Assistant AG Dhillon, Attorney Essayli Announce Update on 2 Criminal Cases

I'm Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon in charge of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice and after I speak I'll introduce my colleagues here. And so today we're announcing the filing of two criminal cases that represent the continuing commitment of the United States Department of Justice and Acting Attorney General John Blanch to combat both hate crimes and to ensure the integrity of all of our federal elections. Both of these cases reflect joint investigative efforts of the FBI, the Civil Rights Division, and the United States Attorney's Office of the Central District of California here in Los Angeles. So first I want to talk about voter fraud and the case of United States versus Brown Armstrong and we'll have a graphic up there in a moment. The Department of Justice has charged a longtime California signature gatherer under 52 U.S.C. section 10307 subsection c with one count of paying another person to register to vote in a federal election. The defendant Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong has signed a plea agreement and has admitted her guilt on this charge. According to the plea agreement and my colleague Billa Saley will be able to answer any specific questions about it, she worked as a petition circulator aka signature gatherer here in Los Angeles for approximately 20 years. And starting in 2025 or so after Ms. Brown Armstrong had had a practice of going down to Skid Row here in Los Angeles getting homeless people to sign these signature petitions that had to do with qualifying ballot measures and etc. She would sometimes find that the signatures would be disqualified because the people signing these signature petitions weren't actually registered to vote. So to remedy this flaw in her business arrangements she would then gather starting in 2025 stacks of voter registration forms from the Los Angeles County registrar voters and then go to Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles to have homeless people first sign the voter registration forms and then sign the signature petitions. And she did this in exchange for cash and other items of value inducements both for the voter registration and for the signature petitions. These were often small sums of cash just a few dollars as well as cigarettes and phone cards. On several occasions when the homeless person had no formal address to enter on the voter registration form Ms. Brown Armstrong provided them with a fake address namely her own former address in Los Angeles to write on the voter registration form. Now the potential charges in sentence rather would include five years in prison three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $10,000. This case is important because it shows how easy it is under California law to corrupt the state's voter rolls and thereby corrupt the state and federal elections administered by the state because when someone registers to vote including with a fake address in the case of an unknown number of people here they're bailed ballots that include state and federal elections here in Los Angeles. And so untold numbers of fraudulent voter registrations can be created. The business model is signature gatherers in California like Ms. Armstrong are often Brown Armstrong are often paid per signature 10 sometimes upwards of $10. And so we're committed to protecting the integrity of all American elections at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division but there needs to be a commitment by people and leaders here in California to ensure that the people of our state of California where I live for 25 years can again trust our elections and so that's the importance of this case. And Bill do you want to say anything about this one? Okay all right so moving on to the other important case today this is a hate crime indictment. In the case of the United States versus Zaid Ghadistani unsealed today a federal grand jury earlier this month returned an indictment charging Mr. Ghadistani who's shown here in his own Instagram images on the right as well as his arrest this morning on the left. He's been charged with a hate crime arising arising out of his alleged unprovoked attack on a Jewish man outside the Otis Torres synagogue in the Pico neighborhood here in Los Angeles. Per the indictment on June 23rd a real estate agency hosted an event at the synagogue to promote land for sale in Israel. These types of events have happened in several American cities including Brooklyn Manhattan and others here in Los Angeles and they have become a subject of violent attacks to intimidate Jews particularly in synagogues. Per the indictment and this event by the way happened mid-2024 several pro-Palestinian groups including the following the Palestinian Youth Movement, Code Pink for Women in Peace, Westpac Foundation, Honor the Earth and Pacific Grassroots Collective planned and advertised a protest outside Otis Torres which Mr. Ghadistani attended. The indictment alleges that the victim who is a Jewish man was walking his dog in this neighborhood where by the way there are numerous orthodox synagogues. Ghadistani allegedly approached the victim from behind and without warning or provocation struck him in the face because of his actual or perceived race or religion. The victim suffered pain redness and swelling as a result of this unprovoked attack. Per the indictment Mr. Ghadistani posted photos of the attack to his Instagram account that's the pictures you see on the side there saying whooped the Zio's today and the chosen people sometimes need a good smack to wake up. Anti-Semitic hate and violence have become endemic in the United States after October 7, 2023. They have no place in America. They are un-American and they are illegal. