Trump’s DOJ is 1-29. I’m not done
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The last several days have shown once again how deeply Donald Trump hates me. In the span of 24 hours, he suggested three times that I am a criminal who should be investigated and prosecuted.
His rage clearly stems from the humiliation I continue to inflict on him and his lawyers in court.
Trump knows well that, in the aftermath of the 2020 election, I helped defeat him and his allies in more than 60 cases challenging the outcome.
In the conventional telling of that period, I led a team of highly skilled lawyers, while Trump had a ragtag team of misfits. While that is certainly true, it obscures a fundamental weakness in the way Trump and Republicans frame their election litigation: they almost always ask courts to take votes away, not to protect them.
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I am not claiming that the current crop of DOJ lawyers are all-stars. Many are no better than Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, the Trump allies who pushed his false 2020 fraud claims and later pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case. But some are experienced litigators who have competently handled government litigation for years.
Yet they continue to show up before judges and lose at an astonishingly high rate.
Since Trump took office, his DOJ has filed 35 election-related lawsuits. It has lost 29 and won one; five are still awaiting a ruling.
In some respects, the DOJ’s 29 losses are more astounding than the 60-plus suffered by Trump’s 2020 team. After all, in 2020, Trump’s lawyers were litigating from behind and under enormous time pressure.
The DOJ, by contrast, is not trying to overcome a nearly impossible deficit. It has had nearly two years to develop a coherent litigation strategy and to bring and sequence its cases to maximize success.
Yet it has almost nothing to show for it.
Its embarrassing record isn’t limited to the cases it files. Nearly every major effort Trump has advanced to undermine elections has been blocked by the courts.
His first anti-voting executive order, which sought to require documentary proof of citizenship to register, was halted in 2025 and permanently blocked this June. His second, issued in March, directed federal agencies to compile “state citizenship lists” and ordered the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters on said lists. It was blocked as well.
In October, another judge ruled that the DOJ’s scheme to collect state voter rolls and run them through the SAVE database was unlawful. Most recently, courts have barred the administration from threatening California election workers with prosecution and from sending armed federal agents door to door to question voters about noncitizen voting.
Indeed, it is difficult to find any area of voting and elections where the Trump administration has consistently prevailed.
Of the cases the DOJ filed, its only victory came in North Carolina, and it comes with an asterisk. The department sued the state over a voter registration form that did not require applicants to provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. According to the DOJ, this violated federal law. Rather than fight, the Republican-controlled State Board of Elections chose to settle.
Trump is not interested in protecting voters. He wants the DOJ to file suits that make voting more difficult and subvert election results. That’s why he keeps losing. Most successful voting litigation does the opposite.
Throughout Trump’s second term, the DOJ has adopted his ethos. In nearly every case, it focuses on the rare unlawful voter while showing no regard for the rights of those whose lawful votes might be cast aside.
In Alaska, for example, the DOJ sued to delay certification of the U.S. Senate race and to force the state to segregate ballots, claiming voters might confuse Sen. Dan Sullivan with a candidate who shares his name. That remedy would necessarily compromise ballot secrecy, leaving voters vulnerable to questioning from federal agents about why they supported the candidates they chose.
In California, the DOJ sued to force election officials to set aside roughly 20,000 ballots cast by voters on a Homeland Security list of alleged noncitizens. The DOJ was callously indifferent to evidence that the list swept in U.S. citizens, including people born in the United States. Indeed, even the department’s acting deputy attorney general publicly conceded that the list could contain errors.
It is no wonder the DOJ lost both Alaska and California. But Trump wants these cases filed, and the DOJ under Attorney General Todd Blanche is simply there to file them.
For my part, I look forward to the day when the DOJ returns to its core mission of protecting voting rights. Until then, I will continue to fight against these attacks on voters in court. If history is any guide, that will earn me Trump’s enmity. That’s a price I am willing to pay.