President Donald Trump’s administration has taken its first step to block the results of a midterm election, and it’s all about the fact that there are two Dan Sullivans on the Alaska Senate ballot.
One of them is a Republican and ally of the president. The other is a retired school teacher whom Republicans accuse of being a Democratic plant to siphon away votes.
Trump said Friday that he directed the Justice Department to file its lawsuit.
What is going on? Here's an explanation:
The campaign is likely to be decided by only a few thousand votes, and it could determine which party controls the Senate. So the stakes are high, and Republicans worry that voters will get confused and accidentally vote for the wrong Sullivan.
That's why Republicans have been trying to get the second Dan Sullivan — hereafter known as Daniel J. Sullivan — thrown off the ballot for months. The lawsuit went all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court, but Republicans lost.
Republicans think the presence of Daniel J. Sullivan is a Democratic dirty trick. But Daniel J. Sullivan, who lives in the tiny fishing community of Petersburg, says he is running of his own accord.
Alaskan voters will see “Dan S. Sullivan” identified as a “registered Republican” and “incumbent" on their ballots, while “Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.” will not have a party affiliation. Former Rep. Mary Peltola is the Democratic candidate.
So the Trump administration is filing in federal court to try to block certification of the election if its Dan Sullivan — the senator — loses.
“Should Alaska certify any electoral results tainted by the inclusion on the ballot of Daniel J. Sullivan," the lawsuit said, “the State and its officers will fail in its obligation to protect the integrity of its election.”
Trump said of the lawsuit: “I’m the one who said do it."
The lawsuit is essentially a placeholder and only becomes an issue after Election Day if the incumbent loses.
Even if that happens, legal experts say it has no chance of success. The suit cites a clause in the preamble to the National Voter Registration Act that says states must “protect the integrity” of elections. It says that gives federal courts grounds to overturn elections which, under the U.S. Constitution, are entirely state affairs. But that vague turn of phrase probably isn't enough for any judge to try to overrule the will of the voters, experts say.
Technically, the lawsuit only asks the court to block certification until an investigation determines whether enough voters were fooled by the two Sullivans to have swung the election. It doesn't explain how that would happen, which seems like a big issue given that votes are supposed to be confidential.
Dirty tricks and voter confusion are nothing new in American politics. In Ohio's Senate race, Republicans have been tied to an effort to boost a socialist on the ballot who would pull votes from the Democratic candidate challenging Sen. Jon Husted.
What is new is that the Justice Department is trying to block an election result. Trump wanted the department to help him try to overturn his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020, but career attorneys stopped it. Now most of those career attorneys have been forced out and replaced by Trump loyalists.
The top Justice Department official who signed onto the lawsuit, Stanley Woodward, had previously served as a defense attorney for those prosecuted for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
There's been widespread concern that Trump will try to nullify the voters' will in November, which Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked about in Virginia on Thursday. He said he didn't want to rule out intervening in some sort of “doomsday” scenario but that “it is not DOJ’s intention to, and it’s never our intention to, improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process."
Hours later the department filed its lawsuit over Alaska's certification process.
This combination photo shows Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, left, in Palmer, Alaska, Aug. 17, 2026, and a candidate in Alaska's Senate race, Dan Sullivan, right, in Petersburg, Alaska, July 3, 2026. (AP Photos/Mark Thiessen/Becky Bohrer)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two former FBI officials were charged Friday with lying to Congress about their involvement in investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, the latest in a series of splashy and politically charged actions the Justice Department has undertaken ahead of next month's midterm contests.
Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides, former leaders of a since-disbanded task force set up to counter foreign election interference, appeared in federal court in Washington, where their lawyers pressed for a speedy hearing at which they could contest allegations that they lied to lawmakers by saying that they did not participate in FBI investigations of Biden.
The prosecution, a rare Department of Justice criminal case against a former employee, revisits a tangled and peculiar saga that roiled the final weeks of the 2020 race. It also comes amid a broader, backward-looking effort by FBI Director Kash Patel, who before taking over the nation’s premier law enforcement agency was a harsh critic of it, to scrutinize high-profile episodes from the bureau’s recent past that for years have animated President Donald Trump’s conservative base.
Floris’ attorneys called her “a patriot” and said she has “served our nation as a dedicated FBI intelligence officer for nearly 20 years.”
“Yet today, the DOJ has accused her falsely of a crime on the say-so of politicians, not on the facts,” her attorneys said in a statement. “It’s no coincidence the government is filing these nonsense charges now, years later, on the eve of an election.”