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to protect every single American to be free from any kind of violence like this based on their race, religion or national origin. And of course in the case of the first defendant who pled guilty that guilt has been admitted of the case of Mr. Ghadistani of course he is presumed innocent until proven guilty and we look forward to bringing this case to justice. Now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Saley to answer any questions and make any remarks that he has concerning. Thank you. Appreciate it. Good morning everybody. Both these cases were work in conjunction with the Civil Rights Division and my office the prosecutors in my office. We developed both cases and we are proud to stand with the Civil Rights Division to announce those cases today. On the matter of election fraud this is particularly important to me as a former assemblyman in the California State Legislature here. They would frequently say there is no fraud in elections in California. Well today's an example where fraud did occur. Not only did Ms. Brown pay people to register to vote which is illegal it is a federal crime 52 U.S.C. 10307 C. She also induced them to place false information on the voter registration forms. She had them put her address as the address to receive the ballots. What she was going to do with those ballots when received was to be determined. But this is an example of election fraud and this is not merely an allegation. She has admitted guilt. She will be appearing in court at 10 o'clock this morning and she has agreed to enter a plea of guilty at the appropriate time. So this is not an allegation. It's not a theory. This is a admitted form of election fraud which is extremely coercive, corrosive to our democracy. So now the question is how widespread. Those in power would like to say well of course there's some fraud but it's not widespread. The truth is and I can tell you having been up there they have no idea. They have no idea how spread the fraud is because they do nothing to detect it, prevent it, or to prosecute it. Nothing. They have no interest. Well in this department under Todd Blanche and Harme we're not putting up with it. We are going to aggressively prosecute election fraud. This is an ongoing active investigation. Ms. Brown is simply the first person that we are announcing charges for in this investigation resulting from some undercover videos that took place at Skid Row. We want to get to the bottom of how widespread the fraud is. The best way for us to do that is to audit the voter rolls of the state of California which by law we should have the ability to do. We have been engaged in proactive litigation with the state of California who's resisted the federal government's rights to audit the California voter rolls. What are they afraid of? We are going to court I think tomorrow and the ninth circuit on this issue and we believe strongly that the federal government not only has the right but has a moral responsibility and obligation to make sure that only legal citizens are voting in our elections. If you allow non-citizens or non-eligible people to vote you are diluting the vote of every citizen. It's supposed to be one citizen one vote so that is a very important case. It's a very important development and we look forward to more progress in that space. On the issue of the the second case we have made it very clear from day one we have zero tolerance for any crimes against religious institutions or for people based on religious characteristics or race. We are committed to that. We have multiple investigations in that regard. Again this is just one that we're announcing today. If anyone has any information regarding election fraud or against crimes against people of faith please reach out to the FBI. It's 1-800-CALL-FBI and with that I'm going to turn it over to Patrick Grandy who is the assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office. Good morning. As mentioned my name is Patrick Grandy. I'm the assistant director in charge of the FBI's Los Angeles field office. I'd like to thank my partners here today for their hard work and collaboration in combating hate crimes. Mr. Giziotani was taken into custody by FBI agents this morning in Carlsbad, California without incident and will have his initial appearance here in Los Angeles later today. As pointed out by the first assistant and the assistant attorney general pro-Palestinian protesters are alleged to have blocked access to the Ades Torah synagogue in Los Angeles preventing people from congregating at the house of worship. Later on the protests became violent and individuals were victimized with pepper spray and other makeshift weapons. This case illustrates the transition from free speech to criminal conduct and subsequently led to an FBI investigation. These investigations are complex. To give you an idea of the scope of this case, FBI personnel reviewed thousands of hours of videos, executed multiple search warrants, and reviewed hundreds of gigabytes of data derived from the search warrant returns. We also served dozens of grand jury subpoenas and conducted dozens of hours of physical surveillance shifts. I'd like to thank our partners at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and