A new White House task force reviewing thousands of pages of classified intelligence and law enforcement documents for evidence of irregularities in U.S. elections is expected to begin releasing documents within weeks, two U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter told MS NOW.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whose acting chief, Bill Pulte, has been accused by Democrats of politically weaponizing federal government information, will be part of the effort. Democrats say that Trump has placed Pulte in the position so that he can aid Republicans in the midterm elections and potentially limit voting by Democrats.

Pulte has no intelligence experience and also serves as the administration’s top federal housing official. Pulte referred multiple Trump political rivals for Justice Department criminal prosecution last year based on mortgage information he obtained from government databases. None of those cases have resulted in convictions. 

The release of the documents appears to be part of a series of accelerating efforts by Trump and his aides to again question the results of the 2020 election, claim that widespread voter fraud occurs in the country and decrease public trust in the results of pivotal elections this fall that will decide control of Congress. 

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“I don’t think we’ve ever seen an administration that is this hostile to voting rights and free and fair elections,” said Jonathan Diaz, the director of voting advocacy at the Campaign Legal Center, an ethics watchdog group. “This is a new frontier.”

Election security experts and election officials have long expected the Trump administration to release more government documents in an attempt to flood the information ecosystem with false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — all with an eye toward sowing confusion about future elections.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, said the release of intelligence documents on alleged irregularities in elections is likely to fall flat with most Americans. “It’s easy to get up on a press conference and throw a thousand-page document out there that has rehashed and debunked claims in it from years and years ago,” Becker said, adding that any actual illegality uncovered would have to face judicial scrutiny. “Tell it to a judge. See what happens then.”

“I have no fear of anything being released. We already know what happened in the 2020 election. That’s the most scrutinized election in world history,” Becker added. “I do have a fear that the White House and the federal government has become perhaps the primary amplifier of disinformation that seeks to delegitimize American democracy in our election process.”

Threatening letters

A Trump Justice Department appointee, Harmeet Dhillon, threatened state election officials nationwide with criminal prosecution on Tuesday if they count ballots cast by noncitizens, according to letters from Dhillon reviewed by MS NOW. 

The move amplifies long-debunked conspiracy theories promoted by Trump about widespread noncitizen voting, which research and state audits have found is extremely rare, involves a minuscule number of votes and is not conducted in a coordinated manner. 

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Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican and Utah’s top election official, assailed Dhillon’s tenor and tactics. She said in a social media post that a dozen courts had ruled that previous requests from Dhillon for private voter data from states were illegal. 

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” Henderson wrote. “This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Dhillon also informed Michigan officials this week that the Justice Department intends to send federal monitors to three cities that are Democratic strongholds, including Lansing, during the state’s Aug. 4 primary elections. Michigan has a hotly contested U.S. Senate race and a toss-up House seat in Lansing that are key targets for both parties. 

And in late June, the Federal Emergency Management Agency published new requirements demanding that states revamp how they conduct elections or risk losing federal counterterrorism funding awarded by FEMA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security. 

Those actions build on Trump’s long-standing efforts to undermine faith in the country’s elections, including trying to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden. 

“Trump has taken a whole-of-government approach to influencing election results,” Mark Blumberg, who investigated voting rights cases for 20 years in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, told MS NOW. “It could be absolutely catastrophic.”

Play Staunch loyalists

In addition to Pulte’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence, Trump has appointed Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, as acting attorney general. Kash Patel, a former Trump White House aide, is FBI director. The appointments of staunch loyalists to lead the country’s most powerful intelligence and law enforcement posts have raised concerns among Democrats that they could help Trump question the results and limit voting in Democratic areas.

Pulte, Blanche and Patel — and all previous heads of the Justice Department, FBI and U.S. spy agencies  — have no legal role in the administration of elections or the counting of votes, election experts said. They have the authority to investigate foreign interference in U.S. elections, but the Constitution clearly says that only state and local officials — and in some instances Congress — set the rules for voting and count the votes.

No president in U.S. history has tried to unilaterally rewrite federal election rules and use the U.S. Postal Service to limit who gets to vote, until Trump did so in an executive order last spring. No president had systematically spread false claims that elections are rigged, and declined to accept presidential election results, until November 2020. And no president had replaced attorneys general, FBI directors and intelligence officials who declined to back their conspiracy theories with ones who do — until Trump returned to the White House for a second term.

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“This administration has shown a willingness to engage in activities that are prohibited by federal law,” Diaz said.

Earlier this year, Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, accompanied FBI agents as they executed a search warrant signed by a judge and removed hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots and voting records from a polling place in heavily Democratic Fulton County, Georgia. 

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Experts are concerned that Pulte, who issued two criminal referrals against Trump rival Letitia James, the New York attorney general, would take similar action at Trump’s behest.  

In one scenario, election experts said, on Election Day this fall, Pulte could obtain a warrant from a judge, arrive at a polling place and accompany FBI agents as they seize records and voting machines as part of what they say is a federal criminal investigation into election interference by a foreign country. 

Jessica Marsden, counsel and director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a nonprofit legal center, said such an effort could disrupt voting or the counting of results. 

Democrats would likely ask federal judges to order federal agents to return the voting machines and leave polling places, citing a 1948 law that prohibits armed federal agents or soldiers from entering polling places.

Marsden is urging local election officials to immediately ask state and local government lawyers and law enforcement officials — such as state troopers and county sheriffs — how they would respond if FBI agents or marshals tried to forcibly seize voting machines, election records or ballots.

“They should be calling their county attorney and their state attorney and ask them to be ready to challenge any warrant or subpoena in order to ensure that the chain of custody of election materials are protected until the results are finalized,” Marsden said. “There are strong legal protections that state and local leaders can cite.”

Another potential nightmare that democratic election experts have envisioned is that Justice Department monitors sent by Blanche and Dhillon to heavily Democratic Detroit and Lansing could announce that local officials had allowed noncitizens to vote.

In yet another scenario, Mullin could have Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conduct raids in heavily Democratic areas of Texas, Georgia or other swing states, Diaz said, which could drive down turnout by naturalized American citizens who fear arrest. 

Marsden said it was critical for election officials to discuss and plan for such scenarios now. She said vocal opposition to such efforts now could make Trump and his allies hesitate. 

Marsden said she was stunned to be discussing such scenarios at all. 

“This is unprecedented,” she said. “If you had told me in 2010 that we would be having this conversation, I wouldn’t have believed you. But we have to take this seriously, given events in 2020 and the president’s focus on this fall.”