One New DOJ Voting Lawyer Worked on Georgia Fake Electors Plot. Another Was Part of Cleta Mitchell’s Anti-Voting Network

One Republican lawyer who worked to overturn the 2020 election alongside leaders of the effort, and a second who was a senior member of Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting network, were recently hired to work on voting issues at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ). 

Both are now involved in the department’s aggressive push to obtain unredacted voter registration records from states nationwide.

Their hiring by DOJ is the latest sign that the department aims to convert its voting section — once dedicated to defending voting rights — into a unit that works to restrict voting and promote election conspiracy theories.

Christopher J. Gardner, a Georgia-based GOP attorney, worked closely with Trump-aligned attorneys including Mitchell, John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro to challenge the state’s 2020 results and advise Republicans on casting false electoral votes for Donald Trump. Now, Gardner is representing the DOJ in litigation seeking ballots and other election records from Fulton County, Ga.

Megan Frederick was until recently a leader of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, part of the national anti-voting network founded by Mitchell. Frederick also worked as a Republican lawyer during the 2020 election, when she was part of Trump’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 ballots in Wisconsin. She now leads the DOJ lawsuit demanding Washington, D.C.’s full voter rolls.

Neither Gardner nor Frederick was listed as Civil Rights Division employees on a list obtained from DOJ through a Freedom of Information Act request, which was said to be current as of Dec. 11. Their names have since then appeared in court filings for the department’s voter roll lawsuits.

Gardner and Frederick are far from the first people with troubling records to be hired to DOJ’s voting section this year. As Democracy Docket reported, the lawyer who served as the voting section’s acting chief until recently came to DOJ from a leading conservative law firm that works to tighten voting rules. She was replaced by a GOP attorney with a long history of working with election conspiracists. A third voting section lawyer has spread false conspiracies about Dominion voting machines.

The move to hire attorneys with documented histories of trying to overturn an election and promoting false claims about illegal voting has stunned veterans of the department and raised urgent questions about whether political loyalty is now prioritized over legal expertise.

“Applying to be a lawyer at the DOJ, particularly in the most competitive divisions like the Civil Rights Division, involved being selected in a difficult interview process from among hundreds if not thousands of other applicants,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, told Democracy Docket. “In 2025, that all changed. The AAG for Civil Rights [Harmeet Dhillon] is now openly begging for applicants on social media, and after losing hundreds of years of law enforcement experience, the division now appears to be fast-tracking the hiring of lawyers based solely on loyalty and commitment to debunked conspiracy theories.” 

A spokesperson for DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

Gardner worked to block Georgia’s election certification

Gardner is now serving as a DOJ attorney on cases targeting Georgia’s election. He signed the brief demanding statewide voter rolls, as well as a separate case seeking 2020 voting records from Fulton County. 

Documents released as part of the probe by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis into the fake elector scheme, as well as records released by congressional investigators, show Gardner worked closely with Trump-aligned attorneys at the highest levels of the effort to subvert Georgia’s 2020 presidential results — including the “fake elector” effort.

In December 2020, Gardner represented President Donald Trump and Georgia Republican Party chair David Shafer in a lawsuit seeking to prevent state officials from certifying the election. Gardner joined national election denial figures, including Chesebro, Eastman and Mitchell in providing what they described as “collective” legal advice to the Republican slate of electors. The attorneys instructed the electors to meet and “act and vote in the exact manner” as if Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) had certified the election for Trump, despite the fact that he had certified Biden’s win.

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, Gardner further coordinated with Chesebro and Eastman. Over email, Chesebro explicitly laid out a strategy to use pending Georgia litigation to create “legitimate doubt” about the election and delay Congress’ certification of Biden’s presidential victory.

As the legal effort faltered in its final hours, Gardner was part of a frantic scramble to keep the case alive. In a Dec. 31, 2020 email exchange with Eastman and Chesebro, Gardner warned that the team might be unable to file an emergency Georgia court challenge because Trump’s required verification had not been notarized.

“There’s no one they can call to come to the White House that’s a notary?” Gardner wrote. “I don’t know how we file without it. Presidential trip to a UPS store?”

The election subversion effort ultimately failed. Georgia certified Biden’s win, and the fake elector scheme later became the subject of criminal investigations. Chesebro was convicted on a felony charge in Georgia and subsequently disbarred in several states. 

In later, unrelated litigation in 2022, Gardner signed an amicus brief filed on behalf of the Tea Party Patriots Foundation — the political arm of the Tea Party movement that helped organize the “March to Save America” rally before the Jan. 6 attack. In that filing, Gardner and Kurt Hilbert, whose law firm Gardner worked for at the time, accused the Biden administration of compiling a “political enemies list” through grand jury subpoenas and claimed federal investigators were targeting “MAGA Republicans” for harassment.

Then in 2024, Gardner again worked to halt a Georgia certification process — this time representing the Fulton County Republican Party, which sought to intervene in a case brought by a GOP election board member who refused to certify the county’s primary results. Gardner signed the party’s motion, arguing that Fulton County’s elections were vulnerable to “fraud, deceit, or abuse,” and that certification without further investigation would “place a cloud over the validity” of the results. A judge dismissed the case, ruling that Georgia officials have a mandatory duty to certify lawful election outcomes.

Now on the other side of the table, Gardner is representing the DOJ in litigation that effectively seeks to reopen the issue of Georgia’s 2020 results.

Frederick was part of Cleta Mitchell’s anti-voting network

Frederick, alongside fellow DOJ attorney Brittany E. Bennett, now leads the federal lawsuit demanding Washington, D.C.’s full, unredacted voter rolls.

As recently as 2024, Frederick was the Project Manager for the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group that’s part of Mitchell’s Fair Elections Fund, which spreads misinformation about noncitizen voting and pressures lawmakers to impose strict proof-of-citizenship requirements that would block eligible voters from the rolls. She also has worked closely with the Election Integrity Network (EIN) — Mitchell’s flagship organization coordinating anti-voting activism nationwide.

On a call with other anti-voting activists last year, Frederick said she worked “hand in hand” with EIN’s executive vice president Kerri Toloczko, and urged listeners to support a slate of voting restrictions in battleground states.

Before joining Mitchell’s network, Frederick played a hands-on and highly visible role in Trump’s post-election effort. One of just three attorneys representing the Trump campaign during the Dane County recount in Madison, Frederick managed attorneys on the recount floor and personally objected to ballots — sometimes one by one — over minor clerical issues such as missing witness initials.

Those objections were part of a broader plan to throw out more than 220,000 votes cast in Dane and Milwaukee counties — heavily Democratic areas that were pivotal to Biden’s victory. Frederick also helped prepare appeals to the Wisconsin Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court seeking to disqualify tens of thousands of ballots from indefinitely confined voters and lawful absentee-ballot programs.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the effort as “unreasonable,” warning it sought the “extraordinary step” of disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of voters after the election had already taken place. Frederick’s résumé confirms she performed the “massive research and prep work” used to justify that attempted disenfranchisement.

Becker said that lawyers hired by DOJ for their ideological commitments may not prove the most effective litigators.

“As a former DOJ lawyer, I’m deeply saddened by the diminishment of the Department,” Becker added. “But those hiring based solely on loyalty tests, etc. are likely to find that the lawyers they have hired have track records of failure in litigation, and admonishment by the courts, rendering it almost certain that this current iteration of the DOJ will continue its unprecedented track record of loss of credibility, and defeats in litigation.”