Last month, the DOJ left officials across the state of Michigan in a state of bewilderment.
Civil Division chief Harmeet Dhillon demanded the clerk of Wayne County, where Detroit is located, provide records from the 2024 election, saying the DOJ intended to investigate supposed fraud from that election in the state.
The reason for the letter didn’t surprise local and state officials. This is Trump II, after all: the FBI has executed search warrants at the Fulton County, Georgia elections hub and has obtained the results of a crackpot Arizona audit into the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. Other FBI agents are reportedly investigating the 2020 election in Wisconsin.
But what left Michigan officials surprised and bemused was that Dhillon had made a very basic mistake: she sent the letter to the wrong office. In Michigan, cities and townships run elections, not county clerks.
“You don’t go to Taco Bell and try to order a hamburger,” Michael Siegrist, head of the association of Wayne County Clerks, told TPM of the request. “That’s what they just did, which tells me they don’t even understand what a taco is.”
The letter raises a broader question.
The DOJ has been conducting criminal investigations across the country into the 2020 election. They’re being carried out with the help of various election conspiracy theorists who are now in positions of power in the government. Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier, has been working as White House election security czar. Heather Honey, another activist, has an election security role at DOJ. Clay Parikh, another special government employee involved in the Fulton County raid, told TPM that he believed he was fighting a “cabal.”
Yet the Wayne County demand was part of a civil probe, not into 2020, but into 2024. That struck many observers as odd: Given that Trump won the state in 2024, the election that year has received far less attention from the coterie of voter fraud alarmists and conspiracy theorists that dominate the still-ongoing world of Stop the Steal.
TPM spoke to several Michigan elections officials as well as to voter fraud alarmists still intent on proving that the 2020 election was stolen. Those activists are currently conducting what they describe as an “audit” of the 2020 results, using documents obtained last year from a massive FOIA lawsuit that sought copies of Detroit’s 2020 ballots and other records. Yehuda Miller, a New Jersey-based activist who has been involved in election denialism for the last several years, obtained hundreds of thousands of ballot images from the City of Detroit.
The question now on the minds of some Michigan elections officials is whether Miller’s “audit” — regardless of how baseless and misleading the results may be — will prompt federal action. And, whether the conclusions that Miller has drawn may have already made their way to the Trump DOJ.
The DOJ didn’t return TPM’s request for comment, and Miller declined to comment.
The DOJ and the Election Truthers
Chris Thomas ran elections for the state of Michigan for 36 years. After retiring in 2017, he decided to work as a consultant for the city of Detroit during the 2020 election. He soon found himself shooting down conspiracy theories; as votes were counted, he even encountered a mob seeking to stop the count.
Thomas told TPM that he’s mystified by the DOJ’s focus on 2024, though the letter to Wayne County will yield nothing. “I would love for ’em to have 2024,” he remarked. “Since 2020, our operations have improved dramatically.”
Thomas did have an idea of where the DOJ’s investigation may be headed. He argued that it may be linked to an ambitious public records lawsuit that resulted in election deniers obtaining images of Detroit’s 2020 ballots last year. Since then, those seeking the records have been in communication with a voter fraud alarmism nonprofit called Michigan Fair Elections and with the far-right, conspiracy theorist website Gateway Pundit, and say that they’ve enlisted dozens of volunteers to comb through the ballots.
To Thomas, it’s possible that the FOIA results are already in DOJ hands. It could explain the Civil Division’s focus on 2024, particularly if the DOJ already has records from 2020. In Arizona, the FBI did not receive ballots from election officials but instead obtained election records from the state Senate, which included the results of an audit, commissioned by the state legislature and conducted by a right-wing firm, the “Cyber Ninjas.” Thomas remarked that, in Michigan, the MIller’s “audit” could yield results that, while bogus to anyone familiar with election law, prompt some form of action from the DOJ. Alternatively, the DOJ could attempt to obtain the ballot images themselves.
In normal times, the “audit” itself — involving various volunteers handling images of ballots — might leave the records less than useful for the purposes of a criminal investigation.
“You give it to these people and they’ve got a hundred people working on it,” Thomas said. “I don’t think that stuff would stand up at all.”
While exposing records in a potential criminal case to random activists may not produce evidence that would hold up in court, these are not normal times.
