Lawsuit seeks to force DOJ to turn over communications with election deniers

A new lawsuit filed Friday seeks to force the Department of Justice (DOJ) to divulge communications between senior officials and election deniers during the department’s ongoing efforts to obtain state voter rolls and relitigate President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.

And it’s targeting some of the most prominent figures and organizations in the anti-voting movement: election denier-turned-White House official Kurt Olsen, Election Integrity Network founder Cleta Mitchell and the election denier group True the Vote, to name a few.

The lawsuit, filed by Democracy Forward* in Washington, D.C., alleges that the department has failed to comply with multiple public records requests for exchanges between senior Civil Rights Division officials and political actors, outside organizations and other federal agencies about voting and elections.

Democracy Forward, a nonprofit pro-democracy legal organization, added that there is an “urgent need” for the information to be made publicly available before the upcoming midterm elections in November.

“Contemporaneous reporting and documented activities indicate that [the Civil Rights Division] is engaged in the collection, sharing, and analysis of state voter data, including interactions with external actors who have publicly questioned election integrity, raising time-sensitive concerns about transparency, public confidence, and the potential impact of these efforts on election administration and voter participation,” the lawsuit reads.

In one of its Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests, Democracy Forward sought any emails, texts and social media messages Harmeet Dhillon, the DOJ’s civil rights chief, and other senior officials have exchanged with Olsen, a notorious election denier the White House hired to investigate election fraud claims.

Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer, played a key role in the president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. As a government official, he was key in initiating the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election materials — including actual ballots — from an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year.

Through its raid on the election facility, the FBI obtained materials that Dhillon’s office was also attempting to obtain through a separate civil lawsuit. Dhillon herself tied the raid to the county’s failure to comply with her demands.

In its suit to force the DOJ to return the election documents, Fulton County has alleged that after Dhillon’s civil lawsuit to obtain the 2020 records ran into roadblocks, the department initiated a criminal investigation to obtain the materials by force. 

Similar to Democracy Forward’s FOIA, the county has asked a federal judge to order the DOJ to disclose any communications between Dhillon’s office and Olsen. The federal government has opposed the county’s request, but the judge has yet to weigh in on the matter.

In a hearing last month, the judge said that evidence of coordination between Olsen and Dhillon’s office would bolster the county’s argument that the FBI’s criminal investigation and raid were pretextual and unconstitutional.

“People in America deserve to know what the U.S. Department of Justice is doing where our elections are concerned,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in a statement.

“The Trump-Vance administration’s continued stonewalling of information about its actions that could impact the integrity of our elections undermines trust, accountability, and our democracy itself,” Perryman added. 

In another one of its FOIA requests, Democracy Forward asked the DOJ to turn over any communications between White House officials and Eric Neff, a Republican attorney with a web of ties to election-conspiracy theorists who now serves as acting head of the department’s voting section. It specifically asked for any correspondence containing terms often used in election conspiracy theories, such as “Venezuela,” “Maduro,” “voting machines” and “election interference.” 

Since joining the DOJ in December, Neff has taken on a leading role in the department’s push to obtain states’ unredacted voter registration records. So far, the DOJ has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., in the effort.

Trump and anti-voting activists have claimed that by obtaining voter rolls, the department will uncover evidence of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens. Numerous studies and voter roll audits have shown that vanishingly few noncitizens attempt to register, and fewer still try to vote. 

Because of his prominent role in the DOJ’s crusade for registration data, Democracy Forward also asked for any exchanges between Neff and anti-voting organizations and figures like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and True the Vote.

*Democracy Docket Founder Marc Elias is the chair of the Democracy Forward board.