Inside Trump’s gutting of the Justice Department unit that enforces voting laws

The Justice Department’s unit tasked with enforcing federal voting laws is down from roughly 30 attorneys to about a half-dozen, as most of its career staff has departed in the face of escalating pressure tactics from the Trump administration. The mass exodus that has whittled the voting section down to a fifth of its normal size came after a relentless campaign by the department’s political leaders to smear the work of the longtime attorneys, dismiss noncontroversial cases, and reassign career supervisors. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump appointee who oversees the civil rights division, which houses the DOJ voting section, has joked about how the division has emptied out. More than 200 attorneys from the division, often called the “crown jewel” of the department, took a buyout offered by the administration. “The crying, the unhappy hours, the mass resignations, the leaking, there’s a support group for former civil rights attorneys,” Dhillon told conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in a recent interview. “These are all leading indicators of the stages of grief.” During President Donald Trump’s first term, DOJ officials forced voting section attorneys to abandon the more high-profile work that had often been opposed by conservatives. But the gutting of the section during Trump’s second administration goes far beyond that, according to former department attorneys and outside voter advocates. “We are seeing many more people at this point, after many, many years of experience, leave the division,” said Thomas Saenz, the president of Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “That is obviously more devastating, because the work that’s going to be done by them is going to be more clearly anti-voting rights and, frankly, done by less experienced people.” The Justice Department has already dropped challenges to Republican-drawn redistricting maps and GOP-backed election laws, as well as lawsuits that alleged Black voters in small communities had been discriminated against by longstanding local voting systems. The administration is abandoning preexisting cases brought under the Voting Rights Act as the 1965 civil rights law is under legal attack, with a new appeals court ruling foreclosing private enforcement of its main provision in a large swath of the country. It is unclear how the Justice Department will do even the most benign election law enforcement – like making sure military members serving abroad receive their ballots in time to vote – with the lack of staff and loss of expertise. And the attorneys’ departure could undermine Trump’s ability to execute his own agenda for voting practices, after his false beliefs that the 2020 election was stolen have only festered in the four years he was out of office. A provision of the president’s sweeping executive order seeking to overhaul election rules has already been blocked by a judge in Washington, DC. Another major legal challenge will be scrutinized at a court hearing in Boston this week. Still, the voting unit and its barebones staff is pushing ahead, with a new lawsuit last week seeking to address the registration records of potentially tens of thousands of North Carolinians after election officials did not collect ID information required by law. A Justice Department official, pointing to the North Carolina lawsuit, said that the voting section “remains active despite shifting priorities from the previous administration.” Now serving as acting chief, according to court filings, is Maureen Riordan, who served in various department roles – both career and politically appointed – during the first Trump administration before spending the Biden years at a conservative legal advocacy group that successfully opposed the Justice Department in a significant redistricting case. Pushing out longtime attorneys Dhillon and her boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi, have been outspoken about their desire to reshape the department by pushing out career officials who balk at pursuing the administration’s agenda in court. “I would have loved all the lawyers from civil rights… to roll up their sleeves and get to work with me,” Dhillon said in a recent address to the Federalist Society. But, she said, “a lot of lawyers didn’t want to do that.” As the deadline for the buyout opportunity approached this spring, the administration’s squeeze on the division’s voting section tightened. Several career supervisors in the section were targeted with reassignments just days before that offer’s expiration, according to people familiar with the section’s inner workings. “That’s what really made people nervous,” said one former DOJ lawyer, who asked for anonymity to speak candidly. The supervisors typically serve as the buffer between the career “line” attorneys who litigate cases and the department’s political appointees. Ultimately most of the supervisors, including the section’s chief, left the department when confronted with the reassignments, which would have sent them to an administrative office that handles internal employee complaints. Just two trial attorneys remain at the section, sources told CNN, though the administration has