Two Pittsburgh business owners have been charged after an investigation by Attorney General Dave Sunday’s office found that they purchased electronic benefit transfer cards at a discounted rate and used them to purchase food for their businesses. KDKA-TV’s Chris Hoffman has more.

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — Officials in Connecticut and Arizona are defending their decision to refuse a request by the U.S. Justice Department for detailed voter information, after their states became the latest to face federal lawsuits over the issue.

“Pound sand,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes posted on X, saying the release of the voter records would violate state and federal law.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced this week it was suing Connecticut and Arizona for failing to comply with its requests, bringing to 23 the number of states the department has sued to obtain the data. It also has filed suit against the District of Columbia.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said the department will “continue filing lawsuits to protect American elections,” saying accurate voter rolls are the ”foundation of election integrity.”

Secretaries of state and state attorneys general who have pushed back against the effort say it violates federal privacy law, which protects the sharing of individual data with the government, and would run afoul of their own state laws that restrict what voter information can be released publicly. Some of the data the Justice Department is seeking includes names, dates of birth, residential addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.

Other requests included basic questions about the procedures states use to comply with federal voting laws, while some have been more state-specific. They have referenced perceived inconsistencies from a survey from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

Most of the lawsuits target states led by Democrats, who have said they have been unable to get a firm answer about why the Justice Department wants the information and how it plans to use it. Last fall, 10 Democratic secretaries of state sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security expressing concern after DHS said it had received voter data and would enter it into a federal program used to verify citizenship status.

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, said his state had tried to “work cooperatively” with the Justice Department to understand the basis for its request for voters’ personal information.

“Rather than communicating productively with us, they rushed to sue,” Tong said Tuesday, after the lawsuit was filed.

Connecticut, he said, “takes its obligations under federal laws very seriously.” He pledged to “vigorously defend the state against this meritless and deeply disappointing lawsuit.”

Two Republican state senators in Connecticut said they welcomed the federal lawsuit. They said a recent absentee ballot scandal in the state’s largest city, Bridgeport, had made the state a “national punchline.”

Equipment at Woodland Pulp in Maine roared back to life in mid-December after a 60 day pause in operations, and now one of the state’s largest mills is again accepting wood from New Brunswick producers. 

“On Monday, we restarted purchasing fibre for the mill,” company spokesperson Scott Beal said. 

“We’re back in the market. We are bringing in some fibre from suppliers in Canada, hardwood and chips.”

The general manager of the Carleton Victoria Forest Products Marketing Board says the news is welcome but not nearly enough to help embattled private woodlot owners in the province. 

“Everything is good news at this point, but it is not as good as it could be,” Kim Jensen said. “We’re not back where we were.”

With sales down by about two-thirds from last year, Jensen said some woodlot owners are deciding to pack it up, while others struggle on. 

“We have had some older ones who’ve left, they’ve just, they’ve had enough and they’ve left,” she said. 

“The people who have invested in the business, have bought processors and forwarders, they have to stay in business. And if you have $1,000,000 worth of equipment there, your payments are $40,000 to $60,000 a month and you have to work. You can’t just go somewhere else and get a job.”

Duty rates on New Brunswick wood were set at 35 per cent in September, when U.S. President Donald Trump announced an additional 10 per cent tariff on lumber imports.

The sudden increase was too much for Woodland Pulp to bear. The mill relied on New Brunswick wood for about a third of its supply prior to October.

“It certainly adds cost to the business and, you know, like other wood users, I mean we’re always looking and hoping and trying to source fibre at the least cost,” Beal told CBC News in October.

The Baileyville-based mill has rehired all of the 144 people laid off during its two month shut-down, and Beal said it will likely take some time to ramp up to accept the amount of wood it previously did. 

And with the difficult and uncertain tariff environment, Beal said, it’s hard to say how long the mill would be able to continue purchasing Canadian wood. 

“It’s a very challenging pulp market,” he said.

“The tariffs remain in place. That hasn’t changed. So it’s not reasonable to think that that won’t be a headwind for the business.”

The federal government did create a $1.25 billion fund to help the industry survive, but Jensen says that hasn’t meant support for individual private woodlot owners. 

In October, Jensen told CBC News that sales of timber by the marketing board’s members totalled about $1 million for all of 2024. They have fallen to about $200,000 over the past 12 months.

And the cost of cross-border business has continued to rise.

Before Woodland Pulp stopped taking Canadian timber, the company had a lumberyard in Florenceville ,where producers could drop off wood. Woodland would then take responsibility for shipping it the rest of the way to the mill. 

Now it’s up to individual producers to source transportation and to arrange a broker to help meet cross-border requirements. That’s adding between $60 and $100 per load of timber heading to the U.S.

“The markets are tightening up, and the prices are going down, and you can only go down so far before it’s just done,” Jensen said.

“A mill can stop and start up, maybe. But a private guy who loses his equipment, he’s lost everything. He’s not coming back.”