ProPublica Goes Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: More than six years later, President Trump continues to claim that he won the 2020 election and that voting was rigged. Since his second inauguration last year, Trump has introduced executive orders designed to change election rules, most recently proposing to create lists of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote and instructing the U.S. Postal Service to send mail ballots only to those featured on those lists. With upcoming midterm elections, many are concerned about election interference. ProPublica reporter Jen Fifield joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what the administration’s efforts could mean for voting access later this year.

 

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Jen Fifield, thanks so much for joining us. You have a recent piece out in ProPublica. It’s called “Inside Trump’s Effort to ‘Take Over’ the Midterm Elections.’ And you start with this meeting back in 2020 that included Attorney General William Barr — at the time — at the Justice Department. What was, what happened there? Why was it so pivotal?

 

JEN FIFIELD: Well, thanks so much for having me on. I think the reason we chose to focus on that, as you know, there were a lot of claims coming out in 2020. And Attorney General Bill Barr was facing all of those. Trump was telling him, you need to look into this, you need to look into this. And what we heard was he stood up to Trump eventually, and he resigned. But we didn’t know there was a bunch of staff that came together that told him how to stand up to Trump. That told him the election was fair. That told him they had researched this. And so we wanted to look at this one key meeting just before he resigned, where he met with staff, cybersecurity experts to talk about Antrim County, Michigan — this one contest where he felt like the election had been rigged against him — and how it was a pivotal moment in Attorney General Bill Barr deciding that he was going to go stand up against Trump. He went and he said, to his deputy at the time, I’m going to kamikaze myself into the White House. It was a — everyone in the room realized that at that moment, that was the end for his federal career.

 

SREENIVASAN: Wow. You know, your investigation takes a look at all of what we assume are the guardrails that were put in place as kind of a result of the 2020 election. What did you investigate? What did you find?

 

FIFIELD: So that team that came together in front of Barr, we started there. We looked at this Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a long way to say, this group that was put together after the 2017 election to protect elections by looking at cybersecurity threats across the country. This has never been an organized effort before 2017, and since then, it had built up into a very sophisticated mission. Now this was the group that met with Bill Barr. And then when Trump took office, this was one of the first teams that he dismantled. You know, he basically, there were more than 30 people working on this across the country. And now everyone has been reassigned to other projects. So there’s not that national look at election cybersecurity from within the Department of Homeland Security at this point. That was one team. We looked at many other teams, including in DOJ, the Department of Justice, that have been dismantled. And those people are now gone and not watching over elections.

 

SREENIVASAN: So how did this agency that he created turn out to become a top target of his? In a memo issued by the Trump administration in 2025, it said “CISA under Chris Kreb’s leadership suppressed conservative viewpoints under the guise of combating supposed disinformation and recruited and coerced major social media platforms to further its partisan mission…Similarly, Krebs, through CISA, falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.” Again, this was an organization set up by the Trump administration. So what happened? Why did he turn on it?

 

FIFIELD: So, under the Biden administration, after January 6th happened, and after social media companies started to begin to censor information on the internet, CISA would communicate with state officials if there was false information out there about elections. For some in the country, that was seen as censorship, as First Amendment problems. And so Trump, when he came in, he said, I don’t want any of that. Or — sorry, the Trump administration did. I don’t know that he said that himself. And so that team was not only doing that, and actually had backed away from that work after getting backlash about it. And so a few people were still left working on that. But this is 30 people that were working on other key projects like checking out voting machines, making sure that hacking doesn’t happen. So they were working on other projects, but they’re all now gone.

 

SREENIVASAN: And you focused on a couple of other groups as well, besides CISA. You said that the National Security Council’s Election Security group and the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and the DOJ’s Public Integrity section, these, at least, you know, these have been changed radically if they’re still around. Explain.

 

FIFIELD: So the intelligence agencies were taking a look at any kind of threats from foreign governments like China that might come in as an election approached, or during election, in which they, they could then respond quickly from a federal agency in a way that local governments can’t do if they see someone trying to hack into their system. They had that broad look at all of the threats and all the ways that people were trying to influence our elections, and they could respond quickly and then try to investigate. All of that has now at least changed, or a lot of it has been dismantled across the federal government.

 

SREENIVASAN: It — you also bring light to, you know, a group of political appointees who structurally were opposed to the results of the 2020 election in the first place, right? And where are they now? What they call themselves, kind of, “Team America.” Where are they now — what kinds of positions that they’re in — and what are they doing?

