Inside the Justice Department’s pursuit of Trump’s 2020 election fraud fixations

By Tierney Sneed, Hannah Rabinowitz, Katelyn Polantz, CNN

(CNN) — When President Donald Trump promised, seemingly out of the blue, in late January that prosecutions would “soon” be coming for 2020 election rigging, the Justice Department was already mobilizing an effort behind the scenes to build out a portfolio of cases that would boost the White House’s narrative.

Since then, a rotating cast of attorneys — both political appointees and prosecutors — have attempted to carry out Trump’s wishes.

The sprawling effort, however, has already hit substantial roadblocks and has not publicly surfaced any information that would shake past authoritative findings that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election wasn’t fraudulent. That hasn’t stopped prosecutors from taking sweeping and unprecedented actions to obtain ballots and other 2020 election materials, with an approach that prompted discomfort and resistance from even the Trump-appointed US attorney initially tasked with steering the department-wide initiative.

The department’s election fraud tactics have been questioned in court, too. One federal judge in Georgia said this month that a search warrant affidavit the FBI submitted to seize Atlanta-area ballots was “troubling” and “misleading,” even as he ruled against a request by Fulton County that the materials be returned.

A separate judge in Georgia last week grilled the DOJ on whether the administration was attempting an “overbroad fishing expedition” with its demands for the personal contact information for thousands of county election workers, so that investigators could interview them. The prosecutor defending the subpoena was parachuting into the Rome, Georgia, hearing from a US attorney’s office in Alabama. Also present was US Attorney Dan Bishop, who leads a US attorney’s office in North Carolina, and is coordinating election integrity efforts at Washington’s command.

Lawyers for Fulton County, critics of this Justice Department, state leaders and other Trump legal and political opponents say that backward-looking investigative steps picking at the 2020 election could brew mistrust in this year’s elections. They’ve also raised concerns that the election integrity efforts are intimidating election workers and voters from participating in future contests.

Absent any new cases suggesting massive fraud, the Justice Department’s election integrity efforts have now broadened to look at one-or two-person indictments for a small number of votes cast by non-citizen immigrants in past elections.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche himself seemed to lower expectations that the department would be able to deliver prosecutions that would show a sweeping election conspiracy against Trump, even as he doubled down on 2020 vote-rigging conspiracy theories.

In a recent interview on Fox News, he claimed there was “a ton of evidence that the election was rigged … there’s been evidence about that for many, many years.”

But Blanche also alleged that the supposed perpetrators were “very good at hiding up misconduct and hiding what they’re doing.”

“You’ll say to me: How long has it taken? Why is it taking so long? And the reality, the answer is that because it takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020,” he said.

Internal clashes over the probes

Litigation over the ballots seized in Georgia revealed that Tom Albus, the top Trump-appointed prosecutor in St. Louis, had been tapped to lead the department’s work on election issues in recent months. His reign, however, was short lived.

As the county’s legal challenge to the seizure unfolded, Albus appeared to be sidelined. Attorneys from Justice Department headquarters took a lead role defending the search in court after Albus expressed willingness to work with the county on certain issues that popped up in the case, according to court filings, like reaching a deal to return the ballots or putting an FBI agent on the stand in the legal challenge to testify about the warrant.

Two sources told CNN that Albus had grown weary of the election fraud hunt, at times even threatening to resign from his post entirely instead of participating in the effort. Senior Justice Department officials, including then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, were frustrated by his hesitancy, the sources said.

Albus did not respond to a CNN inquiry left with his US attorney’s office.

As Albus had all but disappeared in the Fulton County ballot case, Bondi announced in late March — days before she was fired by Trump — that Bishop would lead the department’s election investigations nationwide.

At last week’s hearing in Rome, Georgia, on the subpoena for the election workers information, Bishop told Judge William Ray that both he and Albus had the same role now, as special attorneys to the Attorney General “for this purpose,” according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by CNN.

Bishop had no prior prosecutorial experience before his appointment to the Justice Department. As a Republican member of the House, he voted against certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 win and said he still believed the election was “rigged” in the confirmation proceedings for his current role.

White House involvement

The mark that a Trump-appointed voter fraud czar in the White House has made on the criminal probes is a departure from the distance the Justice Department has kept from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in the past.

Kurt Olsen, an election denier now serving as the White House director of election security and integrity, submitted the referral that launched the Fulton County probe, and, according to information shared with CNN, he also provided information for DOJ’s 2020 election probe in Arizona, for which investigators have obtained records from an audit of the vote in Maricopa County, which contains Pheonix.

