Maureen S. Riordan is the Senior Counsel, and Acting Chief of the Voting Section, part of the Civil Rights division of the Department of Justice. She was appointed to that role in May 2025.
She is the top elections enforcement official in the Civil Division at the Trump/Bondi Department of Justice.
She has spent nearly her entire professional career at the Department of Justice. Lawyers close to the Department of Justice tell the Gateway Pundit that she’s now the “top dog” for election crimes.
From 2021-2025, Riordan worked for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which sues states to clean up their voter files. She spent a year in Charlottesville, Virginia filing less than a dozen cases against illegal immigrants for the government. She also prosecuted a man in Virginia for possession of marijuana in the Shenandoah National Park.
This past week, Riordan, according to DOJ sources, has been giving talking points as to why election crimes will not be prosecuted under the second Trump administration. DC Attorneys involved have relayed what Riordan is telling people around town: actual election integrity is impossible.
Trump last week said he wants a ‘special prosecutor’ to investigate the 2020 election. That may be the only way the crimes of the systemic voter fraud documented across the country, will ever be prosecuted due to deep state agents still in power at the Justice Department.
Riordan’s two main excuses for not prosecuting these crimes herself are obviously lies. She has told attorneys that she lacks data analysts and doesn’t have “a data guy” to review election data for irregularities and systemic fraud, and that loopholes in current law prevent her from investigating voter fraud anyway.
This is the reason, she says, why she cannot prosecute the obvious systemic voter fraud documented in states like Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan.
Riordan complains that she has “no data people” that she has access to, so she can’t effectively investigate election fraud from 2020 or 2024.
Lamenting what she said was the lack of “a data guy” she says she can’t review the assembled evidence of voting irregularities. Riordan, the ‘top dog’ in the Department of Justice, cannot investigate voter fraud because she cannot meaningfully review the election data which might reveal where the fraud occurred.
Bill Bruch, who publishes a popular Substack on election integrity efforts in Washington State, “All Things Politics,” told the Gateway Pundit in response: “It’s concerning to hear that the Department of Justice doesn’t have a ‘data guy’ especially when I have five great ones, and IT specialists focused on election integrity whom I have worked with for years, that I could refer to them if DOJ asked. There are a lot of great expert people doing this work as volunteers, with solid resumes and credentials. I just can’t imagine that the nation’s central law enforcement agency can’t figure this out. Washington State was one of the first to use vote-by-mail, so we have seen the many methods they have used to cheat elections.”
Luckily for Riordan though, the Gateway Pundit has done her work for her, and can point her to the many data analysts nationwide who could assist her in this effort.
In fact, most of the data analysis has already been done. She doesn’t even need her own ‘data guy.’
The Gateway Pundit has years worth of archives that she could peruse that could give her the legal ‘reasonable grounds’ to open an investigation. The ‘reasonable grounds’ standard is the most common threshold for opening civil investigations, lower than “probable cause” which is the criminal standard, and similar to a “credible allegation” or “factual basis” suggesting a legal violation.
The Gateway Pundit also conducted an interview alongside another group in the fall of 2024 with Tom Davis, a retired Michigan data analyst who wrote a report on data irregularities in the 2020 election along with John Droz. The review of this data shows impossible irregularities in absentee ballot data where there is a correlation between the percentage of the vote that Republican and Democrat candidates receive from absentee ballots, by precinct.
The full interview with “data guy” Tom Davis is below.
John Droz also wrote data reports along with many other ‘data guys’ of which Tom Davis was one, after the 2020 elections looking into voting irregularities in swing states. His reports have never been challenged.
Riordan also claims that the Help American Vote Act (“HAVA”) of 2002 is essentially without any effective enforcement sections, rendering her impotent to bring cases about voter fraud. She claims that her only power to enforce the law rests in TItle three of the act.
Title III sets mandatory requirements for voting systems, provisional ballots, and centralized voter registration databases, and under Section 209 of HAVA, the Attorney General has the authority to bring civil actions in federal court to ensure state compliance. These lawsuits typically seek declaratory or injunctive relief to force states to correct deficiencies—such as failing to implement accessible voting machines, mishandling provisional ballots, or neglecting to establish a statewide voter database. Unlike private individuals, who must follow the more limited and procedural pathways outlined in Title IV, the DOJ can act directly to compel corrective action, often through consent decrees or court orders. This enforcement mechanism allows the federal government to maintain baseline election integrity and uniformity across states that accept HAVA funding.
DOJ sources tell the Gateway Pundit that in meetings, Riordan also deflects responsibility to prominent DOJ officials Ed Martin and Mack Warner. Martin and Warner, election integrity advocates suspect, are being set up to be the public face of fighting for election integrity, and are being set up to fail. The actual deep state complex within ‘main Justice’, which is what the Department of Justice calls itself, the deep state actually in control of the machinery of the Department are completely disinterested in pursuing the credible claims of voter fraud.
Even though this week the Gateway Pundit released a powerful exclusive that Chinese whistleblowers have pictures of Communist agents printing faked absentee American ballots and putting them into the U.S. mail.
To Riordan, she does not see that these things rise to the point of even opening an investigation.
For support, Riordan relies on the enforcement sections of HAVA, where she points out that Title 4 of HAVA has been gutted by the courts, and that Title 3 is the only section that offers any potential enforcement provision.
But, Riordan privately believes the statute of limitations is likely to run out on most voter fraud cases, specifically referencing the Muskegon, Michigan incident.
