A federal judge has been asked to force the Trump administration to reveal, less than 30 days before the midterm elections, documents that would “shed light” on details of an anticipated “unprecedented deployment of federal officials” at the polls.
The NAACP’s lawsuit, filed on Friday against the DOJ Civil Rights Division and its Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, argued there is an “urgent need for the Defendant to produce and release the records and information” about a plan to deploy “1,000 election monitors.”
The plaintiff alleged the Trump administration is “searching for evidence related to unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud” instead of “ensuring access for voters.”
“The actions of the current Civil Rights Division’s monitors have raised widespread concerns from state officials and voters. For example, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon described the Justice Department’s monitors’ behavior during his state’s primary elections as ‘aggressive’ and ‘irregular,’ and that the monitors’ behavior seemed to exceed what the authority that Congress had given them was,’” the complaint said. “There have been reported issues, too, of DOJ not providing notice and obtaining consent from state and local officials.”
“One DOJ ‘election monitor’ who was stationed in Minnesota, David Michael Levin, reportedly pleaded guilty in 2016 to illegally hacking a government election website in Florida as a part of a scheme to promote baseless claims regarding the ‘integrity of elections,’” court documents added.
Similar to a pending Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records, the newest case was initially assigned to U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan.
‘Urgent’ lawsuit aims to force Trump DOJ to reveal ‘plans’ for ‘unprecedented deployment’ of feds at polls with 1 month to go
