A top Justice Department official warned managers in a recent conference call that federal prosecutors could be fired if they decline to investigate and pursue cases of reported election fraud, according to two people with knowledge of the call.
Aakash Singh, the top lieutenant to the deputy attorney general, warned that Department of Justice lawyers must pursue election fraud cases that FBI or Department of Homeland Security agents present to them, or risk termination, according to the people, who sought anonymity to avoid reprisals for sharing internal discussion.
Singh also told supervisors that the FBI and DHS may overrule a prosecutor who declines to pursue one of their investigations, and that the office of the deputy attorney general would make the final decision on whether a case goes forward, one of the people told MS NOW.
Word of his comments, which came in the past week in a standing weekly conference call with the senior supervisors overseeing criminal prosecutions in U.S. attorneys’ offices, quickly spread through the department. The news shocked many, because the instructions appeared to override and reject long-standing Justice Department rules that require prosecutors to independently assess whether the evidence presented to them justifies further investigation or possibly bringing a prosecution.
Justice Department spokesperson Emily Covington denied that Singh threatened firings.
“He never said anyone would be fired,” Covington said in an emailed 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 internal reports of Singh’s threat come as the Trump administration has aggressively sought to investigate noncitizens for possible or supposed illegal voting. The results of those investigations, led in part by the DHS unit called Homeland Security Investigations, have so far amounted to little evidence of fraud or crime. The department reportedly targeted nine states in a recent surge, and has been hunting through some voting rolls for noncitizens illegally voting in elections.
Former Justice Department prosecutors and election security experts said that any pressure on prosecutors to pursue election fraud cases is dangerous for the public and ignores decades of department policy designed to avoid unfounded investigations.
“If true, this is outrageous,” said Ryan Crosswell, a former Justice Department prosecutor in the Public Integrity Section, which oversaw election crime prosecutions before the Trump administration dismantled the office. “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.”
Former prosecutors said that they fear prosecutors face a chilling effect from such a threat but that the greater harm is to citizens who may now face unwarranted accusations from the immensely powerful Justice Department.
“One of the most important parts of the prosecutor’s oath is to ensure that they shut down investigations if the evidence isn’t there,” Crosswell said. “This is a protection of everyday citizens.”
Crosswell resigned his position in early 2025 when Trump political appointee Emil Bove ordered his Public Integrity Section to shutter a corruption investigation into then-New York Mayor Eric Adams. Crosswell later ran for a congressional seat.
Democratic National Committee spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said the news of Singh’s comments was part of a frightening trend.
“This is just the latest example of how the Trump-controlled Department of Justice is an extension of his political operation,” he said. “It is critical to our system of justice that career prosecutors make decisions based on the facts, not the hallucinations of a failed president.”
Singh has been an unabashed and fierce defender of some of the Trump White House’s most controversial efforts to deploy the Justice Department for its policy goals, including efforts to deport immigrants and prosecute protesters of Immigration and Custom Enforcement surges in key states. Singh also championed a rule requiring prosecutors to carry a minimum load of 25 cases, turning upside-down the department’s traditional support for pursuing complex and time-consuming investigations with greater impact. Bloomberg reported that Singh told DOJ leaders earlier this year that any prosecutors who refused to advance Trump’s agenda would be replaced, according to three people briefed on the meeting.
Attorney General Todd Blanche recently promoted Singh to be principal associate deputy attorney general, a position widely considered the No. 3 job in the department with the responsibility of overseeing all daily operations. Singh has enjoyed a strikingly rapid rise through the agency since President Donald Trump was re-elected. Formerly a line prosecutor in the Eastern District of North Carolina without any supervisory experience, Singh became a key aide to Blanche and most recently served as an associate in the deputy attorney general’s office.
Prosecutors being ordered to pursue all cases or face termination violates what many Justice Department attorneys consider their professional bible, the department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution, sometimes called the prosecutors’ manual, several former Justice Department attorneys told MS NOW. Singh’s warning, as shared by insider accounts, would void the prosecutors’ duty to assess the legal basis for opening an investigation and measure the likely success and merits of the case before proceeding.
The published Justice Department principles impose a duty on prosecutors to carefully weigh the evidence that investigators present alongside the law and the public interest in opening a probe or pursuing a prosecution. The principles state that “a prosecutor may commence or recommend federal prosecution only if he/she believes that the person will more likely than not be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt by an unbiased trier of fact and that the conviction will be upheld on appeal.”
Crosswell said the Trump Justice Department’s reported emphasis on pursuing election fraud is especially disturbing. He said his former office received numerous reports of alleged violations of election law, and the vast majority ended up producing no evidence of a crime.
“The fact that the one area where they appear to be doing this is election cases makes this even more chilling,” Crosswell said.
According to a ProPublica analysis of data from the Department of Justice, between January 2025 and May 2026, 41 alleged noncitizen voters were charged with involvement in unlawful voting practices or voting illegally. More than 150 million people voted in the 2024 presidential election, and more than 112 million ballots were cast in the last midterm election.
Noncitizen voting is extremely rare, even by the conservative Heritage Foundation’s own assessment. Despite the president’s obsession with uncovering widespread noncitizen voter fraud, his administration has failed to produce evidence to back up its claims.
CORRECTION (Sept. 18, 2025, 3:56 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the name of a former Justice Department prosecutor. He is Ryan Crosswell, not Ryan Croswell.
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