police departments from Los Angeles, Alhambra, UCLA, Gardena, San Bernardino for their significant assistance in helping to bring Mr. Gizziattani to justice today. I'd also like to thank our San Diego and Chicago field offices for their assistance in this investigation. In closing, from the FBI's perspective and yours, even one hate crime is one too many. Hate crimes continue to be the highest priority of the FBI's Bureau of Civil Rights sections because of their heinous nature and their impact on victims and communities. We know that each year hate crimes go unreported across the country. If you suspect you're a victim of a hate crime or know someone who has been victimized, please report it to law enforcement. You can also report it to the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or online at tips.fbi.gov. Our commitment to investigating hate crimes remains steadfast and we will continue to protect the citizens and our communities who depend on us. Thank you. Happy to take any questions anybody might have concerning either of these. Yes. Regarding the election, the voter fraud case, can you talk about what kind of organizations she was connected to collecting these signatures? Were there certain movements? Was there a certain political party? Or was it kind of based on who would pay her? Yeah. She worked for a vendor. She'd been in this business for a long time. Depending on who hired them, they would either collect petitions for ballot initiatives or in some cases they would also get paid to register people to vote. Now the reason that it's important that someone be registered to vote is that if you're collecting signatures for a ballot initiative, the signature won't be counted and you won't get paid unless that person is a registered voter. Thus, before she could have a homeless person sign the petition, she needed to first get them registered to vote and that's what she was paying them to do. Was she instructed at all by the organizations to pay people? That is currently under investigation. Do you have a number of the people that need to be allowed out of the forums? Like I said, this is part of a bigger investigation right now, but we thought it was important that we charge this quickly and at least assure the public that the Department of Justice, again, is taking this seriously and there are criminal consequences to this conduct. This is part of a larger investigation. We'll get into all that I think soon in the future. Can you say what led you to her? Yes, there was a public reporting of an undercover video of her out on video paying homeless people to register to vote. I think that was widely reported. It was all over the press and as a result of that, we initiated and opened up a criminal investigation with the FBI. I know she's worked at doing this for about 20 years, more or less. Do we know when she started this activity and when? Was she still doing this last week? We only have the video recently of her documented doing it, so we don't have right now what she was doing before, but I would suspect it probably was on her first time. But there's some questions online, including somebody was asking about Armstrong's party affiliation, if known, and the reporting of James O'Keefe. I don't have her party affiliation in front of me. When it comes to prosecuting cases, that's frankly irrelevant. We don't care what people's party is. If you're breaking the law, we're going to prosecute you. And yes, James O'Keefe is the source of that video. Any other questions? It's just one person in all of this. I mean, do you know if it's more people doing the same thing? There are more people. They're under investigation, but today we're announcing a charge for misconduct. And I would add that this has happened very quickly because reporting on this video is like less than two months ago, and so we thought it was important to immediately act on this. I and Bill spoke, and our whole team went into action quickly. So this is ongoing. We believe it is widespread. I personally have seen it happen in other jurisdictions as well as a longtime election lawyer, and so we're very interested for people who are witnesses to either self-report and cooperate or call the FBI if they're aware of this activity happening that is corrupting the voter rolls throughout the United States, which is why the United States Department of Justice is auditing voter rolls under the 1940 Civil Rights, 1960 Civil Rights Act, which is in litigation. Tomorrow we have an argument, an expedited appeal on the Ninth Circuit of California and Oregon's refusal to turn over their voter rolls. And so that is being argued by two of my colleagues in the Civil Rights Division tomorrow, and I'm here for that as well. And there'll probably be some remarks outside the Ninth Circuit on the courthouse regarding that appeal as well as some other appeals that are ongoing in this regard. Seventeen states so far have voluntarily cooperated with the United States effort to obtain the voter rolls as a result of that effort, including some of these states uploading their own voter rolls to our federal databases. We've discovered several hundred thousand dead people on the voter rolls and a number of tens of thousands of people on the voter rolls with no discernible citizenship record, which is required by the Help America Vote Act. Each state is required to maintain auditable, verifiable, central databases. And I think the failure here in California, and specifically in Los Angeles County, as Los Angeles County has previously agreed