By
MICHAEL BLOOD and NICHOLAS RICCARDI
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles said Friday it had opened “multiple election fraud investigations” related to California’s elections and sent a prosecutor to the county’s vote-counting center.The developments came a day after President Donald Trump made baseless claims of mass fraud in California’s drawn-out vote count from Tuesday’s primary. Late-tallied Democratic-leaning mail ballots were continuing to eat into the vote totals for the president’s preferred candidates for governor and Los Angeles mayor.The announcement by U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli, Trump’s appointee as the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, and the visit to Los Angeles County’s ballot tabulation center marked an escalation in the president’s campaign against the Democratic-dominated state, whose notoriously prolonged vote count has been a magnet for election conspiracy theories. Trump weighed in again Friday while participating in a roundtable discussion in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, claiming without evidence that Democrats were rigging the election.
“You look at what’s happening — it’s getting tighter and tighter and tighter,” he said. “And the people who were supposed to win, bad things are happening. It’s a crooked state.”
