Michael Gates, who helped lead DOJ’s voter roll grab, advances in California attorney general race

Michael Gates, a former Trump Justice Department official who helped lead the administration’s aggressive crusade for state voter data, advanced Tuesday night to California’s general election for attorney general. 

It sets up a November matchup against incumbent California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D), one of the country’s most active legal opponents of Trump’s attacks on voting and elections. Bonta will be heavily favored.

Gates, a Republican and former Huntington Beach city attorney, finished in the top two in California’s open primary for attorney general. Under California’s top-two system, all candidates run on the same ballot regardless of party, and the two highest vote-getters advance to November.

Gates’ advance gives California Republicans a statewide candidate with direct ties to the Trump administration’s effort to use DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to seize voter rolls and push restrictive voting policies.

“We are going to make sure that elections are safe, that we have election integrity by enforcing election laws,” Gates said when announcing his candidacy in January.

Gates briefly served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon, a longtime conservative attorney and Trump-loyalist tapped to lead the division. The Civil Rights Division is the part of DOJ that has historically enforced federal civil rights laws, including voting rights protections.

Before joining DOJ, Gates served as an attorney for the city of Huntington Beach, where he staunchly defended its voter ID requirement for municipal elections, against a lawsuit from California. When he announced his DOJ appointment, Gates said he would work “to advance President Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, fight to restore law and order throughout the country, and fight to restore faith in the Nation’s justice system.”

He also touted his role in Huntington Beach, saying the city had “successfully ushered in, and successfully defended in court, the State’s very first local VOTER ID law.”

Gates has also been endorsed by Reform California, a conservative group that pushed a sweeping and restrictive statewide ID initiative onto the November ballot.

At DOJ, Gates helped lead one of the administration’s California voter roll cases. In June 2025, the department sued Orange County Registrar of Voters Robert Page, claiming the county had failed to turn over unredacted voter records the administration demanded. 

The complaint was signed by Gates and sought a court order forcing the county to provide the information.

Voting rights advocates have warned that the Trump administration’s demands for sensitive voter data are part of a broader push to purge voter rolls under the false premise of widespread voter fraud.

Gates’ short DOJ tenure ended under disputed circumstances. 

A federal personnel document obtained by the Orange County Register indicated Gates was terminated “for cause,” meaning the department said it had a reason to fire him. 

Gates denied that he was fired and said the allegations against him were a “100% fabrication.”

Bonta has taken the opposite posture toward Trump’s election agenda. In April, he co-led a multistate lawsuit challenging Trump’s sweeping election executive order, which sought to restrict voter eligibility and mail-in voting by giving the federal government more control over voter lists.

With Bonta and Gates advancing, California voters will face a stark choice in November: whether to keep the state’s top legal office in the hands of one of Trump’s most prolific courtroom adversaries, or elevate a Republican who steered the administration’s anti-voting crackdown.