Warner, Who Said CIA Stole Election, Now Leads DOJ Civil Rights

The Justice Department has inserted Mac Warner, who last year espoused false claims that the CIA stole Trump’s 2020 presidential victory with the FBI’s help, to run the civil rights division, replacing an ousted career official who’s started reporting to the new sanctuary cities office.

Warner, West Virginia’s former secretary of state, embraced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election while running in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary.

Warner told DOJ civil rights staff Monday that he’s assumed control of the division, according to an email obtained by Bloomberg Law. He’ll function as the top official until Harmeet Dhillon, another 2020 election denier who Trump selected to lead the anti-discrimination enforcement office, wins Senate confirmation.

Warner’s oversight of a division bracing for a dramatic shift in priorities, coincides with former acting head Kathleen Wolfe’s departure to a DOJ sanctuary cities initiative that she and three other career civil rights supervisors were forced by the Trump administration to accept if they wanted to keep their jobs.

In 2017, when Warner, a former US Army attorney, previously began a new leadership role—his first of two terms as West Virginia’s chief elections officer—he quickly fired 16 employees. His dismissals of mostly registered Democrats ended up costing state taxpayers more than $3 million in wrongful termination settlements.

Warner is now joined in the civil rights front office by Michael Gates, a Trump loyalist who’s spent the past decade as the elected city attorney for Huntington Beach, California. Gates, like Warner, has battled Democrats on voter identification and other election policies. He’s serving as the deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division, Warner’s Monday email said.

The division’s voting section has jurisdiction over suing states and localities for racially discriminatory election laws. It also conducts investigations of hate crimes and police misconduct, and is expected to take the lead in advancing the Trump administration’s efforts to curb diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.

DOJ civil rights attorneys were ordered to halt litigating new cases in the Trump administration’s first week. The new political leadership could lead to further indicators of how the office will be overhauled under Trump.

Different Approaches

Warner informed employees he’d have review responsibility over the division’s voting, education, disability rights, and policy sections, while Gates will handle appellate, employment, housing, and immigration.

Despite his more recent debate stage rhetoric about the 2020 election, he was once known as a more mainstream figure in the voting rights community, said Justin Levitt, a civil rights division official in the Obama administration.

“He’s got an awful lot of experience in this particular zone” of voting rights, said Levitt, now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “What you’re likely to see out of the civil rights division I think depends on which Mac Warner you get.”

“The Secretary Warner who was running for governor I think found himself far more prone to conspiracy theory, far less attuned to actual fact,” Levitt added.