tasked six attorneys in the civil rights division’s housing enforcement section to pick up some of the voting section’s work. The fact that the administration was bringing in attorneys from another section, while seeking to reassign the attorneys with longtime experience in voting law, shows that “they don’t want the people with the background and the experience,” the former lawyer said. A department official familiar with the matter told CNN that attorneys from sections with less work were being reassigned to clear case backlogs. ‘Hostile across the board’ The reassignments happened against the backdrop of a series of other administration maneuvers that encouraged the departures of career attorneys who thought, at the beginning of Trump’s second term, they could stick it out. On her first day as attorney general, Bondi penned a memo requiring DOJ lawyers to “zealously” advocate for administration positions or face disciplinary action and potential firing that set the tone. In the weeks that followed, the administration dropped a number of major cases including a Alabama voter purge lawsuit that had already produced a win for the DOJ; a Texas redistricting challenge that, after years of litigation, was about to go to trial; and the lawsuit brought against a Georgia overhaul of its election laws – an overhaul that was propelled by Trump’s lies about the 2020 count and included new ID requirements and a ban on mobile voting. Before the Georgia case was formally dropped, Bondi said in a news release that the claims in the lawsuit were “fabricated” and “false.” Dhillon too slammed the Georgia lawsuit as a “fact-free hypothesis.” Bondi’s language was a “huge allegation, and one that has consequences for your bar license,” the former DOJ lawyer told CNN. Gates McGavick, a Justice Department spokesperson, defended the Georgia case’s dismissal and Bondi’s rhetoric around it, saying in a statement to CNN that the legal challenge was “based on conspiracy theories pushed by extremist politicians” and among “the worst examples of weaponization under the prior administration.” Though less noticed, the Trump administration’s move to dismiss a handful of more under-the-radar cases, dealing with challenges to the voting policies of municipalities, was perhaps an even greater blow to the morale of the career voting section officials. Those lawsuits were the type of unflashy cases the department has consistently brought under GOP administrations in the past, including the first Trump term, as they were not the partisan lightning rods like DOJ challenges to statewide election laws. “Once small cases were dismissed, it became clear they weren’t just shutting down controversial cases; they were shutting down Voting Rights Act enforcement,” another former DOJ attorney told CNN. One such case was a DOJ lawsuit against Houston County, Georgia, that alleged its system of elections for its county commission diluted the political power of Black voters, who make up nearly a third of the county’s electorate. Among the Black candidates who were defeated over the years, under the county’s at-large system, were candidates who ran as Democrats, Republicans or independents, according to the lawsuit, filed days before Trump’s inauguration. “You wouldn’t have dismissed cases like those in Trump 1,” said a third former DOJ attorney, who did appellate work for the division before leaving at the beginning of the current administration. “That’s a signal to me that the Trump administration is just hostile across the board.” Amid the withdrawals, the Justice Department issued a new “mission statement” for the voting section and other offices within the civil rights division. The statement signaled a focus on election fraud, as well as on defending Trump’s executive order on voting. It also mislabeled the voting section (calling it the “Voting Rights Section”) and botched the name of a law that the voting section traditionally enforces, the National Voter Registration Act (calling it the “National Voting Rights Act.”) Though the Justice Department is abandoning the voting rights cases it brought under the prior administration, many of those lawsuits will continue because non-government voting rights groups are also involved in the legal challenges. Still, the department’s withdrawal from the existing cases comes at a cost to the private litigators – and particularly so in the case alleging racial discrimination in the way Texas Republican lawmakers drew their legislative maps. A trial in that case began last month. “A major player withdraws like that on the eve of trial, it’s a concern,” said Saenz, whose organization is among the private groups that sued Texas. “It increases burdens – both time burdens and money burdens, frankly – and could ultimately have an effect on the outcome.” And, as the department is apparently stepping away from enforcing a key Voting Rights Act provision known as Section 2, a federal appeals court cut off private enforcement of the provision in a ruling last month that applies to seven midwestern states. That ruling has been appealed. But in the meantime, as long at the department is not interested in bringing VRA cases, the “heart” of the landmark civil rights law is “effectively dead” in those seven