Election denier Kurt Olsen leaves DOJ after failing to find evidence of stolen election

By Ajani Stella

FBI officers at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center on Jan. 28, 2026, in Union City, Georgia, outside Atlanta.
FBI officers at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center on Jan. 28, 2026, in Union City, Georgia, outside Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A prominent election denier whom the Trump administration hired to pursue investigations into election-related conspiracy theories has resigned several months after he failed to find evidence that the 2020 presidential race, which President Donald Trump lost, was stolen. 

Kurt Olsen, a conspiracy theorist with no prosecutorial experience, left his Department of Justice (DOJ) position Monday, multiple news outlets reported. 

Olsen has not publicly announced his resignation, and a DOJ spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The White House brought Olsen on in 2025 to lead “election security and integrity” as Trump tried to relitigate the results of the 2020 presidential race. In that capacity, Olsen played a central role in the FBI’s January raid of an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia, during which agents seized more than 600 boxes of documents from the 2020 race, including cast ballots. He also reportedly drove the Trump administration’s fruitless probe of voting machines in Puerto Rico.

In June, after Trump’s election fraud claims did not materialize, Olsen was reassigned to the DOJ team in South Florida conducting an investigation into an alleged “grand conspiracy” by Democrats and Trump foes to sabotage his first term — part of Trump’s broader revenge campaign against federal officials who have investigated him since 2016.

Olsen’s departure leaves the future of Trump’s revenge probe in limbo. 

Earlier this month, Joseph diGenova, the case’s top prosecutor, also abruptly resigned after coming under pressure to quickly press charges. DiGenova is a Trump loyalist who served as a lawyer on his 2020 campaign and supported the president’s false assertions that the election was rigged against him.

Olsen was just one of roughly a dozen election deniers hired by the administration. He gained prominence as the architect of the president’s 2020 election-denial campaign. His unfounded claims spurred the criminal investigation behind the Fulton County raid, even though the FBI had reportedly already debunked many of the claims used to open the probe. 

At the time, election security experts said Olsen’s conduct violated ethical firewalls between the White House and DOJ investigations.

In May, 11 Democratic senators demanded the president fire Olsen because he had exceeded the 130-day limit to serve as a “special government employee.” 

They said Trump and Olsen’s rhetoric threatened to undermine the security of future elections.

“President Trump is then using these theories to justify his ongoing baseless claims about the 2020 election and assert illegal and unconstitutional powers to ‘take over the voting’ in certain states in the upcoming election,” the senators wrote.

The Arizona Supreme Court also sanctioned Olsen in 2023 for making false statements while representing Kari Lake, the far-right conspiracy theorist who pushed Trump’s stolen election claims during her failed 2022 run for Arizona governor. 

Olsen left the DOJ the same day that FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, who took part in the Georgia investigation, announced his resignation. The two resignations appear unrelated — Bailey cited personal reasons for leaving the job.