U.S. President Donald Trump attends the commencement ceremony at West Point Military Academy in West Point, New York, U.S., May 24, 2025.
President Donald Trump has been desperate to find proof or justifications for his false claims about election fraud in 2020, but according to a new report from CNN, that push has already run headlong into "substantial roadblocks" within the Justice Department.
Trump has long insisted, with no meaningful evidence, that he only lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden due to widespread election fraud. Despite the fact that these claims have been thoroughly vetted and shot down in court numerous times, he has continued to insist that there was fraud, and demanded new investigations once he returned to the White House. As CNN noted in its Thursday report, he raised alarms earlier this year when he claimed out of nowhere that arrests connected to the nonexistent fraud were coming.
"When President Donald Trump promised, seemingly out of the blue, in late January that prosecutions would 'soon' be coming for 2020 election rigging, the Justice Department was already mobilizing an effort behind the scenes to build out a portfolio of cases that would boost the White House’s narrative," CNN detailed. "Since then, a rotating cast of attorneys — both political appointees and prosecutors — have attempted to carry out Trump’s wishes."
This new campaign to materialize evidence of Trump's claims has yet to pan out, with the report noting that "substantial roadblocks" have emerged, preventing the new investigations from finding "any information that would shake past authoritative findings that Trump’s loss in the 2020 election wasn’t fraudulent." The DOJ remains undeterred, though, engaging in "unprecedented actions to obtain ballots and other 2020 election materials," using tactics that courts have called "troubling" and "misleading" in order to get their way.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has insisted in interviews that there was "a ton of evidence that the election was rigged," while also hedging his bets and claiming that proving it would take a long time, asserting that "it takes a lot of work to uncover what happened in 2020."
As these efforts fail to turn up any new vast conspiracies, CNN reported that the DOJ has honed its focus to smaller cases.
"Absent any new cases suggesting massive fraud, the Justice Department’s election integrity efforts have now broadened to look at one-or two-person indictments for a small number of votes cast by non-citizen immigrants in past elections," CNN revealed, later adding, "Encountering hurdles in its reach-back to 2020 stolen election theories, the Trump administration is hyping smaller-scale fraud investigations — often concerning more recent elections — that have resulted in one-off charges. Multiple people familiar with the lower-level voter fraud cases now pursued by the Justice Department say they dust off minuscule numbers of votes, some regarding one or two people, from years ago in various states, and not all will result in charges."
The department has also run into the issue of timing, as many of the states they have attempted to dig into do not require election materials to be preserved for longer than two years, while "under federal criminal law, most [election-related] charges must be filed within five years of the vote, leaving investigators racing against time as potential evidence and opportunity slip away."
Tom Albus, "the top Trump-appointed prosecutor in St. Louis," was tapped to head up the DOJ's election fraud investigation initially, but became burnt out on the process, quietly departing after threatening to resign amid the legal challenge mounted against the seizure of election materials in Fulton County, Georgia.
The push to relitigate the 2020 election has also been spearheaded by Kurt Olsen, an election denier and an unprecedented White House appointee tasked with overseeing "election security and integrity."
"Olsen previously spearheaded lawsuits challenging the integrity of elections in Arizona and faced court sanctions for misrepresentations he made in that litigation," the report explained. "He was also involved in a Georgia lawsuit brought by election deniers, and his past legal efforts tie him to some of the witnesses the FBI relied on to justify the seizure of the Fulton County ballots... Olsen has become a central figure in the administration-wide effort to combat alleged voter fraud, acting as a liaison among the multiple agencies focusing on Trump’s hunt for fraud and with outside activists who have helped keep alive the election rigging theories."