Trump Goons’ Major Election Changes Exposed as Midterms Loom

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is not taking the usual steps to ensure election integrity ahead of November’s midterm elections, according to a report.

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With five months to go until the crucial nationwide races, the DOJ is not putting prosecutors and FBI agents through traditional election-integrity training sessions, has deleted a 281-page guide on prosecuting election offenses, and hasn’t replaced the director of its Election Crimes Branch, reported NOTUS.

“That’s really concerning,” Ryan Crosswell, a Democrat and former public corruption prosecutor, told NOTUS. “Obviously, the command center and training are something that anybody who wants to protect election integrity would want. And this just feeds into the fear that rather than protect elections, the DOJ may try to interfere with them. That’s pretty scary.”

The report on the DOJ’s inaction arrives as Trump and the GOP hope to gain any advantage they can ahead of the midterm elections.

Democrats are widely expected to regain control of the House, where the GOP currently holds a razor-thin majority, while intense backlash against Trump’s second term means the Senate could also be in play for Democrats in November.

Crosswell reiterated just how seriously previous administrations took the duties of the “command center” ahead of Election Day. He described how the operation at FBI headquarters would involve a specialist team working eight-hour shifts, taking calls and directing law enforcement responses nationwide to possible election-related crimes.

This included alerting officials to a person spreading online misinformation designed to discourage voters from a particular party, which led the FBI to conduct a “soft knock” at their home to let them know the feds were tracking them.

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“It spoke to how seriously we took this stuff,” Crosswell told NOTUS.

Elsewhere, DOJ headquarters canceled what would have been an intricate, week-long training session to inform prosecutors and FBI special agents from across the country about election-crime laws and how to investigate them without interfering in the democratic process.

The agency also removed a 281-page guide titled “Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses” from the DOJ’s website. The DOJ has also not replaced the former head of the Election Crimes Branch, Rob Heberle, who resigned after the department dropped corruption charges against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

In previous years, local federal prosecutors investigating suspected election-related crimes would seek advice from a team of experts in the Public Integrity Section (PIN). However, nearly all the election experts at PIN have either quit under pressure or resigned in protest during the second Trump administration.

“There’s a massive knowledge gap now,” Gary Restaino, Arizona’s U.S. attorney during the Biden administration, told NOTUS. “PIN was a bulwark. It had people looking down the middle of the road and putting on political blinders. And the command center is critical to act uniformly across states.”

In a statement, a DOJ spokesperson told NOTUS that its top priorities are now “ensuring the integrity of U.S. elections and protecting Americans against voting fraud and civil rights violations.”