California mayor charged with acting as illegal agent for China
City of Arcadia, councilmember, Eileen Wang attends the Asian Hall of Fame 2023 induction ceremony, October 21, 2023, in Los Angeles. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, was charged with acting as an illegal foreign agent for China, the Justice Department announced on Monday.
Wang agreed to plead guilty, the DOJ said.
The City of Arcadia said Wang resigned from her position on Monday.
Starting in late 2020, Wang and Yaoning “Mike” Sun worked together to operate a website called U.S. News Center that “purported to be a news source for the local Chinese-American community.”
The Justice Department said in a plea agreement that Wang and Sun “received and executed directives from PRC (People’s Republic of China) government officials to post pro-PRC content on the website, and sometimes sought approval from PRC government officials to circulate other pro-PRC content.”
In one instance in November 2021, Wang wanted to circulate an article about the Chinese and Russian ambassador asking for Americans to respect the PRC’s “democratic rights.”
“This is what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wants to send,” she said.
In her plea agreement she admitted to not notifying the attorney general that she was working for the PRC.
“Individuals elected to public office in the United States should act only for the people of the United States that they represent,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “It is deeply concerning that someone who previously received and executed directives from PRC government officials is now in a position of public trust at all, but particularly so because that relationship with that foreign government had never been disclosed.”
U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of Iraq Ali al-Zaidi, in the Oval Office of the White House on July 14, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump, in a primetime address on Thursday, announced he has declassified a slew of documents he claims reveal vulnerabilities in America’s elections systems, election fraud and interference in elections by China, and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute those believed to be involved.
“America is back and doing really well, but we still have a major challenge that must be urgently addressed because no country can be great without fair and honest elections, you have to trust your country,” Trump said. “Because if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness, and that’s very simple: no trust, no greatness.”
But throughout the more than 20-minute speech, the president did not provide specific evidence that the election outcome, or any votes, were altered in the 2020 election, despite his repeated claims that the election was “stolen” or “rigged.”
Trump has long pushed debunked conspiracy theories to claim that his 2020 election loss was fraudulent.
The president’s speech led to his main argument: he wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, his sweeping elections reform bill that Senate Majority Leader John Thune has repeatedly said does not have enough Republican votes to pass.
In his remarks, the president said that he would immediately declassify the release of “critical intelligence, revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”
According to the president, the documents focus on what he said were a number of areas of concern, including claims that China “compromised” election data during the 2020 election, and attempts to downplay the extent of China’s efforts.
Trump argued that the intelligence community suppressed information about China accessing 220 million voter files and trying to turn American opinion against him in the run-up to the 2020 election.
The president also accused the “deep-state” of keeping information about election meddling from him.
Trump claimed that U.S. intelligence agencies learned that tens of millions of voters’ data in 18 states had been “bought, stolen, or hacked” by China, and that the intelligence community deliberately kept this information from him while he was president.
Trump’s remarks asserting that the Chinese undertook a far more ambitious role in attempting to dictate the outcome of the 2020 election goes beyond what U.S. intelligence community has previously assessed.
In March 2021, two months into the Biden administration, a declassified “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) that was produced at the end of Trump’s first term publicly acknowledged the belief among some intelligence officials that “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances.” But the ICA said any such actions were “primarily through social media and official public statements and media,” not through interference with “election processes.”
Further, the ICA said that while China was “probably” trying “to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion; political parties, candidates and their staffs; and senior government officials,” the more reliable intelligence indicated that such efforts were not actually intended to undermine Trump but instead to “predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome.”
The heavily redacted documents released by the White House on Thursday do not appear to back up Trump’s assertions, instead containing scattershot intelligence that descries efforts to obtain — but not alter — voter records and to conduct social media activity to sow social discord.
One heavily-redacted document titled “200M Voter Records Compromised. repeatedly references personally identifiable information being compromised. This information includes names, phone numbers and addresses — which can also be found from many other sources.
In another series of near-completely redacted memos, words such as “state voter registration data” and “personal identifiable information” appear between large blocks of black redaction markings. It is impossible to surmise the meaning of these records without context, but they appear to point to some Chinese efforts to gather American voter data, much of which is publicly available.
Notably, these memos document Chinese activities ahead of both the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.
Elsewhere in his remarks, Trump alleged that former Justice Department officials slow-walked an investigation in Michigan that involved the submission of voter registration applications that had forged signatures and other indications of fraudulent applications. Trump called on FBI Director Kash Patel to look into whether any charges can still be brought.
Local media at the time said that a state-level investigation was halted so the FBI could continue with a related investigation. It’s unclear why no federal charges were ever brought or if federal charges were warranted.
At the time, state officials said that the fact that the fraudulent applications were detected shows that the system worked.
The president also said the documents released Thursday include a Department of Homeland Security report he called “stunning,” alleging approximately 278,000 non-citizens were included on voter rolls.
In the documents released by the White House, the DHS report that alleged 250,000 noncitizen voters on the rolls came from a review of “public voter files” that appear to have come from four states: California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada. DHS did not provide any methodology about how it reached that number, nor does it specify what “public voter files” it reviewed.
DHS acknowledged it did not have access to those states’ voter rolls, and alleges that in the 10 states that provided the federal government access to their rolls, the agency found 28,000 noncitizen voters.
Findings from the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation have found only around 100 verified instances of non-citizen voting going back two decades.
-ABC News’ Lucien Bruggeman and Mike Levine contributed to this report.
State Senator London Lamar, a Democrat from Tennessee, holds a copy of the proposed Congressional map for Tennessee during a special legislative session at the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, Tennessee, US, on Wednesday, May 6, 2026. Tennessee is considering redrawing its House congressional map following a key Supreme Court decision last week, a move expected to bolster Republicans ahead of what are forecast to be tough midterm elections in November. (Photographer: Madison Thorn/Bloomberg
(TENNESSEE) — As protesters accused them of racial gerrymandering, Tennessee state lawmakers passed into law on Thursday a new congressional map that could allow Republicans to flip the state’s lone Democratic-held seat, notching the GOP another win in the mid-decade redistricting scramble.
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill into law Thursday afternoon.
The session was interrupted by chaotic scenes with lawmakers shouting over protesters’ voices and at one point forcing police clear the balcony above the House floor before it voted on the new map.
The new map breaks up the state’s current 9th Congressional District, which is primarily made up of Memphis, and the state’s only majority-Black district. The district is currently represented by Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen.
The legislature also passed bills on Thursday that will allow the state to legally redistrict outside of the normal once-a-decade cycle, as well as providing funding to help implement the new map in time for the 2026 elections.
Impact on the midterms and representation in Congress
With the map passed, it paves the way for President Donald Trump and Republicans to gain an additional House seat in the next Congress, increasing their chances of maintaining control of the House as they continue their redistricting battle across the country.
Tennessee Democrats will likely not have any representation in Congress next year if Republicans flip the seat and the map will dilute the Black vote by breaking up Memphis.
But legal challenges against the map are expected.
Cohen said Thursday he will file a lawsuit against the new map.
Cohen posted on X after the vote “[President Donald] Trump knows he HAS TO rig the game to keep his majority in November. And the TN GOP was willing to go along with it. It’s shameful. Next stop is the courts.”
Cohen had said earlier this week on CNN that the Republicans’ redistricting effort was a foregone conclusion, adding that he hopes the new congressional map can take effect in 2028 rather than 2026.
The speed at which the process occurred was remarkable — it was only last week that the Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, dealing a blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
And just one day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Trump posted on Truth Social that he spoke with Lee and that the governor said he would work to redraw the state’s congressional maps in order to net another GOP seat for Tennessee in the House. Lee called a special session the next day, April 30, to review the state’s congressional map.
Potential redistricting efforts are also currently underway in Louisiana, Alabama and South Carolina, although each state has different procedural or legal barriers to overcome.
With Tennessee’s new map, Republicans potentially could flip 14 Democratic-held seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida. Democrats could pick up 10 from new maps passed in California, Utah and Virginia.
Acrimonious debate and protests in the state capitol
The proposed congressional map underwent much acrimonious debate and protest inside the legislature on Thursday before it was passed.
