Things are really heating up. Have you seen all the news this week? If not, take a minute to go back and check out all of our reporting. There’s more coming later today. For now, you know what I’m going to ask: Choose a paid subscription (with a 40 percent discount here) or buy us a coffee to support our work reporting on election interference efforts across the country. You’ll be glad you did because you’ll be supporting reporting that finds troubling stories like this one. Thanks. - jg
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On Sept. 20, the Justice Department responded to allegations contained in a Democratic National Committee lawsuit that the agency was planning to seize ballots in November. The DOJ then said it would need until just a few days before Election Day to respond.
A federal judge apparently told the DOJ their request was denied, and gave the agency a much tighter deadline. On Monday, the DOJ filed its response to the DNC lawsuit. In non-lawyer terms, the DOJ’s response can be summed up in three words: Go fuck yourself.
The DNC had provided several examples that gave background to their demands for information regarding ballot seizures — information that is behind the closed doors of the agency, and that the DNC is trying to obtain via Freedom of Information Act requests.
The DNC noted that Donald Trump said in January that he regretted not seizing voting machines in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election. Also noted were routine threats of arrests of state and local election officials from members of the Trump administration. Finally, the DNC went into great detail describing the dismissal of “guardrails against ballot seizures,” as the DOJ itself termed the guidelines regarding election investigations that it had removed from its website some time in the last several months.
The DOJ didn’t even bother to deny the DNC’s allegation that the agency had purposefully removed the guidance, which for decades has warned agents against “overt criminal investigative matters” like seizing ballots or arresting candidates and officials “until the election in question has been concluded, its results certified, and all recounts and election contests concluded.”
In paragraph after paragraph, the DOJ argued that all of that background material — Trump wishing he had seized voting machines, endless threats to arrest election officials, the removal of the DOJ guidelines for active elections — was “impertinent” to the FOIA requests demanding information about ballot seizure plans.
That’s certainly one interpretation. Another is that all of that background is entirely pertinent to the issue of whether records regarding ballot seizure plans exist, and whether the DOJ has to release them under FOIA.
The response was simply remarkable, I thought. Who wrote it? I wondered.
The response was signed by Devin Iorio, Assistant U.S. Attorney for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. (That’s former Fox News host Janine Pirro’s office.) So, I looked Iorio up and quickly found his LinkedIn page.
Immediately, I couldn’t help but notice something.
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Sorry but…. That’s a kid, right? This couldn’t be him. So I looked up his bar license. Then, I gave the number a call. He answered.
He said he couldn’t comment and apologized if that made him sound rude. It was the most polite “no comment” I’ve had in my life. But I had to confirm it was him. Yes, he just graduated from law school two years ago, he told me. And how long had he been at the DOJ?
Within the last month, he said. Here’s our full conversation.
Iorio has a pretty impressive resume for someone his age. He has interned at the DOJ before, as well as the SEC. He also served as a law clerk in D.C. Superior Court and U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell, according to his LinkedIn.
But he’s only been out of law school for two years, and the DNC’s lawsuit contains very serious allegations on a very serious matter. If the agency follows Trump’s orders and seizes ballots or voting machines in November, it would be the first time in American history that the federal government intervened so forcefully in an election.
Is that the type of case you send a second-year law school grad out to? It’s not just that case but more than a dozen others. Iorio is listed as an attorney of record on about 20 lawsuits that have been filed since the start of the second Trump administration — litigation that also deals with very serious matters like national security, the environment, prosecutorial misconduct, and more.
Devin Iorio, the baby-faced recent law school grad, is now indeed the attorney tasked with fighting the DNC’s attempt to find out whether Donald Trump will seize ballots in the most unprecedented federal election intervention in U.S. history.
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For the past two years, I’ve heard rumblings of major problems inside the Justice Department. They began back when I was reporting on DOGE’s ravaging of the Social Security Administration for Rolling Stone.
At some point in the course of my reporting I recall speaking to a high-ranking Democratic election official in the South who told that the DOJ had tried to coax one of their lawyers to Washington. The lawyer, who had previously worked for the ACLU, was being recruited by a DOJ office focused on elections, probably the Civil Rights Division.
The election official chuckled as they recalled the story: Here was Trump’s DOJ, which was already well on its way to perverting the mission of the Civil Rights Division to focus on voter suppression instead of voting rights, for some strange reason recruiting their natural enemy: an ACLU lawyer.
The anecdote told me two things: One, the rumors about the DOJ being emptied out from the inside as competent, experienced lawyers left under pressure to pursue bogus, politically-motivated investigations, was true. And two, the Trump sycophants who were left had no idea what they were doing. They couldn’t even do basic homework on prospective staff to weed out folks like former ACLU lawyers who wouldn’t take a job in the Trump DOJ if their life depended on it.
In the time since that conversation there has been much reporting on the exodus at the DOJ and other massive government agencies, and how the people who have filled those empty desks are either incompetent, Trump sycophants, hyper-online conservative social media addicts, or all three.
I don’t know hat category, if any, Iorio falls into. But I bet he’ll never answer a call from a phone number with a Peoria, Illinois area code ever again.
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