By Katie Paul
NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) – Michigan officials on Sunday pushed back on a U.S. Department of Justice demand for Detroit-area ballots and other materials related to the 2024 election, accusing the Trump administration of trying to cast doubt on the integrity of U.S. elections.
The Justice Department last week sent a letter demanding ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes to the clerk in Wayne County, home to the heavily Democratic-leaning city of Detroit, according to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.
Nessel’s office released the DOJ’s letter, authored by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, along with a reply vowing to fight the request.
“This request is as absurd as it is baseless,” Nessel said in a joint statement with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.
“If this administration wants to bring this circus to our state, my office is prepared to protect the people’s right to vote.”
Nessel, Whitmer and Benson are Democrats. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has long pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread voter fraud. Dhillon’s letter focuses on 2024’s elections, arguing they too need scrutiny.
But the 2020 election remains a prominent concern for many Trump administration officials. In an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” program, FBI Director Kash Patel pledged that arrests over alleged 2020 election issues are “coming soon.”
On the same TV show, Dhillon touted the administration’s efforts to get states to provide access to voter registration lists, saying the department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal of access to voter rolls.
DOJ staffers so far have reviewed 60 million voter records and found they included the names of 350,000 dead persons, said Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division. She did not provide any evidence that votes were cast for those names.
In addition, about 25,000 people who lacked proof of citizenship were referred to the Department of Homeland Security “to dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted,” she said.
The Justice Department has suffered multiple legal setbacks in its pursuit of election-related records, with judges ruling against requests in Rhode Island, California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Oregon.
A federal judge on Friday rejected the Justice Department’s bid to force Rhode Island to turn over non-public data on nearly 750,000 registered voters so the Trump administration could probe “election integrity” in the Democratic-led state.
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Sergio Non and Lincoln Feast.)
