On Monday afternoon, an “election integrity” call organized by conservative podcaster Steve Stern featured a who’s who of election deniers rehashing years-old conspiracy theories about rigged elections and hijacked voting machines.
These kinds of calls have happened for years. But unlike similar calls I listened to in 2021 and 2022, which were filled with then-unknown activists mostly shouting into the void, this call was stacked with people who are alleged to have been part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. They claim to still have the ear of the president when it comes to trying to undermine democratic elections in the US.
And as Trump prepares to pick his next attorney general following his decision last week to fire Pam Bondi, some of these figures claim to have already weighed in.
A number of the speakers complained that for all the benefit of having Trump in office, the Department of Justice was dropping the ball when it comes to making real changes as to how elections are run in the country—a matter reserved, under the Constitution, for the states and Congress.
“The fact that this stuff isn't being investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent possible”—the “stuff” he was referencing were claims that voting machines were used to rig elections—“is deeply troubling to me, because it means that some folks on our side or purportedly on our side, are literally doing drop, block and tackle,” said John Eastman, the architect of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, who is now a senior fellow at the influential far-right Claremont Institute think tank, announced on Monday’s call.
Disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn agreed, adding, “We just wasted a year of not getting to what the Department of Justice should have been getting to,” before going on to refer to people in the agency as “Deep State goop.”
The DOJ has, in fact, been working hard to undermine trust in elections, filing dozens of lawsuits against states demanding they share unredacted voter rolls. It has also dismantled the hugely respected voting section within the Civil Rights Division, replacing experienced lawyers with Trump loyalists who have spread election conspiracies. Flynn was not alone in being unimpressed, though.
“Pam Bondi was terrible, no arrests of terrible Deep State and Democrat thieves, and frauds and traitors, no arrests of any kind,” said Wayne Root, a right-wing radio host who previously promoted the false conspiracy about former president Barack Obama’s birth certificate. “We’ve got to change that. I hope he comes up with the right attorney general. I've given him some good suggestions.” Root claimed he had urged the president to fire Bondi shortly before she was removed from office.
He also claimed during the call that he sent a text message to Trump last month urging him to sign an executive order on mail-in voting. A few days later, Root says, Trump signed the order. (Root would not tell WIRED if the president responded. “The President is the only one who decides if and when to sign an Executive Order,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson told WIRED.)
Root’s short list includes many of the favorites for the attorney general role, but all of those tipped to replace Bondi on a permanent basis have significant bona fides when it comes to promoting election denial conspiracy theories.
Todd Blanche, the current acting attorney general, is well versed in Trump’s claims about the rigged elections. Blanche, who served as Bondi’s deputy attorney general, was previously Trump’s personal lawyer and worked on teams defending the president from charges related to Stormy Daniels, the retention of classified documents, and federal election obstruction.
Blanche has also recently signaled that if he was appointed as attorney general on a permanent basis, he would have no problem deploying ICE agents to police the 2026 midterms.
“Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” said Blanche during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month. “Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.” Blanche has promoted the false claim that noncitizen voting was widespread and praised the efforts by the DOJ’s voting section of the Civil Rights Division to amass a national voter database, criticizing the judges and states pushing back against it. A study in 2017 found the number of noncitizens voting was vanishingly small, accounting for 0.0001 percent of the votes cast across a dozen states in 2016.
Lee Zeldin, the current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has also been named as a possible candidate for the full-time attorney general position, according to the New York Times.
Back in 2021, Zeldin was one of the House Republicans who voted against the certification of the presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Just hours after the Capitol riot on January 6, Zeldin maintained his support of Trump’s baseless election conspiracy theories. “This debate is necessary because rogue election officials, secretaries of state and courts circumvented state election laws," Zeldin said on the floor of the House in a speech opposing the certification of Arizona’s electoral votes. “These acts, among other issues, were unlawful and unconstitutional.”
Zeldin also signed an amicus curiae in support of a lawsuit filed by Trump’s legal team in the Supreme Court contesting Biden’s victory.
In 2022, Zeldin was involved in another election inquiry, when New York State's election board disqualified more than 13,000 signatures submitted by Zeldin's campaign for governor, citing that the majority of the petitions were duplicates. As a result, Zeldin could not run on multiple party lines in the election.
While Zeldin and Blanche are the clear front-runners for the position right now, there are some other figures still in the race, all of whom would likely be welcomed with open arms by the election deniers.
Jeanine Pirro, who is currently serving as the top federal prosecutor in DC, is best known as a former Fox News host who spread baseless conspiracies about the 2020 election. This resulted in Dominion Voting Systems citing her in the complaint for its defamation lawsuit against the network, which was ultimately settled for $787 million. (She was not a defendant in the lawsuit.) Pirro has also repeatedly defended the January 6 insurrectionists.
Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who is described by the Texas Tribune as the state’s “election denier in chief,” has also been floated as a possible attorney general. Paxton filed lawsuits seeking to overturn election results in four states in 2020, and Paxton continued his anti-voting agenda during the 2024 election by suing to stop an effort in Travis County to register new voters. More recently, he has been accused of targeting organizations that register Latino voters in Texas.
Another possible candidate is Senator Eric Schmitt, a former attorney general in Missouri who led an effort in 2020 to get Republican attorneys general to back Paxton’s Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to throw out the 2020 election results. Schmitt succeeded in getting 16 other Attorneys General to sign up. He has also been working closely with the White House to craft the anti-voting SAVE America Act, a piece of legislation which would disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans.
Utah Senator Mike Lee is another outside possibility for the job. Lee, who strongly supported the overturning of the 2020 election results, has also become a loud voice calling for the SAVE America Act.
Blanche, Zeldin, Pirro, Paxton, Schmitt, and Lee did not respond to a request for comment.
Joe Hoft, who writes for the conspiracy theory-filled Gateway Pundit, told listeners on Monday’s election integrity call that whoever gets the job will have to ensure Republicans win the 2026 midterms.
"It matters, because this first year is not satisfactory,” said Hoft. “We all want much more. And what we're learning is that we don't know if we're going to get it all fixed right now, but if we can win this election, then we can get stuff done. So everything, all our effort, needs to be on this election process.”
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