Trump and his appointees have gutted election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies.

FBI Director Kash Patel dismantled the agency’s public corruption team,
which had previously been deployed to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day.

The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded.

(An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

The voting section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved.

Trump then filled the section with conservative lawyers, including at least four who participated in challenging the 2020 vote
or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump has replaced ousted career specialists with “Team America.”

In the summer of 2025, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists,
a small group of political appointees
— which once called itself “Team America,”
— began convening at DHS headquarters,
looking for federal levers it could pull to realize a March 2025 executive order, in which Trump tried to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting.

Among the core members of the group was David Harvilicz,
a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure,
including voting machines,
and three of his top staffers.

As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about election hacking in Michigan.

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, is a source of the false claim that more ballots were cast in Pennsylvania than there were voters in the 2020 presidential election
— a claim Trump cited on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network,
a conservative grassroots organization led by Cleta Mitchell,
a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election.

Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-midterm-elections-takeover-takeaways