Miller, the New Jersey activist, has spent years requesting election records via public records laws from various counties throughout the country. He has appeared, zelig-like, in the background of several high-profile incidents in the effort to attribute Trump’s 2020 loss to chimerical instances of voter fraud. At one point, he acted as a process server for former Overstock CEO and noted conspiracy theorist Patrick Byrne, handing the CEO of Dominion a subpoena in the voting machine company’s defamation suit against Byrne. WIRED reported in 2024 that Miller was working with a group helmed by Michael Flynn to spread baseless claims of election fraud; at one point, Miller appeared in a cybertruck to ask Elon Musk to use his engineering teams to exonerate Colorado clerk Tina Peters.
For activists like Miller, and for the Trump administration, Wayne County is a special place. It was a hotbed for election conspiracy theories in 2020. It’s no surprise because the county, which is Michigan’s most populous, was a definitive victory for Biden in 2020, with the Democrat winning more than 68 percent of the vote. The Trump campaign tried various strategies to stop certification of the county’s 2020 election results, citing baseless and many-times-debunked allegations of voter fraud.
Last year, Miller’s efforts in Michigan bore fruit. He filed a FOIA suit in 2023 asking the city of Detroit for copies of ballots and other records from the 2020 election, per a copy of the lawsuit obtained by TPM. Last summer, a court docket shows, Detroit settled on unclear terms.
Gateway Pundit announced in September that it had landed a “HUGE EXCLUSIVE.” Miller had obtained nearly 1 million records from Detroit’s 2020 election, the post said. It featured a splashy image of Miller beaming outside of a U-Haul full of palettes and boxes. It’s not clear what was inside the truck; Thomas told TPM that Miller received the FOIA results via thumb drive.
Gateway Pundit, which in April of last year filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy while embroiled in a defamation lawsuit from two Georgia election workers, has been publishing the supposed “bombshell” findings of this investigation.
In an article from earlier this month, Gateway Pundit wrote that Miller and his team were reviewing close to a million documents and reportedly found “a whopping 12.4% of the alleged absentee voters voted but don’t have any record of an acccompnaying [sic] envelope.”
“We will soon release the full, astounding discrepancy between the number of absentee ballots received versus the number of official absentee ballot envelopes submitted by the City of Detroit,” Gateway Pundit added.
Patrick Colbeck, an election conspiracy theorist and former GOP Michigan state senator, said in an interview with TPM that he was initially involved in Miller’s ongoing investigation as a way “to help everyone get organized.” He explained that he understood the investigation to be about verifying chain of custody in the 2020 election.
“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “You want to make sure that the voters that cast the ballot are actually eligible voters.”
Colbeck didn’t say whether Miller’s investigation is directly related to the DOJ’s investigation into the 2024 election in Wayne County, but posited that the DOJ is likely investigating the 2024 election because “they actually have a chance at getting those records.”
‘Sharing it With Everybody That I Know’
It’s unclear whether or not Miller is working directly with the DOJ. Colbeck wouldn’t answer the question directly, but did say that if Miller wasn’t, that Colbeck would share the findings of the investigation with the DOJ.
“I sure as heck am going to be sharing it with everybody that I know, and I’ve got a lot of contacts up in the DOJ,” he said. “Everything they share, I will make sure it gets to them [DOJ].”
What is clear, though, is that Miller has a large election denier network backing him.
Colbeck, who says that Miller is keeping him up to date on his findings, thinks that Miller has over a hundred volunteers who are going through these election records to look for “anomalies.” He alleged to TPM that the ballots’ chain of custody was broken in 2020, and that, in Wayne County, “71 percent of the 80 counting boards were not balanced,” which he said means “the number of voters did not equal the number of ballots.” This is a recycled conspiracy theory that has circulated in the MAGA universe for years following the 2020 election.
For Cobeck, it’s yet another episode in a six-year saga to prove something that he says he’s always felt certain about: that the 2020 election was stolen.
“No matter what they say, there is no lawful certification of the 2020 election,” Colbeck asserted. “I have proof of that.”
Podcaster, MAGA influencer, and former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon is among the many Trump-aligned figures who have celebrated Miller’s investigation. In an October 2025 episode of Bannon’s War Room podcast, Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft describedMiller’s work to Bannon, detailing the “discrepancies” Miller and his team had found.
Hoft told Bannon that Trump and the DOJ are “aware” of the investigation and that he believes they will “take some action.”