Olsen previously spearheaded lawsuits challenging the integrity of elections in Arizona and faced court sanctions for misrepresentations he made in that litigation. He was also involved in a Georgia lawsuit brought by election deniers, and his past legal efforts tie him to some of the witnesses the FBI relied on to justify the seizure of the Fulton County ballots.

Sources both in the White House and the Justice Department, however, pushed back at the idea that he is driving the DOJ’s focus, describing him as one member of a larger team.

Still, Olsen has become a central figure in the administration-wide effort to combat alleged voter fraud, acting as a liaison among the multiple agencies focusing on Trump’s hunt for fraud and with outside activists who have helped keep alive the election rigging theories.

In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump.”

“His entire Administration is working together closely on these issues. The President will do everything in his power to lawfully defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.

Too late to revisit

In several of their attempts to reexamine the 2020 election, the Justice Department may be blocked by the clock — under federal criminal law, most charges must be filed within five years of the vote, leaving investigators racing against time as potential evidence and opportunity slip away.

In Georgia, federal prosecutors have argued that grand juries should still be able to investigate, and if charges were to be brought around 2020, any case could be challenged for its timeframe after its indictment.

Still, the Trump administration-backed US attorneys and the FBI are persisting in several 2020 swing states, including Arizona and Wisconsin.

Under state and federal law, election materials are typically only preserved for about two years after an election. But the new DOJ probes in Georgia and Arizona have been able to capitalize on how the unrelenting reviews of the 2020 vote have forced the preservation of the materials in some battleground states, allowing them to be obtained by federal investigators.

In Wisconsin, federal investigators have sought interviews with election officials in recent weeks. The FBI spoke to a top official on the state election board last month, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, in an interview that covered various theories of fraud in the state’s elections.

An agent also attempted to interview the head of elections for Milwaukee County, home to Wisconsin’s largest Black population and a target of 2020 election-rigging conspiracy theories, according to a statement from the county clerk that said the agent left a business card at the private residence of the election director.

“No dedicated public servant should be subjected to that type of intrusion simply for carrying out her responsibilities with integrity and professionalism,” Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson said. “While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions, we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County.”

One-off fraud cases and voter roll pursuits

Encountering hurdles in its reach-back to 2020 stolen election theories, the Trump administration is hyping smaller-scale fraud investigations — often concerning more recent elections — that have resulted in one-off charges.

Multiple people familiar with the lower-level voter fraud cases now pursued by the Justice Department say they dust off minuscule numbers of votes, some regarding one or two people, from years ago in various states, and not all will result in charges.

A few cases have. Recent criminal complaints accused four non-citizens of voting illegally in New Jersey elections. Another case, announced last week with a splashy press conference, involved a California woman who illegally paid people to register to vote on Los Angeles’ Skid Row to maximize the compensation she received for obtaining signatures for petition drives. The Justice Department reached a one-count plea deal with the woman, according to court filings, which put forward no evidence that unlawful votes were cast.

Much of the investigatory heavy-lifting on those cases and similar probes is being handled by the DHS’ Homeland Security Investigations, according to court documents and other information shared with CNN.

HSI historically has handled more complex matters, like major gang cases, drug smuggling, child exploitation and import-export control. But the administration has instructed the DHS agency to look for naturalized citizens who voted or registered to vote, as part of a larger pivot under Trump to focus HSI on low-legal immigration work that dovetails with the President’s mass deportation agenda.

At the same time, the Trump-appointed head of the DOJ’s civil rights division — which includes the department’s voting section — has sought confidential voter registration data from nearly every state for a nationwide plan to audit the voter rolls against federal immigration records and other datasets. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon has sued 30 states that have rejected the demands for voter rolls, but so far not a single court has ruled in the administration’s favor and eight judges have rejected DOJ’s arguments.

The DOJ has also agreed to hand over to DHS the state voter rolls Dhillon is obtaining for HSI’s election fraud investigations, according to internal documents obtained by CNN through a lawsuit brought against the administration by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Dhillon has claimed that the administration has found tens of thousands of non-citizens on the rolls, and hundreds of thousands of deceased voters. But state election officials who have used the DHS citizenship data program for their own list maintenance efforts warn it can wrongly identify citizens as noncitizens, presenting an inflated picture of the number of foreigners registered to vote.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.