‘The Damage Is Massive’: How the Justice Department Dismantled Its Voting Rights Section

When a new administration moves to Washington, DC, there are always changes in policy priorities and personnel. Alex, a lawyer in the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, had survived Donald Trump’s first term, and thought he could make it through the second.

Within hours of the president’s inauguration, he knew he had misjudged the situation.

“I was just wrong,” he says. “It was wildly different than the first Trump administration. There was just a sense that this was not going to be the same. And then in the Voting Section, what happened is they just started dismissing cases.”

The Voting Section was established in the agency’s Civil Rights Division following the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 to ensure every American had an equal right to vote.

Alex, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, is one of dozens of lawyers who has been ousted from it since Trump’s return to the White House.

There were around 30 attorneys in the Voting Section when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025. Three months later, only two remained. The departing lawyers have since been replaced by half a dozen new hires with little federal court experience who have made a litany of basic errors in court filings. They have also appeared more than willing to comply with Trump’s anti-voting directives, filing dozens of lawsuits in a bid to force states to hand over unredacted voter rolls.

WIRED spoke to a dozen experts and former Voting Section lawyers about the wholesale destruction of the Justice Department’s Voting Section under Trump. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

As the November midterms loom, multiple sources tell WIRED that the damage done to the DOJ’s Voting Section may be irreversible. They worry that the ultimate goal is to provide Trump with so-called evidence to wrest control of elections from the states. “I think long-term, it's about generating fodder to challenge or undermine elections,” says Alex, who worked at the Voting Section for many years.

“They've turned what was previously the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Division, the Voting Section, into a weapon against voters,” Michelle Kanter Cohen, policy director and senior counsel at the Fair Elections Center, tells WIRED. “This used to be a section that enforced people's voting rights, that worked against intimidation, that enforced federal voting laws meant to protect people from discrimination and meant to make voting fair and accessible. It is being turned into a political tool to further conspiracy theories of the Trump administration.”

Former lawyers from the Voting Section agree. “I spent eight years in the Voting Section as a trial attorney doing what was the bread-and-butter work of the section ever since it was created, which was enforcing the Voting Rights Act and the other federal statutes that protect the right to vote,” Eileen O’Connor, who is now senior counsel at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, tells WIRED. “The work that they're doing now is the opposite.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment about the new Voting Section lawyers, but spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told WIRED that “the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act, and Help America Vote Act all give the Department of Justice full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

Voting Rights

In the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Trump sought to weaponize the Justice Department by appointing special counsels to investigate election conspiracy theories. It didn’t work. At every turn, officials and political appointees at the department pushed back, even threatening mass resignations.

Now Trump is once again seeking to use the power of the Justice Department to undermine trust in the election process. This time around, sources tell WIRED, there is no one pushing back.

A few weeks into Trump’s second term, on February 4, 2025, the Senate confirmed Pam Bondi as attorney general. The following day, she issued a series of memos to all lawyers in the Justice Department. Alex remembers the day well: “We got a batch of emails everyone called the Bondi blasts, most notably one that said that everyone needed to be zealously representing the president's policies,” he recalls. (The actual wording of the document calls for DOJ lawyers to be “zealously advocating” for the president.)

Alex and other lawyers who spoke to WIRED say the Voting Section quickly felt the brunt of those policies.

Jamie, a former lawyer at the Voting Section who left in 2025, says the last year has been “unlike anything anyone had ever seen.”

“I was asked to dismiss one of my cases in the very first week of the administration,” they say. “And that kept happening until there were no active cases anymore for the Voting Section and almost no active cases for the entire division.”

The president’s priorities became even more clear on March 25, 2025, when Trump signed an executive order titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” The order outlined how the administration was planning to collect unredacted voter rolls from states and share the information with the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. The sharing of this data across agencies was unprecedented.

In April 2025, the Senate confirmed the appointment of Harmeet Dhillon as the assistant attorney general in charge of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, which oversees the Voting Section. Dhillon has advocated for Trump in his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. She also pushed back on what she claimed was government overreach during the first year of the Covid pandemic, and in a series of posts on X even questioned the attack on representative Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022, noting the security presence around members of Congress and their partners.

Under Dhillon, the Voting Section released a new mission statement. The statement, Alex says, “doesn't really mention Voting Rights Act work. It's all about implementing the executive order, protecting voter integrity and transparency, [but] not enforcing the statutes Congress has charged the Civil Rights Division to enforce.”

The timing of Dhillon’s appointment lined up with the deferred resignation program that was offered to tens of thousands of federal workers during DOGE’s rampage. While thousands of employees left the Justice Department, former section lawyers tell WIRED that they believe Dhillon felt resignations were not happening quickly enough. So she came up with a new way of forcing out senior leadership.

On April 25, 2025, Dhillon sent letters to senior managers in the section, informing them that they were being temporarily transferred to the Justice Department’s complaint adjudication office. As one recipient of the letter described it to WIRED, “Mostly it’s Bureau of Prisons guard complaints about promotions, hiring, and firing, and Americans with Disabilities Act concerns. That is not my expertise.” WIRED reviewed a copy of the letter, which features Dhillon’s signature.

The letter worked, and the entire Voting Section’s leadership resigned. Most of the people leaving had worked there for many years, including at least two lawyers who had been there since the 1980s.

“You will never have people with that level of institutional and encyclopedic knowledge of both the external and the internal precedents, the things that kept the Voting Section always credible, always inside the lines,” says Alex. “That's just gone. It’s just deeply sad.”