states, said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Law School professor who worked on voting issues in Democratic administrations, including in a top civil rights division role under President Barack Obama. Former DOJ attorneys told CNN that VRA enforcement on a local level was of particular concern. Those cases take significant resources, and often federal government subpoena power, to investigate and bring, as do enforcement actions brought under other federal voting laws. The Help America Vote Act, under which the department has brought cases dealing with ballot access for people with disabilities and requirements for provisional voting, cannot be enforced by private parties. Private parties can bring lawsuits under parts of the National Voter Registration law, which sets certain standards for voting registration in most of the country and also requires election officials take certain steps to keep their voter rolls clean. But their burdens are higher than they are for the DOJ, both because of a procedural threshold known as standing and because they lack the federal government’s subpoena power to investigate voter registration practices. ‘Completely nonpartisan work’ aimed at the military vote overseas The unseen effort that goes into enforcing the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act has now also been called into question with the loss of the department’s voting attorneys. The former appellate DOJ attorney described it as “completely nonpartisan work,” and one of the section’s “highest priorities.” The law sets out the procedures to make sure US service members and other Americans abroad can vote. Voting section attorneys typically make contact with the top election officials in all 50 states ahead of every election to make sure their overseas ballot processes are on track to meet federal deadlines. The third former DOJ attorney described the effort as a “really all-hands-on-deck process that involves dozens of attorneys.” The military vote has long been seen as sacrosanct, and UOCAVA was passed in 1986 with broad bipartisan support. Parts of Trump’s election executive order would appear to make it harder for military families away from their homes to vote. The White House previously defended the executive order in an April statement that said Trump “wants to ensure the right of every eligible citizen to vote while preserving election integrity.” A Justice Department official told CNN that the department “will continue to enforce civil provisions of federal statutes that protect voter integrity,” including those in UOCAVA, NVRA and HAVA. Trump’s own agenda potentially hamstrung Hollowing out the voting section could inflict collateral damage on the Republican Party, experts told CNN, because their supporters are infrequent voters who suffer the most if federal voting laws aren’t enforced. And the ability of the administration to carry out Trump’s stated goal of keeping voter rolls free of ineligible voters may now also be at risk with the career experts in the relevant law no longer working at the department. A test case for how the department operates without the longtime voting attorneys who left is the ongoing litigation challenging Trump’s election executive order. Normally, a different DOJ division – the civil division – would defend a presidential order. In the legal challenges to it filed in DC, however, arguments were led by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates, a top Trump appointee in the civil rights division. It was notable that Gates showed up to the mid-April arguments by himself, as in other high-profile cases challenging Trump policies, career attorneys have been present as back up for the political appointees making the arguments. Dhillon, Gates’ boss, watched from the audience. The arguments did not go well. Gates struggled with the judge’s questions about the legal authorities the department would be relying on to carry out Trump’s directives. He was also grilled by the judge on evidence put forward by the plaintiffs – a letter from the US Election Assistance Commission about implementing the executive order – that contradicted a key legal argument the administration was making in the case. That latter dust up earned a sharp footnote in the opinion of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who issued an order halting a provision of Trump’s order that sought to expand requirements for Americans to show documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote. “The Court is not currently of the mind that counsel for Defendants intentionally misrepresented the facts by failing to mention a letter authored by a declarant with whom he surely consulted,” she wrote. “But the Court must remark that this exchange does not reflect the level of diligence the Court expects from any litigant—let alone the United States Department of Justice.” In a surprising move, the administration has indicated it would not appeal Kollar-Kotelly’s preliminary order as the case moves forward on the merits. A hearing is scheduled on June 6 in a separate case, brought by Democratic-led states, that could produce a more sweeping order blocking other provisions in the executive order. The civil division is leading the administration’s defense in that lawsuit.