The Trump administration has abandoned key security bodies meant to investigate direct threats to US elections by foreign actors and domestic terrorists, according to former officials and a recent report. While administration officials have been actively focused on unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by noncitizens, other credible election threats appear to have been overlooked, the officials say. Between 2021 and 2024, the justice department’s election threats taskforce prosecuted 21 cases, like that of Solomon Peña, a failed candidate for the New Mexico house of representatives who organized shootings at the houses of election officials, or Quintez Brown, who shot up a campaign meeting of Louisville’s mayor.
Democrats and Republicans faced prosecution for harassing, intimidating and threatening elections workers, noted Nikki Fisher, former chief election security officer for the Oregon secretary of state, now the executive director of the Oregon District Attorneys Association. Since then, the taskforce seems to have gone quiet. In an academic paper published in June, while she was studying at the Naval Postgraduate School, Fisher noted that the taskforce received more than 2,000 reports of election threats between 2021 and 2024.
It opened more than 100 investigations into those threats. Trump administration officials began disbanding election investigative groups within the justice department, the office of the director of national intelligence, and other agencies almost immediately after the president started his second term. The first day after Pam Bondi won Senate confirmation as attorney general, she eliminated the FBI’s foreign influence taskforce, which had been investigating influence campaigns waged by China, Russia and other adversaries.
Administration leaders fired or reassigned personnel working on foreign election interference at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (Cisa). They also defunded Cisa’s training program for local officials to monitor and coordinate threats through the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center. Pleas from Democratic lawmakers during budget negotiations in 2025 to retain the task force and other election integrity assets went unheeded.
FBI agents swooped into Fulton county in January to seize ballots from the 2020 election, ostensibly as part of a continuing investigation into foreign election interference. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was present at the FBI raid. Similarly, the ODNI and the FBI seized elections apparatus in Puerto Rico, again while investigating foreign interference.
But both cases led up to a primetime address by Trump on 16 July, where he claimed China had acquired extensive voter information during the 2020 election cycle, characterizing it as an effort to influence and undermine legitimacy in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. Trump argued that US election databases and hardware had vulnerabilities to foreign adversaries, and that Venezuela had digitally manipulated its election results in ways that might be replicated in an American election. Trump’s claims could not be substantiated from the evidence presented.
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