Justice Department Will Switch Its Focus On Voting And Prioritize Trump's Elections Order, Memo Says

The Justice Department unit that ensures compliance with voting rights laws will switch its focus to investigating voter fraud and ensuring elections are not marred by 'suspicion," according to an internal memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The new mission statement for the voting section makes a passing reference to the historic Voting Rights Act, but no mention of typical enforcement of the provision through protecting people's right to cast ballots or ensuring that lines for legislative maps do not divide voters by race. Instead, it redefines the unit's mission around conspiracy theories pushed by Republican President Donald Trump to explain away his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.

Trump's attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there was no evidence of widespread fraud in that election. Repeated recounts and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss, including some led by Republicans , affirmed Biden's win and found the election was run properly. Trump and his supporters also lost dozens of court cases trying to overturn the election results.

But in Trump's second term, the attorney general is Pam Bondi , who backed his effort to reverse his 2020 loss. The president picked Harmeet Dhillon , a Republican Party lawyer and long time ally who also has echoed some of Trump's false claims about voting, to run the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, where the voting section is housed.

"The Civil Rights Division has always worked to make sure Americans have access to the polls and that their votes matter," said Stacey Young, an 18-year Department of Justice veteran who left that division days after Trump's inauguration in January and founded Justice Connection, an organization supporting the agency's employees. "The division's job is not to promote the politically expedient fiction that voting fraud is widespread."