Trump Gathers Press to Show Off White House Helipad Project; ... DOJ to Send 1,000 Monitors to Observe Voting in November; Courts Dismiss 20+ DOJ Cases to Access State Voter Rolls; Trump Revives Unproven 2020 Non-citizen Voting Claims. Aired 12:30-1p ET

Inside Politics. Aired August 19, 2026 - 12:30 ET. THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BASH: Don't go anywhere, when we come back new details on the president's election security crusade, how the Justice Department is readying for the midterms.

[12:35:51] BASH: On Election Day in November, approximately 1,000 election monitors will be dispatched by the Justice Department to polling sites around the country. Now that's according to Assistant Attorney General, Harmeet Dhillon. Here's what she says will happen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARMEET DHILLON, ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR CIVIL RIGHTS: The places where there may be language issues, the places where there may have been access of disability rights issues, places where there may be voter fraud issues that we've seen. We've had some prosecutions. I think you've seen some of those. There'll be some prosecutions in the pipeline of people who voted illegally who should not have.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Now to be clear, past administrations in both parties have routinely sent polling monitors to observe elections in case of any legal issues. But when it comes to election security, this obviously is not a normal administration.

My panel is still here and also with us is CNN's Gabe Cohen, who has been covering all of this very closely. Gabe, what does this tell you about what she said, not only about the numbers, but about the where and the why?

GABE COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, you talked about the precedent that is there for the Justice Department to be sending election monitors. I think what is different here is that we have seen this administration essentially go on a hunt to try to prove the president's claims over the past 18 months that there is this issue of widespread voter fraud and the Justice Department is just one example that has fallen in line with that.

We have seen these lawsuits against dozens of states where they have been essentially demanding that states hand over their voter list because they are insisting that they are going to find massive numbers of non-citizens on those lists. Just look, a month ago, we saw claims from the Department of Homeland Security that they had reviewed public voter data and found more than 250,000 non-citizens on the voter list of just four states.

So they're making these big claims that, by the way, these states that they're talking about have pushed back on and said, what methodology are you using? Where are these numbers coming from?

BASH: Yeah.

COHEN: So when we see the administration essentially try to prove out what were unsubstantiated claims from the president, I think that's what's giving a lot of people pause about these election monitors going out across the country looking for anything suspicious.

BASH: So a couple things. First of all, you mentioned these lawsuits and this is something that is ongoing. The DOJ sued states for their voter rolls and 23 of those cases were dismissed, and so -- and most of that is push back from blue states, some red states like West Virginia and others.

There are still six ongoing lawsuits that have not been resolved. And then what you were referring to, I believe, was this Trump truth that the Census Bureau started checking voter rolls from 2020 against their citizenship records.