During a recent speech delivered at a truck manufacturing facility located in the state of Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump told a group of his supporters that he made a call to a federal prosecutor in the state of California to look into the primary runoff for the governorship of the state to see if the slow-moving vote count was “rigged.”
Trump’s claim was repeated the following day in the Oval Office, suggesting that GOP candidate Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, took second place and moved into the runoff race this November due to his call to the prosecutor and the subsequent investigation into potential election fraud. The issue of election integrity has been a crucial one for Trump personally following the debacle that was the 2020 presidential election.
“Steve Hilton, who is running for governor. He was up in front, just about leading. No problem. Then all of a sudden, four, five days after the election is over, they said, ‘Steve Hilton is starting to lose votes.’ I said, ‘Here we go again.’ I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look. They are trying to steal that election.’”
President Trump did not provide the name of the California prosecutor he called, but stated that “an hour after the call, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hilton has won.’ Had I not made that call, Steve Hilton would right now be watching the election from home.” According to a report from the New York Times, Hilton will not face Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and former member of the Biden administration, in the November general election.
The NY Times report revealed that there is no single U.S. attorney in California. There are four, each one representing a federal district in the Golden State. When the outlet reached out to them for comment about Trump’s statement, none of them responded. On June 5, 2026, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office was launching “multiple election fraud investigations.”
When Hilton was asked if he had any knowledge of President Trump’s call, he said he had not spoken to him concerning the vote count, nor had he had conversations with any federal prosecutor in California. Hilton himself had downplayed the possibility of voter fraud. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” Hilton stated during a phone interview, adding that any conversations between the DOJ and the president are “way above my pay grade.”
“I don’t have any reason to change what I’ve said all along, which is that we obviously wanted to reassure our supporters that we were keeping a close eye on it and had teams standing by, but didn’t see a need to intervene in any way,” Hilton explained during the interview. “That’s just our perspective. We don’t have the perspective of the DOJ or its resources, so I can’t speak to anything they might know about.”
"*" indicates required fields
Of course, Democratic leadership in the Golden State seized on the president’s comments to spin a narrative of election interference. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office posted on their social media account, “Trump just admitted it. The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election.”
Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video