Philly DA warns jail cells are ready for anyone who tries to mess with city's vote

WASHINGTON — As Donald Trump's team once again targets large, majority nonwhite cities in swing states like Pennsylvania with claims of election fraud, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner issued a warning to anyone thinking about interfering with elections in America’s birthplace: “F around and find out.”

"If people think they’re going to erase votes in Philly or terrorize people who are here to protect those votes, we’ve got some handcuffs, we’ve got some jail cells, and we’ve got some Philadelphia juries who want to hear why, exactly, it is that somebody thought they could erase our votes or terrorize our elections workers,” Krasner, a Democrat, told NBC News in an interview Thursday, just days before the election.

Krasner said that his "patriotic" team was prepared to handle any issues on Election Day and called any attempts to undermine or influence the vote in Philadelphia "utterly unacceptable."

"As they say in Philly, if somebody wants to come and do that, they can F around and find out," he added.

The City of Brotherly Love, which has been majority Democrat since the 1960s, has long been a target of Republicans and former President Donald Trump, who in 2016 became the first Republican to win Pennsylvania since George H.W. Bush's election in 1988.

During a 2020 presidential debate, Trump warned that "bad things happen in Philadelphia." His campaign filmed Philadelphia voters that year as they placed their ballots in drop boxes, drawing a rebuke from state officials. After the 2020 election, "elite strike force" lawyer Rudy Giuliani held a press conference in the lot of Philadelphia's Four Seasons Total Landscaping — a business near a sex shop, crematorium and the city prison — to once again make false claims about voter fraud in Philadelphia before reporters informed the former New York City mayor that the networks had called the election for Joe Biden.

Biden won Pennsylvania in 2020, but Trump actually improved his margins in Philadelphia from 2016 — a fact that Trump's head of Election Day operations, Mike Roman, told a campaign colleague did not fit "the narrative" they were advancing to undermine his election loss.

Trump and Republican poll watchers who believe his baseless claims of mass voter fraud are once again gearing up to target Philadelphia and other majority nonwhite cities in swing states in next week’s elections. Trump told supporters at an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, in September, “I’m here only because they cheat, and they cheat in this state, especially in Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s out of control. Detroit is out of control. Atlanta is out of control.”

Krasner said it was inevitable that Trump would focus on Philadelphia, along with Pittsburgh, which is smaller and majority-white but still the second-largest city in a pivotal swing state.

“Part of it is just the math. If you either enhance or suppress the vote legally or illegally in these two cities, you can take the whole state,” Krasner said. “Thing two, of course, is that the most diverse and most Democratic — capital 'D,' Democratic — city in Pennsylvania is Philadelphia. It is the largest city in Pennsylvania. This is a city where the demographics have changed a lot since I was a kid, I'm now 63. The city is currently about 40 percent black, it is about 40 percent white, and it is about 20 percent other people of color. Democrats outnumber Republicans approximately 6 to 1 in this city."

Krasner said that part of the Trump playbook is to "pretend" that the "very diverse city full of working-class people and poor people" was "some kind of cesspool of crime," even though violent crime is down in Philadelphia and the U.S. is experiencing "the largest reduction in violent crime in recorded criminological history."

"As is always step one of the fascist playbook, the truth has nothing to do with it," Krasner said. "Every now and then I play a friendly game of poker with seven other old men, and I always announce before a hand that if any of them win, they've cheated. Because, you know, I've learned this from him. Apparently, you holler, 'If I lose, everybody's cheating, but if I win, everything was cool.'"

"I'm not surprised that he's already announcing that the fix is in, there's going to be another big steal, while, in reality, his people try to steal the election all day long, every day," Krasner said.

Krasner's office filed a lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk this week over his super PAC’s lottery-style $1 million giveaways to certain voters in swing states. He declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit, which Musk's team is seeking to move to federal court.

Krasner’s warning to any would-be election interferers is a strategic effort to get out ahead of potential issues in the coming weeks, and he said that sending a clear message has “deterred a lot of stupid behavior” in prior election cycles. He added that his coordination with federal authorities at the FBI has been “more intense” this election cycle, with preparations starting earlier.

“We do have serious concerns that we might see something similar to or worse than what we saw in the last presidential cycle,” Krasner said.

Back in 2020, Krasner's office led the successful prosecution of two men who showed up outside the Philadelphia Convention Center in a Hummer with guns, including an AR-15 style weapon in the car, in the week after the election. The two men, who later participated in the events of Jan. 6, were convicted on gun charges in 2022. One of them ended up in a parking garage with Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on the night before the Jan. 6 attack; he was not charged in relation to Jan. 6. The other, Antonio Lamotta, ended up storming the Capitol and being sentenced to six months in federal prison in September.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com