Trump's election fraud task force is going after the people who investigated him

washingtonpost.com

The White House task force that President Donald Trump charged with uncovering evidence of election fraud hasn’t produced any. Instead, it has shifted to releasing records that his administration is using to help build a public case against officials who investigated him. The president initially promoted the task force, led by pro-Trump journalist John Solomon, as part of a push to uncover election fraud. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. But more recently, the task force has been releasing law enforcement records from past investigations into Trump, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents after the end of his first term in early 2021. Trump allies and some of his political appointees view those materials as useful evidence in the ongoing Florida-based grand conspiracy case - the Justice Department’s most complex and ambitious effort to indict past administration officials who investigated Trump. Even with the fanfare around the release of the files, legal experts and former law enforcement officials said the records show investigators following normal, court-authorized procedures. Still, Trump and his most ardent allies, view the task force as a win. For years, they have complained that the intelligence community has worked to undermine Trump’s presidency and concealed materials related to investigations involving him. The Solomon task force was intended to address these complaints, bypassing the usual bureaucracy by giving the conservative journalist a direct channel to Trump, who has the authority to declassify materials. Some prosecutors on the grand conspiracy case are frustrated with how long it takes to obtain intelligence files related to their investigation and perceive Solomon as better equipped to access those documents quickly, according to two people familiar with the probe who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the case. The investigation in Florida has been hobbled by high-profile resignations from the prosecution team and struggles to build the evidence necessary to obtain indictments. Meanwhile, the White House has for months released records in batches through the task force during background press briefings at which officials have presented the documents as evidence of wrongdoing by Trump’s adversaries. The investigation is a priority for the president, who has publicly called for the Justice Department to indict his perceived political enemies, including Obama-era officials James R. Clapper Jr., who was the director of national intelligence, and John Brennan, who led the CIA. In recent weeks, the prosecutor appointed to head the investigation, Joseph diGenova, resigned amid pressure to bring indictments quickly, according to two people familiar with the personnel matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Solomon said the task force is separate from the Florida probe and is not communicating or working with prosecutors. That arrangement is intended to avoid the appearance of political interference, according to the two people familiar with the probe. Solomon, in an interview, contrasted his task force’s efforts with those of the Florida prosecutors. “They’re worried about the court of law, and what the president has created here is something that can serve the court of public opinion,” he said. “They’re two different courts, they are both important, and I think both can be achieved without interfering with the other, and so far I think we’ve straddled that line.” “This could be considered an overt act and an ongoing conspiracy,” an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive investigation, said of documents the White House released Sept. 9 concerning the FBI interview of then-national security adviser Michael Flynn in February 2017. “We think that’s significant and maybe at the heart of some of the things currently being investigated.” The legal theory underpinning the Florida probe is untested, and the investigation has produced many subpoenas but no indictments. Much of the investigation appears to rely on intelligence documents that date back nearly a decade, meaning the statute of limitations would normally bar the government from prosecuting any offenses involved in compiling them. But prosecutors are trying to prove that these materials were just one part of a long-running conspiracy by officials to deprive Trump of his rights, beginning with the Russia investigation during his first term and continuing through the investigation into his alleged retention of classified materials at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. DiGenova resigned last month, and another Trump loyalist, Kurt Olsen, left the team amid disagreements over how long the investigation was taking. Trump repeatedly expressed frustration with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s failure to prosecute his opponents before firing her in April. A previous reexamination of the 2016 Russia probe by the Justice Department inspector general found no evidence of anti-Trump bias. Another, led by special counsel John Durham, accused the FBI of moving too quickly and resulted in one guilty plea from an FBI lawyer and two acquittals. The White House releases have not significantly altered the public record. The documents include notes from that era, including Flynn’s FBI interview and records of a brief investigation into then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that Mueller’s team swiftly closed. The Flynn documents included handwritten notes and a summary of his FBI interview that led to charges of lying about a call with the Russian ambassador. (Flynn pleaded guilty but later tried to withdraw his plea, and Trump pardoned him.) The FBI’s summary was consistent with the allegations in the indictment. But the administration official said there could be discrepancies between the summary and the underlying notes. The Sessions records involved his interactions with the Russian ambassador, which got absorbed into the Mueller probe. The records showed investigators interviewed Sessions and immediately closed the file. The administration official said the investigation never should have been opened. On Friday, the task force took aim at Trump’s first impeachment by releasing State Department emails and memos between officials who testified in the House hearings. The documents involve concerns about the appearance of impropriety surrounding Hunter Biden’s work with a Ukrainian energy company, as those officials testified at the time. The task force moved to more recent history with its disclosures on Oct. 5: declassified records from the classified documents investigation in early 2023 showing the FBI monitoring calls to and from top Trump aide Susie Wiles, who is now the White House chief of staff. The monitoring, conducted with court approval and using a technique called a pen register, tracked phone numbers from Wiles’s calls but not their content. On Monday, the task force released the Smith team’s applications for court approval, which said Wiles’s calls could provide evidence of crimes such as lying or obstruction. The administration official portrayed the surveillance of Wiles as a violation of constitutional guarantees of free speech and the right to a lawyer. But Paul Cassell, a former federal judge who is now a law professor at the University of Utah, said pen registers are routine in criminal investigations. “To say this violates the Sixth Amendment would be going too far,” he said. “The questions that swirl around this really are not so much about pen registers as about whether targeting Trump and his lawyers and those who were surrounding him was legitimate.” Notwithstanding the change in focus, the task force’s documents are compiled on the White House’s website under the heading “election integrity.” Solomon, who does not have a security clearance and sees only the redacted versions of declassified documents, said that he is negotiating a dozen more releases with government agencies and expects the task force to wrap up its work in the late fall. So far, it has released 113 documents and 832 pages in 14 batches. “My goal in this is not to do anything except to be a neutral arbiter of releasing information to the public,” he said. “That would be a good epitaph on the tombstone of the project to say, hey, we learned a few things that we didn’t know.” Related Content This article originally appeared on Washington Post at https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/17/trumps-election-fraud-task-force-is-going-after-people-who-investigated-him/