President Donald Trump has long raged about election integrity, saying “honest voting” is the key to maintaining nationhood, but his Department of Justice seemingly has other priorities.
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The DOJ has quietly dismantled much of the infrastructure it has relied on for years to protect the integrity of American elections, reported NOTUS. Training sessions have been canceled. A definitive prosecutorial guidebook has been scrubbed from government websites. The unit most responsible for overseeing election crime investigations has been gutted. And the department has yet to establish the around-the-clock command center it has historically stood up to handle Election Day emergencies.
“That’s really concerning,” said Ryan Crosswell, a former public corruption prosecutor who recently ran a Democratic campaign for Congress. “Obviously, the command center and training are something that anybody who wants to protect election integrity would want, and this just feeds into the fear that rather than protect elections, the DOJ may try to interfere with them. That’s pretty scary.”
The cancellations began last March, when DOJ headquarters called off biannual training sessions that had been scheduled at the National Advocacy Center, a federal training facility in South Carolina.
Career prosecutors and FBI special agents from all 93 U.S. attorney districts across the country would typically spend an entire week there learning the intricacies of election-crime law — how to investigate suspected fraud without influencing a race’s outcome, when to act and when to stand down. A follow-up in-person session scheduled for this March never materialized, and an all-week online course set for mid-July was also scrubbed. Internal notes, according to a source with direct knowledge of the situation, cited “changes in priorities.”
Those changes have left a significant void, NOTUS notes. The Public Integrity Section — known inside the department as PIN — was the institutional backbone of federal election law enforcement, a team of specialists who provided guidance to local prosecutors navigating the narrow and consequential decisions that arise around election time. Trump’s team decimated it, firing most of its lawyers, and the head of the Election Crimes Branch quit and has not been replaced, the report states.
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“There’s a massive knowledge gap now,” said Gary Restaino, who served as Arizona’s U.S. attorney during the Biden administration. “PIN was a bulwark. It had people looking down the middle of the road and putting on political blinders.”
Also gone is the 281-page Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses, a guidebook cited across multiple DOJ policies that has been quietly removed from the department’s website.
The DOJ did not answer detailed questions before publication but said in a statement that its top priorities include “ensuring the integrity of U.S. elections and protecting Americans against voting fraud.”
Whether the department can deliver on that promise — without the training, the guidebook, the specialists, or the command center — is a question it has not yet answered.
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November is five months away.
