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These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota\u2019s U.S. attorney\u2019s office, received an urgent email from Washington.<\/p>\n
The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump\u2019s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.<\/p>\n
Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn\u2019t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report \u2014 within hours.<\/p>\n
Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who\u2019d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.<\/p>\n
\u201cBottom line up front,\u201d he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating \u201ca complete lack of understanding\u201d of illegal voting investigations.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,\u201d Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been \u201cdysfunctional.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he\u2019s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.<\/p>\n