Harmeet Dhillon: Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights

Co-chair of “Lawyers for Trump,” on behalf of which she made frequent news appearances pushing false claims about the 2020 election.

Publicly called for a Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump to choose allegiance to him over the law and intervene to overturn his election loss.

Currently overseeing the aggressive push by Trump's Justice Department to intervene in state-level administration of the 2026 election, suing to demand that states turn over private voter information and announcing her intent to send federal election monitors to oversee primaries.

Presided over the Civil Rights Division's abandonment of its responsibility to protect minority voting rights.

Dhillon was one of the most visible legal advocates of the effort to overturn the 2020 election. She served as co-chair of “Lawyers for Trump,” a group the Trump campaign formed to “protect the integrity of the election,” and was a member of the campaign's legal advisory board. In that capacity she became one of the most visible on-air advocates for the campaign's challenges, making repeated news appearances pushing the claim that illegal ballots and unlawful procedural changes had tainted the outcome. She advanced claims that courts and reviews did not bear out, including over-the-top claims that a “wholesale ignoring of laws passed by legislatures” had changed outcomes in a few counties and thereby changed the national result.

In a November 2020 interview, discussing the campaign's hope that the courts would intervene, Dhillon said they were waiting for the Supreme Court to step in, adding that she hoped “Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up.” The remark drew heavy criticism for appearing to assume the justices' allegiance would run to the president who appointed them rather than to the law.

She has continued as one of the most active conservative election litigators, defending Trump in the 2023 Colorado ballot-disqualification case, where she publicly called the effort “the biggest election interference fraud in world history,” and running the Arizona Republican Party's “election integrity” operation in 2024.

Dhillon currently serves as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate over objections from civil rights organizations. She was praised by Trump on her nomination as “one of the top Election lawyers in the Country.”

Dhillon holds a specific federal lever that's highly relevant to election administration: control of the DOJ office that enforces voting law nationwide. She is already trying to use it to intervene in how states maintain their rolls and run their 2026 contests, launching an aggressive, election-focused campaign built around demanding states' voter data. The Division has sued at least 30 states for refusing to hand over unredacted statewide voter registration rolls but has gone 0-18 in rulings on the issue as of July 29. Dhillon also recently announced intentions to send election monitors into jurisdictions across several states for the 2026 primaries.

The Civil Rights Division is the federal government's primary enforcer of voting-rights statutes, and Dhillon has presided over the abandonment of its traditional responsibilities to protect minority voting rights. More than 200 former Division attorneys signed an open letter in December 2025 warning of the “near destruction” of the Division, citing pressure on staff to fit facts to predetermined outcomes, the dropping of lawsuits over voter suppression laws, and a focus on “fighting diversity initiatives instead of race-based discrimination.”