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A top Department of Justice official brushed off a lawsuit brought Tuesday by the Democratic National Committee over the administration’s work on election security, describing the suit as frivolous.
Civil Rights Division head Harmeet Dhillon mocked the legal challenge in an X post in response to Marc Elias, a prolific Democratic election lawyer, promoting it.
“Maybe we should all just file lawsuits demanding things we used to ask the tooth fairy for, shall we?” Dhillon said. “This is not how executive power works.”
Dhillon’s remarks came as her division and the Trump administration more broadly have ramped up their focus on election security, demanding voter roll data from states, launching investigations into past elections and pushing for passage of a voter ID bill.
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Democrats have accused the administration of also hiding information about alleged federal deployments at polling places. They cited White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying earlier this year that she could not rule out potential federal deployments, while she added that it’s “not something I’ve ever heard the president consider.”
The lawsuit, brought in Washington, D.C., seeks records from the DOJ, Department of Homeland Security and Department of War under the Freedom of Information Act about the possible deployments. DNC lawyers said their FOIA requests were triggered last year by “repeat threats to free and fair elections from President [Donald] Trump and his administration.”
The lawsuit was filed against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s intensifying focus on election security. The FBI has pursued expanded inquiries into the 2020 and 2024 elections in at least two battleground states, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and sought extensive voter registration records from state election officials, which critics have argued encroaches on states’ rights.
In a statement provided to Fox News Digital, the Republican National Committee said of the lawsuit that Democrats did not support “commonsense safeguards like voter ID.”
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“We’re surprised the DNC actually has any money to file a lawsuit,” RNC election integrity spokeswoman Ally Triolo said, adding that the DOJ was “simply doing its job to fix the election chaos that Democrats across the country have created.”
Triolo said the DNC was filing “fake, nonsensical lawsuits and grasping at straws, leaving only one explanation: they want to cheat in our elections.”
The DOJ is able to send federal officials to monitor polling places to check that federal voting laws are being followed, but concerns have mounted that the federal government will go beyond that. DHS, for instance, has shut down rumors that it would send immigration authorities to polling places.
In its complaint, the DNC alleged that it has “yet to receive a substantive response to any of the FOIA requests at issue,” despite deadlines passing. The DNC lawyers claimed the departments have “violated their duties … to conduct a reasonable search for responsive records [and] to take reasonable steps to release all nonexempt information.”
The lawsuit also referenced statements by Trump, including the president saying he “regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines” after the 2020 election.
The DNC asked the court to force departments to produce all the requested records, as well as to pay the organization back for legal fees.
Fox News Digital reached out to the DNC on Wednesday morning.
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