No. of Recommendations: 11
What does the Justice Department's top leadership do when the boss is demanding that it bring “voter fraud” cases—before the election even occurs and regardless of whether any actual crimes take place? After the 2020 election, the acting Attorney General refused to play ball with Trump when he told DOJ to announce it was opening investigations. But apparently, it’s different in 2026, and not in a good way.
There has been a lot of speculation about what the administration will turn to now that the Supreme Court has rejected its plan to use USPS to keep mail ballots out of the hands of Democratic voters. Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MSNOW reported on Friday that in a call with managers in offices across the country, “Aakash Singh, the top lieutenant to the deputy attorney general, warned that Department of Justice lawyers must pursue election fraud cases that FBI or Department of Homeland Security agents present to them, or risk termination, according to the people, who sought anonymity to avoid reprisals for sharing internal discussion.” Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is the criminal investigative component of ICE.
This probably means at least two things. First, the administration will use word of this to try and intimidate people from voting out of fear of prosecution and make election officials and workers fear prosecution as well. Second, it suggests they will try to invalidate the results of key elections that they lose. As bad as the administration’s plan is, we are far better for knowing about it; we can prepare. And the only reason we know about it is because two reporters got the story......
... So now, top DOJ officials are threatening prosecutors across the country that they will lose their jobs if they refuse to pursue meritless cases. “FBI and DHS may overrule a prosecutor who declines to pursue one of their investigations,” Leonnig and Dilanian write, “and that the office of the deputy attorney general would make the final decision on whether a case goes forward.”
But that’s not how prosecutions work. The Justice Manual, which contains the rules that guide prosecutors, provides that a case can be indicted only if prosecutors believe they have sufficient evidence to both obtain a conviction and sustain it on appeal. It would be unprecedented to have agents, knowing the Department’s political leadership will back them, decide what cases to prosecute
If they follow the rules, they have to wait for prosecutors to determine if there’s enough evidence to prosecute the case.
Solution? Just bypass the prosecutors
Of course this wouldn’t stand, but it may be enough to add yet another element of chaos to elections.
Which seems to be the plan.
