Senior leaders of the Justice Department, many of them veterans of President Trump’s legal and political wars over the past decade, share a singular, striking attribute: They have not admitted, unequivocally or plainly, that he lost the 2020 election.
Attorney General Todd Blanche; his predecessor, Pam Bondi; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; and Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, have all avoided providing yes-or-no answers about the election in appearances before Congress. Instead, they have acknowledged only that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory was legally certified.
Emil Bove III, a former Blanche aide, offered a telling non-answer during his confirmation process for a federal judgeship last year: It was inappropriate to opine on 2020 because it was an unresolved “political or policy debate,” he wrote in a questionnaire.
This refusal to acknowledge the fact that Mr. Trump lost, a go-to tactic for nominees seeking to avoid contradicting the president, has become so commonplace it no longer warrants much attention. Yet it reflects the enduring legacy of a polarizing election whose reverberations are still being felt, perhaps most consequentially in the department’s presumption that voter fraud is so rampant that it requires a forceful federal response. That premise has been challenged by state election officials and expert analysis.
“This is a different approach than we have seen in any previous Department of Justice, whether it was run by Republicans or Democrats,” said Karen Brinson Bell, the former executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.
Ms. Brinson Bell said the administration’s current initiatives, like its attempt to curtail mail-in voting, the unsuccessful effort to obtain sensitive voter data from states and the issuance of threats against local officials, underscore themes Mr. Trump struck six years ago.
The 2020 election “seems to have been something of a catalyst” for their current actions, she added.
Mr. Trump built a powerhouse political movement by mobilizing supporters to align with his grievances, including his debunked claims of a conspiracy to steal the election and his rage over being prosecuted for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
And the president has explicitly linked his stop-the-steal message six years ago to the midterm elections this year.
He exploded after a federal court recently rejected the department’s demand that officials in California stop counting 20,000 mail-in ballots over concerns the batch included noncitizens who voted illegally, even though such instances are exceedingly rare.
“Why would they reject fixing Election Fraud?” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday as he continued to stew over the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.
“That’s like, in the 2020 Rigged and Stolen Election, when we had a great case, but the Supreme Court would not hear it because they said I, the President of the United States of America, had NO STANDING to bring such a case.”
This spring, Mr. Blanche, the president’s former defense lawyer, told Fox News that “there is a ton of evidence the election was rigged.” But he added that producing evidence that would hold up in court was “very difficult because they’re very good at hiding misconduct and hiding what they’re doing.”
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, dismissed the idea that the department’s actions in California and its effort to pre-emptively contest the results of the Alaska’s Senate race were impelled by any lingering grievances over 2020, just the determination to enforce laws the Biden administration would not.
“The Justice Department is focused on 2026 and on enforcing the federal laws that protect it,” Ms. Pels said. “Noncitizen voting is a federal crime. Prosecuting those cases is not ‘interceding’ in state elections. It is the job.”
If the department is facing criticism from the left for doing far too much, some on the right believe Mr. Blanche and his team are doing far too little.
Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump aide who has long maintained that the 2020 election was stolen, said most of the department’s recent actions were aimed at keeping his boss happy, not at uncovering what he has said is a vast conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump.
“Everything D.O.J. is doing is totally performative to give some patina of action,” he said in an interview. “Their heart isn’t in it. They slapped together a plan in the last 60 days after Trump started to really tune in.”
Several figures who played central roles in the post-2020 fight have emerged as influential voices in Mr. Trump’s ear. He recently met with Tina Peters, a former election official in Colorado who served prison time for breaching a county voting system. She has urged him to use the power of federal law enforcement to aggressively investigate elections without seeking court orders or the cooperation of state officials.
“He already has the authority to do all this — he doesn’t have to go to Congress to ask,” she told MS NOW on Monday. “If there’s something that is criminal in nature, he has every right to have the administration, the attorney general’s office or, you know, law enforcement go in and investigate.”
The assumptions undergirding the department’s two main lines of legal attack — the effort to sequester ballots based on contested assertions of illegal voting and the intervention, at Mr. Trump’s request, in the Alaska race — echo the drumbeat of 2020 election denialism.
“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Mr. Blanche said after suing California on Oct. 15. The move kicked off a period of litigation so intense that his tiny team of deputies has had to work around the clock to keep up with the demands of drafting the paperwork.
The effort, he added, was essential to “restore trust in American elections.”
Critics say it was aimed at achieving exactly the opposite, part of a determined political effort to undermine faith in elections — and one destined to fail in court.
“We’re seeing the same unsuccessful playbook as we did in 2020,” said Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former trial lawyer in the voting rights section of the department’s civil rights division. “It’s clear they haven’t learned that much.”
The federal judge in the California case, David O. Carter, rejected the department’s argument. He accused the administration of seeking to “disrupt the election that is already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters alike, and discount the votes of United States citizens.”
The department’s appeals in the case have thus far proved unsuccessful. On Monday, it petitioned the Supreme Court to uphold the suit.
The lawsuit embodied the evolution of the Trump administration’s strategy. It has shifted away from investigating broad-based claims of rampant voter fraud that William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general during the 2020 election, dismissed as “completely bogus.”
Mr. Blanche and his team have coordinated closely with the Department of Homeland Security to target illegal voting by undocumented immigrants. That approach dovetails with the all-encompassing crackdown on immigration led by Mr. Trump’s top domestic adviser, Stephen Miller.
In the past nine weeks alone, the department has charged 192 immigrants across 26 states with illegal voting and registration offenses. Since the beginning of this administration, the department has charged 236 people with voting-fraud-related offenses, Ms. Pels said.
Another approach with shades of 2020 has been the department’s targeting of state and local election workers. Six years ago, Mr. Trump and his allies accused poll workers in Georgia and elsewhere of intentionally mishandling ballots. In October, the department sent warning letters and subpoenas to officials in California, accusing them of failing to comply with their demands.
On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the department not to “threaten, intimidate or coerce state or local elections officials” based on the government’s suspicion a voter might be a noncitizen. She scheduled a hearing for Monday.
Mr. Blanche’s team has said its actions are necessary to safeguard the process. The flurry of 11th-hour activity, they have claimed, represents the urgency of addressing the threat posed by illegal voting with a goal of reminding local officials of their legal obligation to preserve records for future scrutiny.
Mr. Blanche has repeatedly offered assurances that the department’s recent activity was motivated by evidence, not politics. Last month, he told reporters the department would never “improperly interfere with elections or the state certification process.”
In the meantime, dodging questions about the 2020 election remains the go-to tactic of those seeking positions of power in the administration.
“Who won the 2020 election?” Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, asked Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, during his confirmation hearing in July.
“I’m not going to do this with you,” said Mr. Clayton, who was the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan before he was confirmed.
Mr. Ossoff persisted.
Mr. Clayton repeated that Mr. Biden had been certified the winner.
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