation of whatever risks you think there are, we're all about addressing that and fixing that. We have decades of experience with building these systems, running these systems in every country in which they're operating. They have the same set of radar and military needs and national security needs. And if there are issues out there, they can be dealt with.

26:17Pat, despite the fact that the Trump administration is losing in court, court battle after court battle over the wind farms, the shift in policy under Trump, I mean, even the so-called one big beautiful bill sped up the phase out of federal tax credits for offshore wind projects. So has the policy shift and this general assault on wind power increased the risks of investing in it so that it's unlikely that you'll have new projects, the ones that are ongoing now they'll fight to keep. But new projects, I mean, I think the government's not even going to approve new projects. Yeah. Yes, that is the bigger threat here, that they're going to discourage investment.