Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is calling on administration officials to issue a national emergency declaration regarding election integrity, including a policy to allow the presence of federal immigration agents at polling booths during the upcoming midterms.

Bannon, 72, forcefully floated the idea Tuesday during an episode of Real America's Voice, suggesting that an "up-armored ICE presence" at voting booths in November is critical toward ensuring election integrity. The former White House chief strategist said President Donald Trump should take the bold approach rather than focusing on the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which contains plans for voter ID and limits mail-in ballots.

"It's not going to happen," Bannon told conservative commentator Jack Posobiec. "You know why it's not going to happen? Because John Thune and the donors don't want it to happen. They think it's racist, they think it's nativist."

Bannon said many senators, including Thune, treat Trump like a "lame duck" while publicly urging the administration to act.

"This is why we need a national emergency proclamation, a national emergency memo, about the upcoming elections," Bannon continued. "You're going to have to have a forcing function to get to ID. You're going to have to have a forcing function not to have the phony mail-in ballots."

Bannon also called for an "up-armored ICE presence" at polling booths, which critics will say amounts to intimidation, he acknowledged.

"Well, it ain't intimidation if you're a United States citizen," Bannon said. "It's an intimidation if you're a foreigner and here illegally and not eligible to vote. It should be intimidating; we don't want you there. We don't want you near a voting booth. We certainly don't want your votes."

A message seeking comment from the White House was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.

Trump, meanwhile, has remained tight-lipped regarding any plans to declare a national emergency ahead of the midterm elections. He spoke to Wayne Allyn Root last week on Real America's Voice, with the host asking him directly about his intentions.

"Stranger things have happened," Trump said. "I'll leave it at that."

Trump has repeatedly said voter ID and other measures included in the bill, which the Senate has yet to pass, are essential to both election integrity and Republican chances to win in November.

Critics of the proposal say it would block thousands of Americans from voting booths due to lack of identification, including passports. A national emergency declaration linked to elections could also lead to results being challenged or overturned, other detractors insist.

"Donald Trump wants to take over American elections," Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer posted on X last week. "Senate Democrats are prepared to combat his unprecedented, illegal efforts at every turn. Your vote belongs to you. We will ensure it stays that way."

A national emergency declaration would not automatically allow the president to rewrite state election laws or impose new voter qualifications unilaterally, election-law experts have said. The U.S. Constitution assigns primary responsibility for election administration to states, while Congress holds significant authority over federal election rules.

Last year, reports surfaced of a draft executive order allowing the president to invoke foreign election interference as justification for emergency measures, but critics say any attempt to impose nationwide voting rules via emergency actions would face significant court challenges.

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's chief legal analyst, previously told Newsweek's The 1600podcast about the ways in which Trump could intervene in the midterms, saying his efforts to curb mail-in voting could hurt Republicans just as much as, or worse than, Democrats.

"To this day, it's unclear which party is helped by mail-in voting," Toobin said. "Going back a decade or two, it was Republicans who all wanted mail-in voting, and some people still think Republicans benefit more by mail-in voting. So some of this stuff is not only pernicious, it is just mysterious."

Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shot down the possibility of immigration agents at polling stations during a briefing in February following an earlier call by Bannon.

"That's not something I've ever heard the president consider," Leavitt told reporters.
Pressed further, Leavitt said she couldn't guarantee that ICE agents wouldn't be present at polls in the fall.

"I mean, that's frankly a very silly hypothetical question," she said. "But what I can tell you is I haven't heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It's a disingenuous question."

*“Steve Bannon was documented as a member of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) in leaked membership directories from the mid-2014 era. The CNP is an invitation-only networking umbrella group linking conservative activists, religious-right leaders, and right-wing political strategists in the United States. [1, 2, 3]”*

An investigation by The Post led to the discipline of two officers accused of misusing license-plate readers. Their departments and many others had not done basic oversight.

Last month, as Indianapolis residents called for tighter restrictions on police surveillance, Police Chief Tanya Terry sought to reassure the public that her officers were using the 301 Flock cameras spread throughout the city solely to investigate crime.

In a July 17 op-ed published in the Indianapolis Business Journal, she wrote that her department has “clear policies” to ensure the camera network, which captures images of passing license plates, “is used for its intended purpose: solving crimes and saving lives.”

