Trump escalates demands for 2020 election investigations and prosecutions [View all]

Source: Washington Post

November 2, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EST


President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections.

In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results. Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992.

Across the administration, though, officials have been more focused on forward-looking steps such as examining state voter rolls for people who have moved or aren’t citizens. Some officials are ready to move on from 2020 and want to avoid being called “election deniers,” a term for people who claimed without evidence that Trump beat Biden in the 2020 election.

But Trump and some allies inside and outside the administration won’t let go of allegations of widespread election fraud in 2020 even though courts have repeatedly rejected their theories. They argue that future elections can’t be secured without a full accounting of 2020.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/11/02/trump-escalates-demands-2020-election-probe-prosecutions/