In October 2020, GBI Strategies was caught trying to fraudulently register 12,000 voters in one day in Muskegon, Michigan. Further stories emerged that clerks from around Michigan had a private Facebook group where they talked about ‘care packages’ coming from hotel addresses where GBI Strategies was operating. An unknown number of false voter registrations were likely never caught and the cover-up on this has been relatively in the open.
The local police investigated and their investigation was taken over by the Michigan State Police. The Michigan State Police investigated and, the public was told, the investigation was handed off to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Michigan Attorney General said that the case was handed off to the FBI at a press conference. But later, it emerged that it may never have been handed off and, instead, the FBI was merely investigating a related crime, but never officially opened a Muskegon investigation.
What election integrity champions fear is that the various law enforcement authorities are simply ‘running out the clock’ on the five-year statute of limitations to allow these election crimes to go unprosecuted.
DOJ sources say the Muskegon criminal case is likely to die this year unless it was prosecuted, and note Riordan is aware of both the allegations, and the pending expiration of the time to prosecute the crimes.
This was depressing news to election integrity champion Chris Kaijala, who believes he was cheated out of a County Commissioner and who has been documenting Muskegon County voter fraud for years. “I can’t believe that a case which has over 10,000 possible felonies, wouldn’t be aggressively followed up on. This story, to me, has everything to do with whether the Republican Party can win in this County, and frankly, this Country. How is it possible that 10,000 felonies from false registrations can’t be pursued by the DOJ? It just blows my mind.”
“People in Muskegon want this done, we don’t have any legal help, the Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel is hostile to us, our County Prosecutor is working directly for the Secretary of State, we have no protection, there’s no fairness. so I don’t know who else we’re supposed to help us. How many election felonies do you have to have before the DOJ will investigate? The locals defer to the state, and the state defers to the feds, and now the feds are blaming this for their inaction?”
DOJ also has a criminal section, the “Election Crimes Branch” of the “Public Integrity Section” of the Department of Justice. This office could be hunting down and rooting out election fraud. This office is also the hyper-politicized department that became the attack dogs for the Obama/Biden regime who went after and jailed conservative leaders. One victim of the department was Sen. Ted Stevens in 2009, who died before he could be fully exonerated by a DOJ that coerced false testimony against him, and who flew out witnesses who could exonerate him. The attorney involved with the Stevens persecution committed suicide when his crimes were brought to light.
The Bill Barr DOJ appointed Robert Heberle as the head of the branch in 2020 to investigate 2020 voter fraud, which the Gateway Pundit exclusively warned the public that “the fix was in” because Heberle had been tied to politicized persecutions of conservatives previously.
Heberle resigned from the Department of Justice in disgrace this past February.
The Department had no problem or hesitation in inventing new crimes to use against January 6th protesters. It had no problem with data analysis on massive data dumps in order to capture phone records, texts, private Signal threads, when it came to arresting thousands of pro-Trump protesters who cared about election integrity and fair elections.
The DOJ was even the recipient of the entire archive of those who interacted with Trump’s account in the past, so that it could sort out whom to persecute.
The federal government, as part of the Biden Censorship Complex still being litigated as part of the Missouri v. Biden federal censorship suit, where Gateway Pundit Publisher Jim Hoft is the lead Plaintiff, had no problem flagging hundreds of thousands of individual social media posts that were critical of the false COVID narrative, critical of vaccines, or which mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop. The government and the Department of Justice had no problem handling large data sets in the recent past when it came to the actual Department priorities of prosecuting their political opponents for made-up political crimes.
Thousands of activists across the country have been defamed, persecuted, prosecuted, and harassed because they believed in, spoke up about, and work for election integrity. This decision by the Trump/Bondi Department of Justice signals that no enforcement work will ever happen, as the various statutes of limitations are about to expire at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Trump electors nationwide were prosecuted for hesitating to certify the obviously fraudulent 2020 election. Election integrity lawyers were disbarred and sanctioned by courts. The persecution against the 2020 Trump electors is still ongoing in Michigan in both civil and criminal courts.
Team Biden pushed prosecutions and lawfare even when the facts weren’t on their side. Team Trump, so far, has been reluctant to prosecute a single person even when the facts are obvious and glaring as to their criminality.
Already, Attorney General Bondi and FBI Director Patel, and Deputy Director Bongino, have taken significant criticism and scrutiny for their abject failures at releasing the suppressed documents related to the JFK Assassination and the Jeffrey Epstein murder investigation. This betrayal on election integrity is likely to simply be the latest chapter of the story of the ultimate victory of the deep state, and the inability of the White House and the Trump team to effectively deliver on his repeated campaign promises to free these files, and investigate voter fraud.
Bill Bruch noted that many election integrity champions face lawfare from local authorities, while receiving little support from Washington, “It’s gotten so bad in Washington State, left-wing legislators in Olympia are even trying to criminalize things like voter roll challenges and citizen initiative petition signature gatherers by making it a felony if they deem that you did anything wrong. Many election integrity advocates are volunteers simply trying to help our auditors clean up the voting rolls. Our left-wing legislators have no problem inventing new laws or reinterpreting existing laws to try to outlaw election integrity. Instead of helping with the cause and improving things, they’re trying to imprison us. So it’s very disappointing and troubling to hear that some in DOJ leadership won’t stand up to fight for election integrity and voter fraud.”
Over email, a Department of Justice spokesperson denied these claims. They said, “The Civil Rights Division has and will continue to aggressively pursue enforcement of various federal elections statutes. Election integrity is essential to our democracy and this Department of Justice will vigorously protect the safety and security of our elections in court.”
The post Bondi DOJ Claims it Cannot Enforce Voter Fraud Crimes because it lacks Powers, Doesn’t Have a ‘Data Guy’ appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.