A document dump to a right-wing website exposed a secret and controversial hire made by the Trump administration, according to a new report.
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Hidden metadata in an internal Trump administration letter, released by Homeland Security, revealed that Pennsylvania election denial activist Karen DiSalvo was a quietly hired department adviser conducting an operation similar to her efforts following President Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
The letter, signed Aug. 24 by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, threatened to withhold security funding from states that do not conduct post-election audits. The conservative outlet Just the News posted it Thursday.
Metadata in the document names DiSalvo as its creator, according to Democracy Docket, which examined the file. DiSalvo works as a senior adviser in the department’s Office of Strategy, Policy, and Plans, according to records.
That is the same office where Heather Honey, an election-denial activist whom the department hired last year, oversees election integrity. Before either joined the government, the two founded the Election Research Institute, a Pennsylvania anti-voting group, the report said.
“Someone linked me up with Heather, and so we formed this nonprofit, the Election Research Institute, last year,” DiSalvo said on a 2024 podcast.
Honey’s false claims about the 2020 election were cited by Trump in his speech to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mullin addressed the letter to a White House task force whose members include Just the News founder John Solomon, who joined the administration as a special government employee while continuing to cover election integrity for his own outlet.
The pattern reaches well beyond one office. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, created in Trump’s first term to shield elections from foreign interference, has lost nearly a third of its workforce since he returned.
Its public affairs director is Marci McCarthy, a Georgia Republican official who helped lead a lawsuit challenging her state’s voting machines.
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At the Justice Department, the voting section is run by Eric Neff, whose prosecution of a voting software executive collapsed after conspiracy theorists seized on the case.
“The administration dismantled the election cybersecurity expertise built up during the past two administrations, including Trump’s first term, and has replaced that expertise and credibility with conspiracy theorists,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
“Election officials of both parties tell me they can no longer trust the federal government as a partner in running secure elections,” he told Democracy Docket.
Mullin’s agency refused to say when taxpayers first began paying DiSalvo’s salary.
“DHS does not comment on existing personnel,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
Archived versions of DiSalvo’s state bar profile suggest that as late as September 2025, she did not list the department as her employer, the outlet reported. The ties federal money to a practice DiSalvo spent years demanding. States must show they conducted “random post-election manual counts of paper ballots,” Mullin wrote.
Her 2022 demands to the Lycoming County elections board included “no future use of voting machines,” the report said.
The county hand-counted more than 59,000 ballots and found no significant discrepancies. Officials said the exercise proved the machines were accurate.
She later sued to block Pennsylvania’s machines and filed a federal case that state officials said would disenfranchise “tens of thousands” of overseas voters, according to the report.
A co-founder of the Minnesota firm listed as her employer in earlier filings, William Mohrman, worked to overturn the 2020 Wisconsin result before the Justice Department hired him. The department has said it will send 1,000 monitors to the polls this fall.
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