DOJ appears to have hired lawyer convicted of hacking election sites to check ‘integrity’
A Florida lawyer who pleaded guilty after illegally accessing government election websites appears to have joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) — and taken part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota.
The apparent hiring of David Michael Levin would be among the most troubling example yet of the department’s Civil Rights Division bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section — who have taken extreme steps to undermine fair elections, as it rushes to put together a team to carry out Trump’s anti-voting agenda.
And Levin’s involvement in election monitoring could offer a hint of the kind of personnel who will staff the operation this fall, when the DOJ has said it will send 1,000 monitors to the polls.
Levin was charged with three felonies in 2016 after Florida investigators said he used a cyberattack to obtain credentials, then entered restricted portions of a county elections website, and separately accessed the state Division of Elections website.
Levin later said he had wanted to look into “the integrity of elections.”
The charges were later reduced to two misdemeanors. Levin pleaded guilty, served 20 days in jail and received two years of probation. [Continue reading…]