Leah Feiger

But to put this all into a bit of context, the voting section is a really, really key part of the DOJ's civil rights division.

We don't talk about it a ton, and in some ways that's kind of the point.

The voting section has been described as the crown jewel of the division, and it was established following the Voting Rights Act to stop discrimination in voting.

So if you haven't heard of it before, the goal is that theoretically it's doing its job and it's working.

The lawyers who have worked there for years and years are all considered to be like the voting experts, the election experts in the country.

So to have had them all virtually ousted in the last 15 months is pretty shocking.

And to really understand how this dismantling took place, we have to go back to the 2020 election, where Trump really sought to weaponize the Justice Department, appointing special counsels to investigate election conspiracy theories.

But it didn't really work because officials of the department pushed back.

They threatened mass resignations.

Skip ahead a couple of years and Trump's efforts have been pretty successful.

In February of last year, now former Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a series of memos to the staff that called for DOJ lawyers to be zealously advocating for the president.

Staff called them the Bondi blasts and were like, this is spelling out the beginning of the end.

It's a good name.

Yeah.

Over the following months, this became even more clear.

In April, the Senate confirmed the appointment of Harmeet Dhillon as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division.

Dhillon has advocated for Trump in his claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

And she's also, since being appointed, pushed out senior leadership, including people who were there from the ANC.

You guys will enjoy this.

When the resignation program across the government last year was rolled out, offered to tens of thousands of federal workers during Doge, former section lawyers tell Wired that they thought that Dillon didn't think that resignations were happening quickly enough.