Attorneys for Benavides accused the government of bringing “baseless criminal charges against him in a transparently political complaint.”
“This is another sad day for the Department of Justice,” his lawyers said in an emailed statement. “But now we are in court, and the truth will come out: Brad Benavides is a true patriot who devoted his career to protecting this country and its people. These charges are a disgrace.”
The case was filed 10 days before the Nov. 3 elections via criminal complaint, which means prosecutors have not yet presented the allegations to a grand jury for an indictment. The Justice Department has repeatedly struggled in high-profile cases to convince grand juries in the nation’s capital to return indictments.
During the former FBI employees’ court appearance, both defense attorneys and the judge noted the unusual move to charge the case through a criminal complaint, which is more often used by prosecutors when they have an urgent need to take people into custody because, for example, they present a danger or a risk of flight.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui remarked that it is “rare that we have charges this old coming in this nature.” Faruqui set a preliminary hearing for next Tuesday over the objections of prosecutors, who pushed for more time given what the judge described as the “sword of Damocles” hanging over the defendants’ head.
The revelation of the laptop’s existence in October 2020 injected a thorny storyline in the race between Trump, the Republican incumbent, and Biden’s father, Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger, who went on to win the race.
The laptop were publicized by the New York Post, which said it had obtained from Trump ally Rudy Giuliani a hard drive of a computer dropped off by Hunter Biden at a Wilmington, Delaware, repair shop about a year earlier.
The criminal complaint aims to build on longstanding congressional Republican complaints about the FBI’s handling of the laptop, including allegations that the bureau was not forthcoming to the public that the materials on it — including emails that showed discussions of the younger Biden’s foreign business dealings — were authentic and not the product of Russian disinformation.
The curious circumstances of the laptop’s discovery raised concerns among Democrats and former intelligence officials about the possibility of Russian involvement, particularly at a time when the Trump administration’s own intelligence community was Moscow that Russia was attempting to interfere on Trump’s behalf in the election and as Giuliani had traveled abroad looking for dirt on the Bidens. Dozens of former U.S. intelligence officials signed a letter saying that the laptop bore the "classic earmarks of an Russian information operation.”
But Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, said in a letter to Congress that there was no proof foreign actors had anything to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI under then-Director Chris Wray subsequently backed up that assessment.
Hunter Biden was charged with, and convicted of, gun and tax offenses during his father’s administration. Joe Biden pardoned him in his final weeks in office.
The complaint alleges that in their capacity as leaders of the Foreign Influence Task Force, Floris and Benavides were deeply engaged in the investigations into Hunter Biden, and that Biden was a recurring subject at FITF meetings.
Yet, the complaint says, both downplayed their firsthand knowledge of the laptop or involvement in investigations during 2023 testimony to lawmakers who were doing their own Biden investigation.
It accuses Benavides of making a false statement by saying he learned through Wikipedia that the FBI was in possession of the laptop, and that Floris falsely claimed to have had no knowledge of Hunter Biden having been the subject of discussions at FITF.
“Lying to Congress by senior FBI officials strikes at the heart of our system. No one is above the law,” Patel said.
The case brings renewed attention to the work of the task force, which was established in the first Trump administration to police influence campaigns staged by Russia and other nations aimed at sowing discord, undermining democracy and spreading disinformation. The task force became a magnet of congressional Republican criticism during the Biden investigation and was disbanded in February 2025 by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
As FBI director, Patel has presided over widespread firings of agents who were involved in investigations of Trump or who are perceived as being against the Republican administration's agenda.
He has also focused attention on years-old investigations like the Hunter Biden one that occurred before he became director and that have been the subject of grievances and complaints by Trump allies.
The Justice Department historically looks to avoid public and overt investigative acts in the direct lead-up to an election that involve candidates or that risk influencing a political outcome. But officials in the last two weeks have made a series of bold moves in cases with political undertones, including a search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s house in an immigration fraud investigation and a corruption indictment unsealed Thursday against powerful Democratic Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas.
Omar and Lucas are both Trump critics. Omar, who's from Minnesota, has called the search of her Washington home an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” Lucas has said she won't be intimidated or bullied by the federal government in its case against her and “will not back down.”
FILE - Hunter Biden steps into a vehicle as he leaves federal court, Sept. 5, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer, File)
FILE - Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism at the FBI Nikki Floris, testifies before the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Oct. 22, 2019. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
FILE - An FBI seal is displayed on a podium before a news conference at the field office in Portland, Ore., Jan. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)
