President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections.

Across the administration, though, officials have been more focused on forward-looking steps such as examining state voter rolls for people who have moved or aren’t citizens. Some officials are ready to move on from 2020 and want to avoid being called “election deniers,” a term for people who claimed without evidence that Trump beat Biden in the 2020 election.

But Trump and some allies inside and outside the administration won’t let go of allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 even though courts have repeatedly rejected their theories. They argue that future elections can’t be secured without a full accounting of 2020.

“I hope the DOJ pursues this with as much ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history!” Trump posted on Truth Social on Wednesday. “If not, it will happen again, including the upcoming Midterms.”

The renewed focus on 2020 coincides with Trump’s starting to see results from his demands to prosecute his critics, including former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Last week, the Justice Department also suspended two prosecutors who referenced the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a Trump-supporting mob at the Capitol in a court filing related to sentencing a participant who Trump pardoned and is now facing unrelated weapons charges.

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said he views the charges against Trump’s political opponents and the administration’s attempts to acquire voter rolls and voting equipment as a continuation of Trump’s years-long effort to question the results of an election he lost.

“Everything that they’re doing now is a re-litigation of 2020,” he said. “They’re trying to discredit the entire electoral system in the United States of America so that Donald Trump can finally be able to say, ‘You see, the system was corrupt. My lies were actually the truth.’ ”

Trump has not specified who he blames for the alleged fraud in the 2020 election. But he has named people he wants investigated for the prosecutions against him and his supporters during the Biden administration for efforts to reverse his 2020 loss.

The president’s calls to investigate or “jail” former officials including former president Joe Biden, former attorney general Merrick Garland and former special counsel Jack Smith intensified last week after House Republicans released a cache of FBI files from 2020 to 2023. The 234 pages describe the preliminary steps to investigate people who falsely certified that Trump won the 2020 election in key states.

“What they did was criminal,” Trump said in an Oct. 15 news conference in the Oval Office with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel — the same officials who would oversee those investigations.

At another point in the news conference, Trump responded to a reporter’s question about a Senate primary in Georgia by returning to the topic of the 2020 election.

“I hope they’re going to go into that,” he said. “I hope they go into the votes which are being stored in Fulton County.”

The county, which includes part of Atlanta, was the epicenter of false allegations of voter fraud during the 2020 election, arising from a water leak at the ballot counting facility and wheeled ballot containers that were mischaracterized as unauthorized suitcases. Two election workers won a defamation case against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani for spreading falsehoods about them that led to threats.

The Fulton County mail ballots remain a source of interest in the MAGA movement because they are still in storage five years later. Ordinarily, the ballots are required to be kept for 22 months, but a Georgia judge ordered them indefinitely preserved during litigation that unsuccessfully challenged the election.

The state’s Republican-controlled election board has repeatedly tried to obtain the ballots, but county officials said the records are under seal. Fulton County Judge Robert C.I. McBurney will hold a hearing on Nov. 24 to consider whether to quash the board’s subpoena for the ballots.

In July, the board asked the Justice Department for help. The next month, Justice Department official Ed Martin sent McBurney a letter requesting immediate access to the 148,000 warehoused mail ballots. Martin, who previously represented Trump supporters accused of breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, temporarily became the U.S. attorney in Washington when Trump returned to office but lacked Republican support for Senate confirmation. He went on to become Trump’s pardon attorney and lead a newly created Weaponization Working Group at the Justice Department. In that capacity he has been convening frequent meetings with officials across multiple agencies to address voter fraud, according to a person familiar with the meetings who wasn’t authorized to speak to reporters.

“I am at present undertaking an investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice,” Martin said in the letter to McBurney, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post. “A review of the ballots and envelopes is imperative for this work.”

It is not clear whether Martin’s letter ever reached the judge: The letter says he sent it electronically to one email address that was typed incorrectly. An aide to the judge did not say whether he received it, and Fulton County Clerk Ché Alexander and a county attorney declined to comment about the letter. Martin did not respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday, Harmeet Dillon, a former Trump campaign legal adviser who now heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, followed up by requesting to inspect the ballots. The letter, obtained by The Post, said the division is investigating compliance with federal laws on administering elections.

Robb Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said he was confused by the Justice Department’s involvement in efforts to review ballots from an election that has already been repeatedly scrutinized.

“It makes no sense to me to continue to look at the 2020 elections,” he said. “Audit after audit, review after review, where does it end? One more time? Two more times?”

Until now, Dillon’s division was primarily focused on current voter lists rather than revisiting 2020 ballots. Most states have denied the department’s requests for the full versions of the rolls, but Indiana and Wyoming have turned them over, according to a Brennan Center for Justice website tracking the requests. The Justice Department last month sued eight states — all but one of them led by a Democratic governor — for not handing over copies of their full rolls.

Separately, two other Justice Department officials responsible for coordinating prosecutors have asked states to share information about voters in response to a March executive order on elections. The part of the executive order promoting sharing information remains in place, but the most significant aspects of the executive order have been blocked by courts. One blocked provision would have changed state deadlines for returning mail ballots; another would have required people to provide proof of citizenship when using a national voter registration form.

Another part of the executive order that remains in effect directed the Department of Homeland Security to share citizenship data with state and local officials to verify voters’ eligibility, leading Republican-led states to run their voter rolls against a database administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The Ohio secretary of state, a Republican, referred 1,084 suspected ineligible voters to the Justice Department for investigation, and his Texas counterpart flagged 2,724 people to county officials to scrutinize. Voting rights advocates cautioned that the database contains incomplete and outdated information, resulting in inaccurate matches.

This summer, the Trump administration and its allies also asked county clerks in Colorado and Missouri to turn over voting equipment for inspection and testing. The clerks refused the highly unusual requests, citing laws that require them to tightly limit who can access the equipment.

In Missouri, the requests came from Andrew “Mac” Warner, a top official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who previously served as West Virginia’s secretary of state. Warner has claimed the 2020 election was stolen by the CIA.

“The Justice Department is committed to upholding the integrity of our electoral system and will continue to prioritize efforts to ensure all elections remain free, fair, and transparent,” a spokesperson said.

In addition to these efforts at the Justice Department, in recent months Trump tapped Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who worked on 2020 election challenges, to work in the White House. Olsen was also in touch with Trump during the 2024 campaign, irritating some other officials who found his advice unhelpful. Olsen declined to comment.

Cleta Mitchell, another lawyer who tried to contest the 2020 election, said the administration should take additional steps, including publicly releasing more Biden administration records, compensating Trump and his supporters who were prosecuted, and revoking tax deductions for charitable contributions that funded local election administrators to ease voting procedures during the covid pandemic in 2020.

“It is high time that there was a full and open discussion of what transpired in 2020,” Mitchell said in an email. “Those who perpetrated these prosecutions and persecutions must be punished to stop it from ever happening again. And everyone in the DOJ/FBI/WH who participated in that grand illegal conspiracy needs to be held to account. Every. Single. One.”