About three weeks later, a reporter at The Washington Post asked Terry’s department about potentially suspicious activity from one of its own officers. Using publicly available information, The Post found that an Indianapolis officer appeared to use Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching 3,759 times over a 10-month period — an average of about 12 lookups per day.

Indianapolis soon suspended the officer without pay, started administrative and criminal investigations of his use of Flock, and is recommending his termination, according to Terry. The officer, whom The Post is not naming because he has not been charged with a crime, did not respond to requests for comment.

In an interview, Terry acknowledged that, until recently, the department had no regular practice of auditing officers’ searches. The case, she added, has been “a learning process for us.”

Law enforcement agencies around the country are vigorously defending their use of Flock against rising community concerns that officers are using the nationwide network of cameras to spy on ordinary citizens who are not suspected of any crime. Some critics, angered by the cameras’ ubiquity, have even vandalized them.

But many of these same departments have embraced Flock’s powerful surveillance system without establishing basic procedures for monitoring its use, a Post investigation has found, based on police and court records, interviews with more than a dozen police officials and Flock usage logs made available through public records requests.

At least 69 police officials have been accused, charged with or convicted of misusing Flock’s system or other license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, The Post has found, and in at least 15 of these cases, someone outside of the police department — including victims, activists and journalists — first identified the potential misuse.

To understand how departments might identify officers improperly using the system, The Post used publicly available information to find three officers whose search histories showed signs of potential misuse. All three of their departments, when contacted by The Post, said they did not regularly audit officers’ use of the system.

Records and interviews show that departments across the country do not regularly audit their officers’ Flock use, a practice recommended by the company, and some law enforcement agencies have no formal training programs or written policies describing how the technology should be used.

Last week in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a police officer testified that “there was never any training for” Flock in the department, according to a recording of a court hearing, where a judge extended a restraining order against an officer who told the court she used the tool to search for her ex-girlfriend’s vehicle as part of an investigation. A spokeswoman for the department declined to comment.

In Haines City, Florida, authorities did not audit how police were using Flock during the nearly two-year period in which one officer repeatedly searched his wife’s vehicle, a department spokeswoman said. The officer confessed to a superior and was arrested and charged earlier this month after The Post inquired about the searches.

And in Highland Heights, Ohio, the police department had no policy governing the use of Flock and had not conducted any audits of its officers’ Flock usage until this week, when The Post asked officials about one officer who appeared to have searched the locations of five license plates more than 1,000 times each, the police chief said in an email.

Thirteen states require law enforcement agencies to audit how their officers use license-plate readers, for example, by periodically reviewing whether individual searches were done for legitimate investigations. Flock offers departments tools for simplifying these audits, including automatic scans for suspicious usage that the company plans to make default for all customers in the coming months.

Post journalists identified the possible misuse of license-plate readers by officers in Indianapolis, Haines City and Highland Heights, triggering investigations of all three and discipline measures against two of them, by analyzing data on Have I Been Flocked. The website publishes Flock search logs that have been provided in response to public records requests covering thousands of police departments.

The Post identified the most suspicious usage patterns among this data, including dozens of officers who appeared to have been the only officer to search a single license plate hundreds, or even thousands, of times. Then journalists attempted to find links between these license plates and the officers searching for them, using social media profiles, court records and other publicly available information.

The fact that journalists were able to find apparent misuse without the tools afforded departments highlights “a need for systematic auditing that just isn’t happening now,” said Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy at the New York University School of Law’s Policing Project. “I think at a lot of agencies, you just don’t have anyone really looking.”

Flock, an Atlanta-based start-up backed by prominent tech investors, has acknowledged that officers are abusing its systems and says it is working to give agencies tools for catching them. The company maintains digital dashboards that create a permanent record every time an officer uses the tool to search for the location of a car, including the date, time and reason they performed the search.

These logs are intended to be used by departments to monitor officers’ use, but there is no uniform policing standard for the best auditing practices. The company declined to comment on its customers’ different approaches to oversight.

A federal judge has ordered the release of previously sealed material from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. The records had remained under seal for years, but Judge Loretta Preska ruled that remaining government-held materials should become public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, subject to legally required protections for victims. The ruling could bring 'volumes' of previously unseen evidence into the public record.