A federal prosecutor said Friday that his office has multiple election fraud investigations underway in California, and one of his prosecutors was sent to a Los Angeles County ballot processing center to watch vote counting in person.
First Assistant U.S. Atty. Bill Essayli posted the update to X Friday morning, days after President Trump accused Democrats in California in a late-Wednesday social media post of cheating in the state’s primary election and said there was an investigation underway in Essayli’s office. Trump offered no evidence for the claim, but the federal prosecutor’s message gave it new force by confirming that investigators are already active and that the FBI is involved in Los Angeles.
The prosecutor who went to the ballot center was Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Renner, who was there to observe the vote counting process. A spokesperson for Dean Logan said the visit fit with other routine observations of the counting process, which is open to public observation by appointment. That matters because California is still counting millions of ballots, and the federal presence comes while the state is under pressure from a political fight over whether slow results reflect fraud or simply the mechanics of a large mail-ballot system.
By Thursday evening, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office said about 5.6 million ballots had been processed and an estimated 3.6 million additional cast ballots remained. Weber said Thursday that taking the time to do the work correctly protects voters’ rights and ensures the integrity of elections, a direct rebuttal to Trump’s allegations and to Republican criticism of the pace of the count. California officials have said the delay is the result of a careful, accurate tally of millions of ballots, many of them mailed on election day.
Essayli declined to discuss any one case, saying he would not comment on any specific investigation, but he said protecting California’s elections is a top priority for his office and argued that the state’s election system has serious structural vulnerabilities. That leaves the sharpest question unanswered: what exactly federal prosecutors think they are looking into. For now, the concrete fact is that multiple probes are open, ballots are still being processed, and the next public marker in the debate is next Thursday, when the state’s count will again be measured against the accusations swirling around it.
