This article is made possible through Spotlight PA’s partnership with NOTUS, a nonpartisan news organization that covers government and politics with the fresh eyes of early career journalists and the expertise of veteran reporters.
President Donald Trump says “if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.”
But five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch.
Moreover, the DOJ has not taken the usual steps to establish a “command center” to monitor and address the typical emergencies that pop up around Election Day, three sources with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS. A command center team would address things like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process.
These actions — and inactions — have alarmed current and former prosecutors, who say the Justice Department is not prepared to deal with threats to election integrity in the November elections.
“That’s really concerning,” said Ryan Crosswell, a former public corruption prosecutor who recently ran for Congress as a Democrat. “Obviously, the command center and training are something that anybody who wants to protect election integrity would want. And this just feeds into the fear that rather than protect elections, the DOJ may try to interfere with them. That’s pretty scary.”
The DOJ did not provide any answers before publication to detailed questions about the training cancellations and the election command center, but a department spokesperson issued a statement that its top priorities are now “ensuring the integrity of U.S. elections and protecting Americans against voting fraud and civil rights violations.”
Former DOJ attorneys described the command center as an intense, around-the-clock operation at FBI headquarters. Investigators direct law enforcement responses nationwide, while public corruption prosecutors take long shifts answering phone calls about possible crimes and confusing situations. The anticipated emergencies are taken so seriously that department leadership has normally kept an auxiliary team of specialized prosecutors on standby back at DOJ headquarters. Everyone orders pizza and sits tight for shifts that span eight-plus hours.
“It spoke to how seriously we took this stuff,” Crosswell noted.
One source described how prosecutors at the command center spotted people online spreading lies to suppress votes from a particular political party or geographical region. Prosecutors were then able to send out FBI agents to perform a “soft knock” at the person’s door to let them know the feds were aware of what they were doing.
That kind of tactic rarely results in an actual criminal prosecution but is meant to head off more damaging disinformation campaigns. In the past, local federal prosecutors have called headquarters asking how to handle allegations of ballot stuffing and whether to serve subpoenas or make arrests — situations where local law enforcement is directed to stand back because it’s better to prosecute a crime after-the-fact than seize ballots and risk having the federal government accused of tampering with the election.
The Trump administration has yanked this time-tested strategy away from Main Justice attorneys who specialize in election matters at the Public Integrity Section, a unit known as “PIN” that Trump’s team decimated.
“There’s a massive knowledge gap now,” said Gary Restaino, who was Arizona’s U.S. attorney during the Biden administration. “PIN was a bulwark. It had people looking down the middle of the road and putting on political blinders. And the command center is critical to act uniformly across states.”
Instead, the task of addressing election crimes has been left entirely to career prosecutors at the 93 local U.S. attorneys offices who aren’t as well versed in that body of law. Those local prosecutors aren’t being adequately prepared, either.
According to a fourth source with direct knowledge of the situation, DOJ headquarters canceled biannual training sessions last March that had been scheduled for this year at the National Advocacy Center, a massive training facility in South Carolina. Career prosecutors and FBI special agents from every district nationwide, who would typically spend an entire week learning about the intricacies of election-crime laws, aren’t being taught how to proceed carefully with criminal investigations without influencing the outcome of a political race.
Another scheduled in-person training session this March never happened. An all-week online course scheduled for mid-July was also canceled. Internal notes cited “changes in priorities” in the way the DOJ plans to handle elections going forward, according to this fourth source.
This person said that the last in-person training took place in January 2024, evidence that if the Trump DOJ was planning to provide much-needed instruction and guidance to local prosecutors it would have done so by now.
Although the DOJ has kept most of this change in strategy quiet, even internally, there are a few external signs of its pivot away from providing support for addressing election interference.
A government web page still notes that the DOJ’s Election Crimes Branch was created “to oversee the Justice Department’s nationwide response to election crimes … to ensure uniformity, impartiality, and effectiveness.” And it says a periodically updated, 281-page tome, called the Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, guides investigators on this corner of law. The publication is cited in several DOJ policies, but the PDF has been taken down. NOTUS obtained a copy and uploaded it here.
The previous head of the Election Crimes Branch, Rob Heberle, quit after the DOJ dropped its corruption charges against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams. He hasn’t been replaced.
Some former DOJ employees and one current official all expressed deep concern that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which has become Trump’s preferred domestic security force, could be put in charge of election security, even though it is illegal for any federal official to send “armed men” to polling locations absent a violent threat.
That specific hypothetical scenario — where ICE is set up as an election security force — came up in an exchange between Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin during his confirmation hearing in March, when she asked if he felt he has “the authority to put uniformed officers at polling locations in 2026.”
“The only reason why my officers should be there is if there was a specific threat for them to be there, not for intimidation,” Mullin responded, failing to convince the senator, who expressed worries that the Trump administration would still send ICE agents to the polls as a show of force.
One election-related DOJ legal pillar — which the department refers to as “election sensitivities” — is that, barring emergencies, prosecutors should not take public investigative steps on the eve of an election.
Local federal prosecutors who encountered suspected election-related crimes would routinely check with the experts at PIN in Washington before making moves. For example, as one former DOJ official put it, PIN might reject a request to subpoena the bank records of a front-runner candidate on the eve of an election, but it might greenlight an FBI search of the home of a clearly long-shot candidate caught stealing money from their own campaign. The goal is always the same: to not put a thumb on the scales.
The DOJ’s Justice Manual has long required local U.S. attorneys offices to first consult with the Public Integrity Section on any “federal criminal matter that involves alleged or suspected violations of federal or state campaign financing laws, federal patronage crimes, or corruption of the election process.” Trump’s DOJ did away with that policy in June last year, and for more than a year, that portion of the Justice Manual has featured a note in bold that reads, “Department leadership is currently revising this section. The Consultation Requirement is suspended while revisions are ongoing.”
This year’s midterm elections are still five months away, far enough out that the DOJ could reverse course and jump-start its election preparations. In past years, each local U.S. attorney’s office would be expected to publish a press release sometime around October identifying a particular assistant U.S. attorney it has designated as the “district election officer.” No such announcement has been made but on Friday, the DOJ said it had already appointed DEOs in each district. These officers “will be responsible for overseeing the district’s handling of Election Day complaints, which include voting rights concerns, threats of violence, and election fraud in consultation with Justice Department Headquarters in Washington,” a spokesperson said.
In public, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has made clear that the Trump administration has a different focus this year, on what it calls “voter integrity.”
Speaking to Steve Bannon on his “War Room” show in April, Blanche explained that investigations into 2020 election results in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Fulton County, Georgia, were an attempt “not only to understand what happened in the past, which is important for the American people to know, but also to make sure our elections are free and fair and make sure nobody’s voting that isn’t supposed to vote.”