 

FIFIELD: So what was key to us was looking not just at the dismantling — which has been in the media a lot, how a lot of these people have left. A lot of people have left under new presidential administrations – that happens. We need to look at who’s in there now. And so we started to look at this team that has emerged within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, that’s working across government silos to try to fulfill Trump’s executive orders on elections. So they’re looking at things like how to see if there’s non-citizens on the voter rolls, as Trump has claimed for years that millions are voting in our elections. There’s never been proof that that’s actually true. But this team is focused on trying to seize state voter rolls, find tools to search those voter rolls, and that kind of work that’s trying to fulfill his mission.

 

SREENIVASAN: So is this basically a merger, or a takeover, of what we would consider the federal government’s efforts to make sure that there are free and fair elections by people who structurally feel like, well, they’re kind of election deniers of the 2020 side?

 

FIFIELD: So there’s two things going on. There’s one, this new push forward for the election executive orders, and there’s this other campaign going on to reinvestigate the 2020 election and past elections. We just recently saw that the Department of Justice request ballots from the 2024 election that Trump won in Michigan. And so they’re, they’re doing these two compartmentalized ideas where they’re looking back at these elections and trying to, you know, fulfill whatever Trump mission is in front of them. And so I think, you know, we’re trying to figure out — the White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, all say they’re doing it to uphold free and fair elections. But I think a lot of election experts are worried about their end game.

 

SREENIVASAN: So what is the end game that they’re worried about?

 

FIFIELD: They fear that if people are within the federal government working on this, say they seize voting machines. They already did in Puerto Rico. Say they continue to seize voting machines and they say there’s something wrong with the voting machines. We can’t use these in the upcoming election. While states and local governments have the ultimate authority over their election, that’s what’s courts have said. That’s what courts have defended. There’s still this worry that the American public then doesn’t trust what we’re using to conduct our elections going into this key midterm.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know the president has also called on the midterms to be nationalized. I guess explain what that means in practice and what is the response from local election officials?

 

FIFIELD: Well, as I talked about, state and local officials are used to working with the federal government. 

 

SREENIVASAN: Sure. 

 

FIFIELD: They run elections under the Constitution. That power is with the states. They’re used to working with the cybersecurity agency on elections, and now they’ve seen this turn where they’re getting subpoenas for their voter information or they’re getting their ballots seized, and they feel like the federal government is an adversary now and they’re kind of trying to war game out how to defend themselves now against the federal government.

 

SREENIVASAN: There’s also been this push to try to get voter rolls and kind of reexamine voter rolls, as you mentioned. The FBI, the Department of Justice have subpoenaed election records and voter data across the country in different places. The former Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a February 2026 statement, she said, “Accurate, well-maintained voter rolls are a requisite for the election integrity that the American people deserve. This latest series of litigation underscores that this Department of Justice is fulfilling its duty to ensure transparency, voter roll maintenance, and secure elections across the country.” That sounds reasonable. It sounds like something that people should want to make sure that people who are voting are citizens, right? 

 

FIFIELD: I agree. And all the county clerks, state clerks that work on elections agree with that idea. You should not have non-citizens voting in our elections. That dilutes the strength of the citizens that vote. What’s happening though, is the tool that they’ve chosen to use so far on this mission at the federal level, ProPublica has covered this tool. It’s called the SAVE tool, it’s incorrectly identifying people as non-citizens that are actually citizens. So, you know, it doesn’t, you know, if there is a tool that works great that identifies actual non-citizens on the voter rolls, we want to be using that. But that’s not so far what’s happening.

 

SREENIVASAN: Jen, the president hired an attorney named Kurt Olsen as his director of election security. Tell us a little bit about Olsen and his past involvement in challenging the 2020 results.

 

FIFIELD: Sure. So Kurt Olsen emerged in the key 2020 post-election period when Trump was getting all of this information from lawyers who felt like there were legal strategies to try to overturn the 2020 election results in his favor. Now he’s been appointed into the White House as a special counsel to look — reinvestigate 2020. One of the actions that we uncovered in our reporting was that in the recent FBI raid in Georgia for their 2020 ballots, he was heavily involved. He went down and try, attempted to influence the U.S. attorney’s office there to try to get a search warrant for these ballots. And when top official in that office was unwilling to write the sort of memo that they had asked for, that person was then asked to either retire or resign. And that person did retire and the warrant went forward under a different official then. So we saw a direct influence from the White House coming through to law enforcement, which many people, many experts, told us would not have happened if teams like the Public Integrity Section were still around in the Department of Justice.

 

SREENIVASAN: What did he say, or did he respond, when you asked him for comment?

