Trump Officials Abandon Election Threat Investigations, Former Officials Say

Between 2021 and 2024, the justice department's election threats taskforce prosecuted 21 cases, including that of Solomon Peña, a failed candidate for the New Mexico house of representatives who organized shootings at the houses of election officials, and Quintez Brown, who shot up a campaign meeting of Louisville's mayor. Democrats and Republicans faced prosecution for harassing, intimidating and threatening elections workers, said Nikki Fisher, former chief election security officer for the Oregon secretary of state and now executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association.

Since then, the taskforce appears to have gone quiet. "While officials are being trained to handle threats, the federal deterrent meant to punish the people making them appears to have gone quiet," Fisher said. "To date, no new cases have been prosecuted, and the DoJ's election threats taskforce appears to be defunct in practice." Asked about the status of the taskforce, the justice department referred to nine departmental media releases issued over the past five weeks describing indictments of foreign nationals on charges of election fraud and stolen identities.

In an academic paper published in June, written while she was studying at the Naval Postgraduate School, Fisher noted that the taskforce received more than 2,000 reports of election threats between 2021 and 2024 and opened more than 100 investigations into them.

Trump administration officials began disbanding election investigative groups within the justice department, the office of the director of national intelligence and other agencies almost immediately after the president started his second term. The first day after Pam Bondi won Senate confirmation as attorney general, she eliminated the FBI's foreign influence taskforce, which had been investigating influence campaigns waged by China, Russia and other adversaries. Administration leaders fired or reassigned personnel working on foreign election interference at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and defunded Cisa's training program for local officials to monitor and coordinate threats through the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. Pleas from Democratic lawmakers during budget negotiations in 2025 to retain the taskforce and other election integrity assets went unheeded.

"I'm less worried about jurisdictions' ability to defend themselves in particular," said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology and a former director at Cisa. "I'm more worried about the lack of an information-sharing environment across the community." Federal cuts to the agencies' monitoring and investigative apparatus leave local agencies blind to broader patterns, he said, describing the relationships and trust Cisa built over 10 years as the way security professionals supporting elections across the country stayed in close contact and closed vulnerabilities in multiple locations.

Agencies working with state and local election leaders used to offer regular warnings about suspicious activity, Caitlin Durkovich, a former deputy homeland security adviser for resilience and response on the national security council, said at a briefing staged by the Brennan Center for Justice last week. "This administration has dismantled the entire apparatus that is responsible for detecting and holding these bad actors accountable," she said. "That has all gone away at a moment when this administration is again claiming that the spectre of foreign operations is in play."

Meanwhile, Trump officials have focused on some of the president's longstanding personal grievances over election integrity. FBI agents entered Fulton county in January to seize ballots from the 2020 election, ostensibly as part of a continuing investigation into foreign election interference, with Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, present at the raid. The ODNI and the FBI similarly seized elections apparatus in Puerto Rico, again while investigating foreign interference. Nothing has yet come of either event. Both preceded a primetime address by Trump on 16 July in which he claimed China had acquired extensive voter information during the 2020 election cycle, characterizing it as an effort to influence and undermine legitimacy in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections.