June 1, 2025

The Department of Justice no longer represents the best interests of the American people. Under Bondi, it has been transformed into little more than a cog in the authoritarian machine doing Donald Trump’s bidding. It has abandoned independent judgment and fealty to the law and replaced it with unquestioned obedience to the White House.

After only five months in office, Trump has transformed the Department of Justice into an  instrument for voter suppression. This should come as no surprise.

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When Trump nominated Pam Bondi as Attorney General, Democracy Docket described her as an “election denier” who helped spread “voting conspiracy theories and false allegations of election fraud.” Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorialized that she should be confirmed because she was “qualified” and “serious.”

Sadly, we were right, and much of the corporate legacy media was woefully wrong.

Since taking office, Bondi has appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican lawyer with her own history of supporting anti-voting litigation and election denialism, as head of the Civil Rights Division. The most recent addition to the voter suppression team is Maureen Riordan, who recently helped lead a prominent anti-voting legal group. As Democracy Docket reported, she is now the acting head of the Voting Rights Section.

The first sign of the new regime’s focus came last week in North Carolina. Republicans spent six months trying to steal a state Supreme Court election by throwing out more than 65,000 ballots, claiming the voter registrations were incomplete.

Eventually, a federal judge nominated by Trump stepped in and ordered the state’s Board of Elections to certify the Democratic candidate’s victory. Republicans ultimately conceded the battle, but Trump’s DOJ is now engaged in the war.  

On Tuesday, the DOJ filed a new lawsuit against the North Carolina State Board of Elections, echoing the claims made by the Republican Party. The goal of this lawsuit is to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in future elections. The fact that North Carolina will feature marquee Senate and House midterm elections seems an unlikely coincidence.

When I founded Democracy Docket in 2020, the most important litigation involved efforts to make voting easier in the middle of a pandemic. Though the Republican Party opposed these efforts, the Department of Justice remained on the sideline.

When Joe Biden was elected, Republican legislatures responded in 2021 by enacting a slate of new voter suppression laws aimed at making voting more difficult, particularly for minority and young voters. While private litigants actively challenged these laws in court, the DOJ was more selective — in part, I suspect, because it wanted to avoid claims of partisanship in the cases it brought in the name of the United States.

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In the run up to the 2024 election, the Republican Party and a constellation of well-funded right-wing groups brought a barrage of litigation aimed at making it harder to vote and easier for election deniers to cheat. This new breed of cases was bolder and more consequential than what the GOP had advocated in the past. Luckily, they were mostly defeated.

One of which — the last one to be defeated from the 2024 election cycle — was the case brought by Republicans to overturn the results of a free and fair election in North Carolina. At the end of his term, Biden’s DOJ continued to stay out of such cases — even though it was clear what federal law and the Constitution required.

Whether that is described as a norm or a guardrail, it does not exist within the Department run by Pam Bondi. The Department of Justice’s flip-flop to the anti-voting side of the coin is consequential. Its adoption of an overt partisan agenda is potentially devastating.

Bill Barr, the Attorney General in Trump’s first term, was far from a folk hero for our democracy. Yes, he promoted baseless claims about the dangers of mail-in voting during the pandemic. Yes, Barr often liked to act as Trump’s personal lawyer. But he had a line he would not cross.

Barr refused to interfere in the vote counting and open bogus investigations to affect the results of the 2020 election. To this day, he refused to parrot Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.

Pam Bondi is another story. She is a Trump sycophant before she is Attorney General. With her at the helm of the DOJ, we must remain vigilant, and we should be concerned for democracy. 

Trump knows that the greatest threat to his power is a devastating loss in the midterm elections. He knows the best way to secure Republican victories is through voter suppression and election subversion.  

That’s why the Department of Justice’s recent lawsuit in North Carolina is of such concern. Lawsuits aimed at undermining free and fair elections are sadly not new. Those lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice are unprecedented. What used to be a stalwart fighter for American voters is now the right hand of a wannabe dictator who knows voter suppression is his best chance of his party retaining power in Congress.

Make no mistake, North Carolina is a test for a broader plan. They are seeing what works. They are seeing what sticks. They are seeing what they can get away with. With 2026 around the corner, we must prove that they cannot succeed in using the courts to undermine democracy.

Pro-democracy lawyers around the country have been gearing up for this moment, and we won’t be afraid or ill-prepared when we’re called up to battle.

As we defend our democracy against our own Department of Justice, I’m saddened for our country — but we cannot afford to run from this moment. Trump and his Republican sycophants will not back down until they have suppressed our voices and our ballots, and we cannot back down until we have protected free and fair elections.