Dan Bishop was one of nearly 150 Republican lawmakers who refused to certify Donald J. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election even after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Now the former congressman oversees a sweeping investigation by the Justice Department into allegations of election fraud across the country — including the debunked claims that Mr. Trump was cheated out of victory six years ago.
Mr. Bishop’s appointment last month as the department’s top election fraud prosecutor was the latest example of the Trump administration putting untested loyalists in charge of sensitive criminal inquiries that feed into the president’s political agenda. Only five months earlier, he was installed as the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of North Carolina, his first job in federal law enforcement.
His inexperience and fealty to the president were on display last month at one of his first big meetings with senior Justice Department leaders.
It was April 23 and Mr. Bishop had joined Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, and Andrew Bailey, one of Mr. Patel’s top deputies, for a briefing by the bureau on a new election fraud investigation. The inquiry concerned a retired college professor who claimed that an election technology company whose owner had bought Dominion Voting Systems — a company that has been falsely blamed for rigging the 2020 election against Mr. Trump — had manipulated voter registration records in Bexar County, Texas, according to people familiar with the matter.
The agent who conducted the briefing was insistent that despite the anomalies in Bexar County’s data, they appeared to have been caused by a clerical error, not by fraud.
But Mr. Bishop left the meeting skeptical of that assessment. He later used artificial intelligence to do his own analysis of the retired professor’s work, the people said, and came to the conclusion that the F.B.I. was wrong about the data, urging investigators to take another look.
Mr. Bishop would hardly be the first senior official in Mr. Trump’s Justice Department who has questioned the findings of the F.B.I. and chased investigative leads that its agents had rejected. Still, his doubts suggest the lengths to which he is willing to go to turn up even the slimmest shred of evidence to support Mr. Trump’s persistent claims that elections have been marred by fraud — especially by voting machines.
Under Mr. Trump, the department has often taken a fox-in-the-henhouse approach to its prosecutorial appointments, putting people in charge of inquiries or offices they have already shown an inclination to distrust.
For instance, Ed Martin, a Missouri lawyer who defended and raised money for some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was the president’s first choice to run the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which handled all of the criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack. And Joseph DiGenova, who once asserted that the F.B.I. inquiry into potential ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign was a deep-state plot to keep him out of office, was selected to supervise a wide-ranging case in Florida that seeks to portray all of the criminal investigations into Mr. Trump as a “grand conspiracy,” a unified scheme to violate his rights.
Mr. Bishop’s appointment in early April as a special attorney with the authority to roam the country examining issues of so-called election integrity seems to fit the same pattern. He was one of the 147 Republican lawmakers who voted on Jan. 6 not to certify Mr. Trump’s loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., and he often amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims that the Democrats had rigged the results of the race.
During his time in the House of Representatives, from 2019 to 2025, Mr. Bishop served on the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which often went after the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for supposedly persecuting Trump supporters. He took the lead in accusing the bureau of pressuring social media companies to censor people with conservative views on issues like the Covid-19 vaccine, calling it “the largest censorship program ever run by the government of the United States.”
David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department who now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that works to build confidence in elections, said that Mr. Bishop was one of a handful of prosecutors the department had called on to use investigations to erode faith in the electoral process.
“They are being pushed by the president to find a crime that never happened, and there are a dwindling number of people left willing to execute the charade,” Mr. Becker said. “This is part of an ongoing trend where even this administration with its loyal foot soldiers can’t seem to find any evidence of a crime that wasn’t committed.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Bishop referred all questions to the Justice Department, which did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Mr. Bishop, who worked as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget before becoming a federal prosecutor, has taken over the job of running the election fraud inquiry from Thomas C. Albus, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri. The scope of the investigation he now leads remains somewhat opaque, but it has so far included the seizure of hundreds of boxes of records from an election office in Fulton County, Ga., and an attempt to demand the identities of every worker who staffed the county’s 2020 presidential election. It has also resulted in subpoenas being issued for reams of information about voting results in Maricopa County, Ariz.
An F.B.I. agent recently visited the home of the elections director for Milwaukee County, Wis., leaving a business card, according to a statement issued on Wednesday by the county clerk, George Christenson. “While we cooperate with all legitimate law enforcement actions,” the statement said, “we will defend against any attack on our democracy and will defend the rights of voters of Milwaukee County.”
The Bexar County inquiry has centered on apparent duplications in voter registration records that were collected in February by the company KNOWiNK, which makes devices used to check in voters at polling places. (The company’s founder also bought Dominion Voting Systems last year and renamed it Liberty Vote.) The agents determined that the anomalies were most likely caused by a drag-and-drop error that occurred as county officials moved the data from the devices into an Excel spreadsheet.
The supposedly cloned records became an issue of public concern largely because of the writings of Walter Daugherity, a retired Texas A&M University computer science professor, who has long opposed the use of voting machines — especially those built by Dominion. In social media and Substack posts, Mr. Daugherity cast doubt on more than 4,000 voter identification records collected by KNOWiNK during early voting in Bexar County for primary elections.
Mr. Daugherity is well-known in election denier circles, having served as an expert witness in a failed legal case challenging the use of voting machines filed in 2022 by Kari Lake, a Trump ally who ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor of Arizona.
He also wrote a report in support of Tina Peters, the Colorado county clerk who was sentenced to nine years in prison for tampering with Dominion voting machines under her control in a botched attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump issued a symbolic pardon to Ms. Peters in December and Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado has signaled that he might commute her sentence.
It remains unclear who first brought Mr. Daugherity’s work to the F.B.I.’s attention, but his claims have been championed not just by Mr. Bishop, but also by Kurt Olsen, the White House’s director of election security and integrity, the people familiar with the inquiry said. Mr. Olsen, a lawyer who helped Mr. Trump try to overturn the 2020 election in the courts, was also instrumental in getting the bureau to open its investigation in Fulton County, which relied heavily on false or debunked claims made by several independent researchers.
Some fair elections advocates have suggested that Mr. Bishop and Mr. Olsen want the F.B.I. to press harder on the Bexar County data in order to build a case implicating KNOWiNK and Liberty Vote. Mr. Trump’s allies have long asserted that the voting machine company used its machines to rob Mr. Trump from regaining office six years ago, but it has never been charged with any crimes.
To Mr. Becker, the Bexar County inquiry is a part of something broader: another attempt by the Trump administration to use the powers of the federal government to cast doubt on the way elections work.
“This is not a law enforcement effort, it’s a propaganda effort,” he said. “It uses tools of law enforcement to bully election officials and to create a false narrative of delegitimizing elections.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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