In blow to Trump DOJ, experienced anti-voting lawyer is out

Maureen Riordan, the veteran election lawyer whose appointment as Acting Chief of the Department of Justice’s voting section symbolized the department’s sharp anti-voting shift, is no longer at DOJ, the department said in a court filing Tuesday.  

Riordan came to DOJ from the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), a right-wing anti-voting legal group that has pushed aggressive voter purges and promoted false claims about widespread illegal voting. Still, her departure leaves the section largely in the hands of a slew of new hires with less experience and ties to even more radical anti-voting figures.

In a filing seeking New Mexico’s unredacted voter rolls, DOJ lawyers wrote that “Riordan is no longer with the Department of Justice.”

Riordan continued to be listed in official filings and complaints as recently as this month.

Riordan’s exit marks the loss of one of the most experienced active lawyers in the voting section since President Donald Trump’s return to office. 

She spent nearly two decades at DOJ before leaving in 2017, then resurfaced in 2025 as acting chief of the voting section — the unit responsible for enforcing the nation’s voting rights laws. In between, Riordan worked at PILF, where she aligned herself publicly with prominent election denial figures, including Cleta Mitchell.

“What we have now is an election integrity movement,” Mitchell said on a 2022 podcast appearance with Riordan. “And we want to keep building on that and training people and deploying them in a way that actually does reclaim our election systems from the left.”

“I agree,” Riordan responded.

Riordan was replaced as acting chief by Eric Neff, a Republican attorney with ties to election conspiracy theorists.

Neff was placed on leave as a Los Angeles County prosecutor after working with the election denial group True the Vote to bring bogus charges against the CEO of an election software company. The county ultimately paid $5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the CEO over the charges. 

Neff’s promotion was never formally announced either. Instead, his name began appearing inconsistently across DOJ filings, sometimes listed as acting chief, sometimes as a trial attorney and sometimes omitted altogether — mirroring broader confusion that has plagued the department’s campaign to seize state voter records.

Riordan’s departure leaves the voting section in the hands of a group of newer hires with significantly less experience in voting rights enforcement, and have their own backgrounds in election denial. 

Among them are Brittany E. Bennett, Christopher J. Gardner and Megan Frederick, lawyers who have appeared in recent DOJ cases seeking state voter rolls and who have ties to efforts to overturn elections. Gardner worked on the plot to overturn the 2020 election alongside Mitchell, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, and other leaders of that failed effort.

As Democracy Docket has continually reported, the department’s aggressive push to obtain voter data has already been riddled with errors — from misdirected demand letters to filings that cite nonexistent laws and misidentify basic facts about election administration. The loss of a legal veteran like Riordan only heightens concerns about whether the Voting Section is equipped to carry out its work competently.

Riordan’s quiet exit also underscores the instability roiling the Civil Rights Division more broadly. 

Since Trump returned to office, the division has hemorrhaged career attorneys, with roughly three-quarters of its lawyers departing amid leadership changes overseen by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.

After reaching out for request for comment regarding Riordan’s departure, a Justice Department spokesperson responded “no comment, thanks.”