DOJ Deputy's Lieutenant Warns Prosecutors: Pursue Election Fraud Cases DHS Brings You, Or Risk Firing

Federal prosecutors have spent the past several weeks announcing a steady drumbeat of election fraud cases across the country. Now comes a report about pressure inside the Justice Department itself over how those cases get chosen.

What Singh Reportedly Said

Aakash Singh, the top lieutenant to the deputy attorney general, told supervisors on a standing weekly conference call in the past week that Justice Department lawyers must pursue election fraud cases brought to them by the FBI or Department of Homeland Security, according to two people with knowledge of the call who spoke to MS NOW's Carol Leonig and Ken Dilanian. Those people said Singh warned that prosecutors who decline could be fired, and that the FBI or DHS can overrule a prosecutor's decision not to move forward, with the deputy attorney general's office making the final call.

That instruction, if accurate, would upend a longstanding Justice Department norm: prosecutors, not investigators, are supposed to independently judge whether evidence meets the legal bar for charges. Ryan Crosswell, a former prosecutor in the department's now-dismantled Public Integrity Section, called the reported directive "outrageous" if true, telling MS NOW that "it is the prosecutor — the expert on the criminal law and the expert on whether the facts satisfy the elements of the crime — that has to make this decision."

DOJ spokesperson Emily Covington denied Singh threatened anyone's job. "He never said anyone would be fired," Covington said in a statement. "The Department has been very clear that election integrity is a priority. This is not a partisan issue. Only those who are allowed to vote should be voting in our elections. If you break the law, you will be charged accordingly."

The account has not been independently corroborated beyond the two anonymous sources cited by MS NOW, and no recording or transcript of the call has surfaced publicly.

The Cases Actually on the Books

Whatever pressure exists internally, the prosecutions themselves are real and documented. In Louisiana, former mayoral candidate Bridget Johnson is charged with fraudulently registering Jamaican national Michael Wedderburn to vote, an act prosecutors say let him cast ballots in both the 2024 federal election and the mayoral race Johnson was running in, according to court documents cited by Fox News. In Kansas, Peruvian national and permanent resident Mariana Alexandra Dewey, 24, is charged with voting in a federal election after allegedly falsely claiming citizenship on her 2024 registration, per the Epoch Times.

In California, James Brass, Courtney Price and Jateisha Herron face conspiracy and identity fraud charges for allegedly paying people on Los Angeles's Skid Row to sign ballot petitions using stolen identities of registered voters, part of a scheme the Justice Department says netted Brass roughly $41,600 from petition coordinators, according to the Epoch Times.

Separately, Russian national Dmitry Shushlebin was sentenced on Wednesday to six years in prison and ordered to pay $458,839.69 in restitution for orchestrating a scheme that submitted more than 100 fraudulent voter registrations in Pinellas County, Florida, using synthetic identities also used for credit card and loan fraud, the Daily Signal reported, citing Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva and U.S. Attorney Gregory W. Kehoe.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said individuals "gaming the election system, voting illegally or committing voter fraud" will face prosecution, and White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital that "the evidence of noncitizens registering and voting in our elections continues to pile up."

The Prevention Argument

A Daily Wire opinion piece raises a separate and more structural concern: prosecuting individual cases after the fact does nothing to fix the registration systems that let ineligible voters through in the first place. The piece points to New Jersey, where state officials disclosed that roughly 6,600 noncitizens were registered to vote and nearly 400 cast ballots, many after identifying themselves as noncitizens during motor vehicle transactions but ending up on the rolls anyway. It also cites a separate federal case against Mercedes Alexandra Cardoso, accused of falsely certifying citizenship through New Jersey's online registration system before voting in the June 2024 primary, plus similar charges in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Daily Wire's framing argues these prosecutions, spread across three states, show a real vulnerability rather than proving noncitizen voting is rampant. That differs from the White House's framing that evidence "continues to pile up," and from MS NOW's separate reporting that a broader DHS effort to hunt for noncitizen voters across nine targeted states has so far "amounted to little evidence of fraud or crime" in that specific sweep, a claim distinct from the individually charged cases above.

Nobody has publicly named a prosecutor who was fired or disciplined for declining an FBI or DHS-referred election case. Whether Singh's reported directive gets tested in that way, and whether Congress or department watchdogs seek more detail on the call, remains an open question heading into the midterms.