Failed Republican candidate gets quiet consolation prize at Trump's DOJ

Dan Bishop has been lucky enough to score several jobs in President Donald Trump's administration after he failed to win in a primary race and it isn't the first time.

Writing for the Rachel Maddow Show blog, producer Steve Benen noted Bishop was first hired after he gave up his North Carolina House seat to run for attorney general in the state. He lost. So the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) hired him.

After less than a year, he left OMB for a prime spot at the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina. After five months, he was shifted to another job: Winning Trump's 2020 campaign, in 2026.

Trump has spent the first part of the year revisiting the 2020 election, which he lost to President Joe Biden. In Fulton County, Georgia, the FBI seized ballots from the past election. In Maricopa County, Arizona, in early March, an FBI agent took more than three dozen hard drives and servers containing data from a partisan audit of the 2020 election from the state Senate building. The audit was done by the company "Cyber Ninjas" and lambasted by legal experts and watchdog groups as a "sham audit."

Benen cited the Wall Street Journal report, which cited Bishop's recent "quiet" appointment to the investigative team at the Justice Department.

"Attorney General Pam Bondi, last week, quietly authorized Dan Bishop, a U.S. attorney in North Carolina, to pursue election-related probes across the country, according to a copy of the order," the Journal cited. One DOJ official told the reporters that "Bishop, a former congressman who voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 win, will also examine voter-roll data the Justice Department has been collecting from states in an effort to determine whether noncitizens have illegally registered or cast ballots."

Benen wrote, "Given his record, it’s tough to be optimistic about Bishop overseeing these efforts in a detached and independent way."

The report indicated that "the lines have grown blurry," Benen said, when it comes to how the DOJ is being used to pursue 2020 election conspiracy theories. While Bishop is concerned, Benen, it's the combination of all of it that sent up the red flags.

"Making matters worse is the scope of the efforts. The Bishop news is important, but it dovetails with the president and his team seizing ballots and election records in Georgia and Arizona; seizing voting equipment in Puerto Rico; waging an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states where Democrats won; organizing an unnecessary FBI elections 'briefing' for state officials; and providing Kurt Olsen, one of Trump’s highly controversial former campaign lawyers, with classified information as he tried to advance election conspiracy theories," Benen explained.

While it's part of Trump's continued efforts to relitigate the 2020 election, it's also part of a larger campaign to restrict voting rights.

As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) explained it in 2020, “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again. President Trump should not concede. We’re down to less – 10,000 votes in Georgia. He’s going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more – more votes to be counted.”

Trump further commented in early March that passing voter restrictions “will guarantee the midterms."