in a 2017 settlement with an organization named Judicial Watch, that there were over one million people on the voter rolls in Los Angeles County who did not belong on the voter rolls because they were dead, they had moved, they were duplicates, or they were otherwise ineligible to vote in Los Angeles County. This is a widespread problem in California, and you can see what happens in a case like this, that ballots are sent from the registrar voters to a place where they don't belong. We don't know what happened to those. That is why there's an investigation. One single illegal vote in an election can change the outcome, so this is very important and a national focus of the Department of Justice. I want to also add on the Otis Torres situation that a number of people, a number of these incidents have occurred. There were hundreds of people at the protest in question, and so when our FBI colleagues said they reviewed all this evidence, I want to be clear that this is the first arrest in this case. We have had ongoing investigations, and by all means, these are not over. I would like to bring to justice all the individuals who come to a house of worship and threaten and harass people there, no matter what their motivation is. It's illegal under the FACE Act. We didn't draft that law. Congress did in the 1990s, and we are very committed to enforcing it. So far, it has been enforced in a civil case in West Orange, New Jersey, also a land sale incident there that we have charged civilly, and of course, the city's church case in Minnesota, where there was an attack on a church and blockage of the church. And so there are other incidents under investigation throughout the United States, including here in Los Angeles. I personally visited this site of the synagogue, spoken to the rabbi, and heard from families that are affected by this type of violence. People feel afraid to wear their symbols of their faith in this community, and that is un-American and unacceptable. Any other questions? Yes. Oh, for me? Oh, sorry. Can you reiterate the times for the two court hearings today for each of these defendants, and then tomorrow, what time of night is that? I think it is 10 o'clock today for other judges. Yeah, Ms. Brown is going to make her appearance today for arraignment at 10 o'clock, so about half an hour, at the Santa Ana Federal Courthouse. And then the other gentleman will be in L.A. about 1-1-30 for his bond appearance. He is in custody, and he will have a bond hearing and initial appearance. Oh, tomorrow, the Ninth Circuit? Deborah, do you know the time for the Ninth Circuit for this particular case? The docket starts at 9 a.m. Yeah, so in the Federal Appeals Court, you have to wait until the next prior one ends, so I'll be in court at 9 a.m. when our argument is over. I'll come out, so probably mid-morning to late morning before we have a press conference outside, and our press team will keep people informed about that and let you know about it. Any other questions? You mentioned you believe that this is widespread voter fraud. What reasons do you have to believe it's widespread, and what does widespread actually mean? Well, for one thing, there's video evidence of people doing this on multiple occasions, and so we've been able to identify this particular lady. There are obviously thousands of people on the voter rolls, sorry, over a million people on the voter rolls in Los Angeles who don't belong there. That is part of the evidence, and Los Angeles has admitted that. That's not a disputed fact. And so a million is a lot in a county of 10 million. That's a pretty bad error rate, and so what it shows, and by the way, this is also not disputed. California repeatedly over the years has requested extensions of time to comply with federal requirements under the Help America Vote Act. Never really has complied in our opinion because there is no system for getting rid of or detecting the fact that dozens of, or maybe even more individuals are registered to vote at a single residential address, and so it is not difficult to do this. Other states are doing it. Other states are voluntarily complying. The federal government is able, ready, willing, and able to help individuals and states comply with these requirements, and, you know, over a third of the states are voluntarily complying, and so it's the voluntarily complying states that have shown so far the figures that I mentioned. So we can only imagine what is happening in high population states, New York, Illinois, California, that are refusing to cooperate with federal law enforcement, where the Attorney General of the to obtain voter records. States are required to maintain them, and states are, in fact, California and others, handing these voter rolls over voluntarily to so-called non-profit organizations that are using them for allegedly partisan activities, but they refuse to provide them to the United States. So when we are complete with our investigations and litigation, we'll have a better picture of the distortions of our voter rolls, but every time a ballot is mailed to a where it should not have been sent and does not belong, we lose control over our voting system, and that in turn has the effect of undermining public confidence in the outcome of our elections, and I think we would all agree as Americans that we want all Americans to accept the outcomes of elections, no matter what they are. I want that, and I think over the years, people in both parties and independent parties have complained about voter rolls and vote by mail and all of