President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections. In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992.
Across the administration, though, officials have been more focused on forward-looking steps such as examining state voter rolls for people who have moved or aren’t citizens. Some officials are ready to move on from 2020 and want to avoid being called “election deniers,” a term for people who claimed without evidence that Trump beat Biden in the 2020 election.
But Trump and some allies inside and outside the administration will not let go of allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 even though courts have repeatedly rejected their theories. They argue that future elections can’t be secured without a full accounting of 2020.
“I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 26. “If not, it will happen again, including the upcoming Midterms.”
The renewed focus on 2020 comes as Trump has begun to see results from his demands to prosecute his critics, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Last week, the Justice Department also suspended two prosecutors who referenced the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a Trump-supporting mob at the Capitol in a court filing related to sentencing a participant who Trump pardoned and is now facing unrelated weapons charges.
Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said he views the charges against Trump’s political opponents and the administration’s attempts to acquire voter rolls and voting equipment as a continuation of Trump’s years-long effort to question the results of an election he lost.
“Everything that they’re doing now is a relitigation of 2020,” he said. “They’re trying to discredit the entire electoral system in the United States of America so that Donald Trump can finally be able to say, ‘You see, the system was corrupt. My lies were actually the truth.’ ”
Trump has not specified who he blames for the alleged fraud in the 2020 election. But he has named people he wants investigated for the prosecutions against him and his supporters during the Biden administration for efforts to reverse his 2020 loss.
The president’s calls to investigate or “jail” former officials including former president Joe Biden, former attorney general Merrick Garland and former special counsel Jack Smith intensified last week after House Republicans released a cache of FBI files from 2020 to 2023. The 234 pages describe the preliminary steps to investigate people who falsely certified that Trump won the 2020 election in key states.
“What they did was criminal,” Trump said in an Oct. 15 news conference in the Oval Office with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel — the same officials who would oversee those investigations.
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