On the House floor, Democratic representatives condemned the map, saying it would dilute the Black vote in the state. At one point, chants of “our house!” started in the House gallery.
As the vote came up for the new map on the House side, chaos erupted in the room. A trooper was asked to clear out the balcony above the House floor as people protested.
Earlier, Democratic State Rep. Justin Pearson, who is running for Congress in the 9th District that will be broken up on the new map, said that “what is happening here is immoral and wrong.”
“This is about attacking, targeting and cracking District 9 into pieces for more political and racial dominance and white supremacy in the state of Tennessee. And we need to realize that the Callaisdecision that you all are basing your decisions off of that gutted the Voting Rights Act, that that Voting Rights Act was paid in blood,” Pearson said.
Pearson later confronted law enforcement officers, ABC affiliate WKRN reported, as they worked on clearing the House gallery of protestors. Pearson later said his brother KeShaun Pearson was arrested.
After the House passed the bill and it was taken up in the Senate, Republican state Sen. John Stevens spoke in support of the new map over audible protests and yelling.
“Tennessee is a conservative state, and I submit its congressional delegation should reflect that. The proposed map ensures that,” Stevens said.
He later said, “This bill represents Tennessee’s attempt to maximize our partisan advantage and allow Tennesseans to support a national Congress to be a Republican majority.”
But Democratic state Sen. London Lamar, who is Black, slammed the new map during debate as an attack on Black voters and said it “diminishes Memphis.”
“This map does not reflect Memphis. It diminishes Memphis. It slices our city into pieces and stretches our communities hundreds of miles away to places of different needs, different economies, different histories and different lived realities,” she said. “You cannot take a majority-Black city, fracture its voting power and then tell us race has nothing to do with it. Racism does not become less racist because it’s called partisan.”
Later, chants of “Hands off Memphis!” rang out and another lawmaker soon unfurled a banner that read “NO JIM CROW 2.0 – STOP THE TN STEAL.”
Exterior view of the Louisiana State Capitol building, the seat of government for the state of Louisiana, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 20th June 1974. Completed in 1931, the Art Deco building was designed by architects Weiss, Dreyfous & Seiferth. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
(BATON ROUGE, La.) — Louisiana lawmakers on Friday approved a new congressional map that could allow Republicans to flip one of the state’s two Democratic-held House seats in the 2026 midterms.
The Louisiana Senate gave final approval to a bill with the new map after much dissent from Democrats.
“Y’all, at the beginning of this process, I would have said that we are building a house on a broken foundation. Now, it feels more like quicksand, because we’re in 2026 going into a map that we know is flawed, that we know is going to get struck down,” state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat, said on the Senate floor.
State Sen. Jay Morris, a Republican, defended the map ahead of the final vote.
“I think we have a map here that meets all the traditional redistricting criteria. It’s not racially gerrymandered. … I think it broadly allows for representation for each region of the state, and it’s very fair, and we should approve it,” Morris said.
The new map comes weeks after U.S. Supreme Court struck down the state’s current map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander.
The landmark Supreme Court decision dealt a blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and set off a newfound scramble of mid-decade redistricting in Louisiana and other states that Democrats say could drastically reduce the number of Black representatives in Congress.
On Thursday, during hours of floor debate, several Democratic state representatives condemned the redrawn map, which eliminates one of the two majority-Black districts in the state, as discriminatory.
“I want to ask you to remember the argument that we should now be colorblind about a congressional map, in this state of all states, requires forgetting a quantity of history that I don’t believe any of us has the right to forget. Black people in this country were not citizens; not partial citizens, not second-class citizens. We weren’t citizens at all,” state Rep. Kyle Green, a Democrat and member of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, said on Thursday.
State Rep. Beau Beaullieu, a Republican who sponsored an amended version of the map that the state House approved, argued to members that legislators had been forced to redraw the map because of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“And now we find ourselves back with a similar map to the one this body passed in 2022, that had five Republican districts and one Democrat district,” he said on Thursday. “The map complies with traditional redistricting principles and also maximizes partisan advantage. The map is contiguous; it is compact; it binds communities of interest; it protects incumbency. … Race was not a factor when drawing these districts.”