this, so I think we should all get to a point where we have clean voter rolls and everyone accepts the outcome. That would be a good thing for America. Any final questions here? Let me just add to the reason why, you know, we can't give you a solid number for California is because they won't give us the information. The problem with California is basically everyone now votes by mail, so the ballots, millions of ballots go out in the mail. You have no idea who's receiving the ballot, you have no idea who's filling the ballot out, and you have no idea who's returning the ballot, so then when we count the ballots, it takes us three, four, five weeks to count them. We have no voter ID, so you have no way to actually confirm the identity of the person voting, and that's why we want to look at the voter rolls. We want to make sure nobody's getting a ballot that shouldn't be getting a ballot, and then this is why I think you've seen the administration push strongly for voter ID laws, and I know there's efforts for that to go through Congress, and now there's a citizen ballot initiative in California that will provide for voter ID, so we're not taking a position on that. I'm just telling you these are the issues that we wrestle with in California. It's very hard to detect and to prevent fraud because of the way they run their elections, so it makes our job harder, and so it becomes harder to answer your question with concrete numbers, but we're going to do our best, and we have the FBI working on this, and we have our Meats team working on this, and so once we saw these videos, we went to work. Here's one prosecution, and we're looking at more, and we will keep prosecuting and exposing this problem. We would tell California, drop your lawsuit. Don't resist our efforts to audit your voter rolls. You should welcome it with an open arm. Bring the federal government in. Help us clean up the voter rolls. Why does California not want clean voter rolls? They must benefit from it for some reason. We don't know, so we want to get to the bottom of it, so if California is listening, they can show up tomorrow, and they can drop their case, but I don't think they're going to do that. Just one follow-up question. How many cases have you prosecuted so far of voter fraud in your office? My office here? This is the first one under my tenure here. I'm sure we've done other voter fraud cases in the past. I don't have those in front of you. Can I add that some of our investigative work at the Department of Justice in states, including Michigan and others, stems out of state prosecutions. They're sporadic. In the case of Michigan, there are, I think, three different instances of voter fraud prosecutions at the local level of three incidents, and so that led us to believe, given that it was in different places, that there was a problem because they didn't seem to have a way of controlling for this, and so we do appreciate when states do step up and enforce the law themselves. It is, unfortunately, quite rare, and we have other cases we're aware of. We can't talk about them yet because they haven't been indicted nationally, but this is a problem that you're to see news about in other jurisdictions as well. There are multiple states in the United States where people who are not American citizens, even illegal aliens, have not only registered to vote, but also voted in American elections, and that distorts and dilutes the vote of every single American in this room and who's watching. You have a question? Yes, the last one from me. I'm just wondering if people should be worried about any potential impacts that Well, sure. I mean, if you're arrested for committing a crime, that may impact your ability to vote at some point, but our goal is not to impact any particular election. This is an ongoing issue. I was a California voter for many years, and you register to vote once typically, and you go to the DMV and renew it in 10 years or what have you, but it is an ongoing problem, so it's not targeted at any one election. I think we do have a little bit of a crisis of confidence, Americans, and you go into the streets and ask Americans about recent elections. Both parties, I mean, you've had Stacey Abrams, you've had Hillary Clinton question the outcome of elections that they were leading candidates in because of issues about vote by mail and machines and so forth, and so we need to put a stop to that by starting with the very basics and the very foundation. You can't have a clean election if you don't have clean voter rolls. That is basic, it is fundamental, and I don't think anyone should really quibble with that, and by the way, as I've said, there have been elections in the United States in recent years. I can remember one where a statehouse flipped control over a single vote in a single race, and so one bad vote does affect the outcome of an election, and some of these local elections we have, you have a mayor's election coming up here in Los Angeles, and they're lower voter turnout, so any one vote can affect the outcome of city council race or a mayor's race or what have you, school board race. Each vote matters, and so that is why prosecuting as a start, this lady and what she did, is a great start, but it is by no means the end, and we are very interested in the public giving us whistleblower information, eyewitness information, self-reporting information about doing these things so that we can put a stop to it and increase voter confidence. I think that's, I don't see any other questions. Thank you guys very much. Thank you.