The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon has become the latest symbol of the Trump administration's chaotic approach to election investigations after sending a records demand to the wrong office in her attempt to investigate Detroit's 2024 election results.
According to Talking Points Memo, the controversial Dhillon demanded that Wayne County's clerk provide records from the 2024 election, claiming the DOJ intended to investigate supposed fraud. However, she made a fundamental error: in Michigan, cities and townships run elections — not county clerks.
Local officials were "bemused" by the basic misunderstanding, the report notes, with Michael Siegrist, head of the association of Wayne County Clerks, ridiculing the bungled demand for information.
"You don't go to Taco Bell and try to order a hamburger. That's what they just did, which tells me they don't even understand what a taco is," he told TPM.
According to the report, the gaffe is in line with the broader Trump election investigations that includes the FBI executing search warrants at the Fulton County, Georgia elections hub, obtaining results from a discredited Arizona audit into 2020 election results, and reportedly investigating the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
What struck observers as particularly odd was that Dhillon's Wayne County demand focused on the 2024 election — an election Trump won in Michigan, TPM's Josh Kovensky and Khaya Himmelman wrote, considering that Trump prevailed statewide in 2024.
Chris Thomas, who ran Michigan elections for 36 years before retiring in 2017, expressed bewilderment at the DOJ's focus on 2024. "I would love for 'em to have 2024. Since 2020, our operations have improved dramatically," Thomas told TPM.
Thomas speculated the DOJ investigation may be connected to an aggressive public records lawsuit that resulted in election deniers obtaining images of Detroit's 2020 ballots. Those seeking the records have communicated with voter fraud activism nonprofit Michigan Fair Elections and the far-right conspiracy website Gateway Pundit.
Gateway Pundit announced in September that it had obtained nearly 1 million records from Detroit's 2020 election, featuring a splashy image of an operative posing outside a U-Haul filled with pallets and boxes. However, Thomas told TPM the records were actually received via thumb drive.
The report notes that Gateway Pundit filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April while embroiled in a defamation lawsuit from two Georgia election workers, and has been publishing the supposed "bombshell" findings of this ongoing ballot-combing investigation.