The new top voting lawyer at the Department of Justice was until recently an attorney and activist for a leading anti-voting legal group that has worked for years to spread fear about illegal voting and press election officials to tighten voting rules.
The lawyer, Maureen Riordan, also has appeared with Cleta Mitchell — the right-wing activist who played a key role in President Donald Trump’s failed bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election — backing Mitchell’s pledge to “reclaim our election systems from the left.”
Riordan’s appointment, which has not been formally announced by the DOJ, underscores the sharp reverse the department and its voting section have undergone under Trump — from their previous role as a largely consistent defender of voting rights to instead working actively to undermine them.
A new lawsuit filed Tuesday by the DOJ against North Carolina lists several attorneys on the case, including Riordan, who is identified as “Acting Chief, Voting Section” – the unit tasked with enforcing the nation’s voting rights laws.
The lawsuit, which cites Trump’s March executive order intended to tighten voting rules, aims to require North Carolina to do more to collect missing information that’s required by law from people registering to vote. Historically, lawsuits filed by the Justice Department’s voting section have almost exclusively aimed to expand voting access, rather than to restrict it or enforce stricter rules.
Riordan spent nearly 17 years as a lawyer at the voting section, according to her LinkedIn bio. But from 2021 until this month, she served as litigation counsel at the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF)….