A top official in President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently sought access to voting equipment used by two Republican clerks in Missouri during the 2020 election, an unusual request from federal officials amid continued efforts by the president to malign the integrity of the nation’s voting systems.
Trump overwhelmingly won each of his three elections in Missouri, yet many of his supporters there and elsewhere continue to champion the president’s false claim that voting equipment was rigged against him in 2020 and that ballots should be tallied by hand. The Trump administration, working with an intermediary, previously sought access to voting equipment in Colorado, but the effort in Missouri appears to originate directly from the Justice Department.
The two Missouri clerks rejected the request from Andrew “Mac” Warner, a top official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division and a former West Virginia secretary of state who has embraced false claims about the 2020 election. One of the clerks cited state statutes that restrict who can access voting equipment, and the other told Warner he no longer has the Dominion Voting Systems equipment he was looking for.
“They wanted to test a machine that was used during the 2020 election,” Jasper County Clerk Charlie Davis said in an interview last week with The Washington Post. “I just told him we upgraded our machines. Our vendor has all of the old machines so we don’t have access.”.
Days later, Davis got a call from his friend Jay Ashcroft, who oversaw the 2020 and 2024 elections as Missouri’s secretary of state. Ashcroft did not describe his interest in the machines, or whether he was working with federal authorities, Davis recalled. Ashcroft, the son of former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft, urged Davis to cooperate with the Justice Department and wondered if he would change his mindif he was given a replacement machine, according to Davis. Davis told him he no longer had the equipment….