Voting rights groups are concerned about priorities shifting under Trump’s Justice Department

ATLANTA (AP) — The Justice Department appears poised to take a very different approach to investigating voting and elections.

Conservative calls to overhaul the department by removing career employees, increasing federal voter fraud cases and investigating the 2020 election are raising concerns among voting rights groups about the future of the agency under Pam Bondi, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump who will face a confirmation vote later this week.

Bondi supported Trump’s legal efforts to overturn the 2020 Pennsylvania election results, has reiterated his false claims about his loss that year and during her Senate confirmation hearing refused to directly state that former President Joe Biden won, saying only that she accepted the results. She pledged to remain independent.

“Nobody should be prosecuted for political purposes,” Bondi told senators.

The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said after the hearing that he was struggling with Bondi’s responses to key questions.

“Pam Bondi has proved herself loyal to Donald Trump and wealthy special interests — and not the American people,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said in a Jan. 15 statement. “The American people deserve an attorney general who will protect their right to vote always, not only when it’s convenient or suits your political party.”

Bondi’s nomination is scheduled for a committee vote Wednesday. If confirmed to head the nation’s top law enforcement agency, Bondi could significantly alter how the department perceives voting rights violations. Project 2025, the governing blueprint conservatives wrote for an incoming Republican administration, provides clues on how that might look.

The Justice Department has historically targeted voter suppression efforts or state laws that could disenfranchise certain groups. But Project 2025’s authors view the agency as having “lost its way,” failing to investigate and prosecute election-related crimes such as voter fraud.

It says the department should have investigated election officials for actions taken during the 2020 election, even though there is no evidence of any widespread fraud and the results were confirmed through multiple recounts, reviews and audits.

The report calls out Pennsylvania’s former chief election official as someone who should have been investigated for potential violations of federal law and envisions the criminal division — rather than the department’s civil division — as handling prosecutions of election-related crimes. Courts across the nation, including in Pennsylvania, turned away dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump allies seeking to overturn the 2020 results.

During her Jan. 15 committee hearing, Bondi was asked whether she would uphold the nation’s voting and civil rights laws. She said she would, but the discussion quickly moved on.

Bondi, a former prosecutor twice elected Florida’s attorney general, also echoed claims by Trump and his allies that the Justice Department has been used for political purposes, pledging to end the “weaponization” of the department under Biden. That also is a key element of Project 2025.

On Monday, the department fired more than a dozen employees who worked on the criminal cases against Trump.

After the 2024 presidential election, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who previously advised Trump, called for a “reckoning” and said that “every lawyer in the voting section and likely in the in the Civil Rights Division needs to be terminated.” The division was created by Congress in 1957 to enforce federal civil rights laws.

“These are leftwing activists who have come from and should return to their leftwing organization,” Mitchell wrote in a Nov. 13 post on social media.

Legal experts said there are protections to prevent the dismissal of department employees without cause.

“Calling for terminations based on disagreeing with a legal approach or based on disagreements with enforcement choices — it is asking people to break the law, and that should be treated just as seriously as if they were asking DOJ to knock over a bank,” said Justin Levitt, a former department attorney and White House senior policy adviser under Biden.

Voting and legal experts have said the authors behind Project 2025 have a misunderstanding of the law and how the department operates. Adopting the report’s approach, experts said, would likely result in a decrease in enforcement of federal civil rights and voting laws and could drive career department employees to leave.

The Legal Defense Fund issued a report opposing Bondi’s nomination, saying she has worked “to undermine key protections for vulnerable and historically marginalized communities.” The group cited her involvement in drafting a rule in Florida that requires formerly incarcerated people to wait five years before they can ask to have their voting rights restored and in a Georgia lawsuit last year over whether a local official could refuse to certify an election.

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights also opposes Bondi’s nomination, writing a letter to senators that said Bondi’s “active participation in and support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election ought to be disqualifying in itself.”

One early test of how the department will approach voting rights is a lawsuit filed over the right of private citizens to sue under the Voting Rights Act. Most experts agreed it’s unlikely courts would set aside years of legal precedent if the incoming administration changed its position, but the change could send a troubling message nonetheless.

“It does give the impression that these legal positions are susceptible to changing quickly and easily from one administration to the next – and that’s not helpful in the long term,” said John Powers, a former senior analyst in the department’s civil rights division who later served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for the division.

Christina A. Cassidy, The Associated Press