 

FIFIELD: The FBI responded and said that everything that they’ve done has been under the law and that they’re following all laws when they’re doing these enforcement actions regarding the elections.

 

SREENIVASAN: Tell me a little bit about, you know, look, everything around the news cycle these days is about AI, especially when it comes to misinformation and deepfakes and disinformation. And I wonder, heading into this election, heading into future ones, what safeguards, if any, do we have in place to try to prevent this and the influence that they might have on elections?

 

FIFIELD: Well, like I said, it’s all up to the state and local governments to figure out how to best secure their elections. I think we’re seeing an even increased mission across the country as people try — as state officials try to figure out how to do, go at this alone. There’s new groups emerging to try to help replace what CISA used to do for cybersecurity. So there are efforts underway to try to ensure that whatever comes this November they’re ready.

 

SREENIVASAN: There also seems to be a different type of, kind of, understanding of what the courts say in response to the president’s executive orders and what the executive orders are trying to do, and what his administration is trying to do, right? So I guess if you could lay out some of the executive orders that the administration has put out when it comes to elections, what the courts have said and how they’ve pushed back, but what some of his political appointees are doing anyway.

 

FIFIELD: So the first election executive order came out in March of last year. And this looked at two main things. One was making sure that non-citizens don’t vote by trying to change a federal form for registering to vote, by putting something on the form to say, I’m going to prove my citizenship now. I’m going to give you documents to prove that. That has been shut down by the courts so far. Courts have said, You cannot control that portion of elections. This is not your role as the president. Congress can pass a law to change the form to make it so we prove our citizenship. Right now we just have to attest to it. We just have to say, I am a citizen to vote. So that’s one thing. 

 

He also tried to change barcodes on voting systems so that you’re only voting on a paper ballot that doesn’t have any kind of barcode coding your vote. There’s some security concerns around that, real concern, security concerns. There’s also some wide misinformation about what that can lead to. And so the courts have also blocked that part. 

 

Now we have this new executive order that just came out recently that says, for mail-in voting, the U.S. Postal Service is going to be able to decide and put together voter lists for who is eligible to cast a mail-in vote — ballot. Now, this is something that is definitely controlled by the states. They ask voters to send in a notice if they’d like to vote by mail, a lot of them. And once that’s decided, they’re on them voting by mail list. So this is another attempt. We’re already seeing challenges in court.

 

SREENIVASAN: We’ve had at least a tradition, if not a set of norms, that say that law enforcement doesn’t come necessarily near the polls, right, to not be an intimidating force. What happens if there are places where ICE troops or troops, ICE officers, are near polling areas in specific counties or specific jurisdictions where they think, okay, this is gonna be a place to catch people who are undocumented. But does that create any kind of an other unintended effect or intended effect?

 

FIFIELD: It absolutely does. We know that federal law prohibits law enforcement from being around polling places. What we see here is Attorney, the Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has said he doesn’t see the concern of having ICE agents around polling places. Because if you’re not a citizen, you shouldn’t be voting. So why are you concerned? But we know that there’s an intimidation factor that comes in certain communities, specifically minority communities, that see law enforcement at polling places as a threat or as something to stay away from, that could very much factor into who shows up at the polls. And so what we’re seeing is Attorney Generals —  I mentioned war gaming — talking about what happens, how do we respond if certain scenarios like this happen in November? And so we’ll have to see how all of that plays out. But I think there is real concern about voter intimidation.

 

SREENIVASAN: You know, put this in perspective if you can, from the experts that you’ve spoken to who’ve watched elections. You know, a lot of times the strategy to winning elections is to make sure that your team comes out to vote and make sure the other team has a hard time getting there, or a hard time having their votes counted. Have we seen anything like this on a structural level from the federal government or elsewhere, to try to change so many rules in such a short period of time?

 

FIFIELD: Well, of course there was the Civil Rights Act is in place for a reason. If we go back in our history, there’s been times where certain groups have been disenfranchised, specifically minority voters, in different ways. When it was all in-person voting, there were attempts to shift locations throughout the, your area to make sure someone can’t vote. There’s gerrymandering that happens that dilutes votes. So there’s always been attempts to do this. And I think that this is different from that, because you have the president dictating it now. You have someone who’s in power who’s not saying, okay, Congress is going to do this. The state legislature is going to set your lines. The local county is going to decide where you vote. It’s coming from the top down now.

 

SREENIVASAN: ProPublica reporter Jen Fifield, thanks so much.

 

FIFIELD: Thank you so much.