Capehart and Ponnuru on Trump's threat to block Alaska election results

The Justice Department has filed suit that could let the administration block certification of Alaska's Senate race should Republican Senator Dan Sullivan lose, even though no votes have been counted yet. President Donald Trump said he was the one who told the department to build the legal groundwork. The dispute centers on a second candidate also named Dan Sullivan, whom Republicans view as a Democratic ploy to taint the outcome. Alaska's Supreme Court ruled in June that both stay on the ballot, though it has not yet released its reasoning, according to PBS NewsHour.

On PBS NewsHour, MS NOW's Jonathan Capehart called the suit a manufactured crisis and said a president should not direct the department at all. National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru said he sees no federal basis for it and expects it to go nowhere, noting that Democrat Mary Peltola might simply win by a wide margin. Sullivan's campaign says voters can tell the two apart.

The panel also discussed a Wall Street Journal account that Elon Musk directed curbs on Ukraine's use of Starlink. Administration officials have given conflicting versions of who approved them. Trump says service is back, while Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukrainian military officials report outages persisting.

Summarized by PolitiKool from PBS NewsHour’s reporting. Read the full story at PBS NewsHour →