An attorney who in 2016 pleaded guilty to illegally hacking state and county election websites in Florida has apparently been hired by the US Department of Justice and took part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota, according to a report published Friday.
Democracy Docket said it used “publicly available facial recognition reverse image search tools” to analyze “images and video posted online” and concluded that David Michael Levin seems to have joined the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
Yunior Rivas, a breaking news reporter at the voting rights and elections site, said that hiring Levin “would be among the most troubling examples 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 [President Donald] 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,” Rivas added.
EXCLUSIVE: Ten years ago, David Michael Levin was convicted of hacking into government election websites.Now, he appears to have been hired by the Trump DOJ to…wait for it…monitor elections.
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— Democracy Docket (@democracydocket.com) August 21, 2026 at 10:19 AM
Levin was arrested in May 2016 on three felony counts of “unauthorized access to the Lee County Elections Office website” the previous year “and to the Department of State Division of Elections website” in January 2016. The three felony charges were subsequently downgraded to two misdemeanors, to which Levin pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 20 days in jail served on weekends and two years of probation.
"It was a silly political stunt,” Levin told the presiding judge in his case. “I didn’t think I was going to get in and I did. I’ve never done anything like it before and I’m not going to do anything like it again.”
“That was probably one of the bigger mistakes I’ve made in my life, the way I went about the whole thing,” Levin told the Bradenton Herald during his failed 2021 run for Manatee County School Board on a platform opposing critical race theory and mask mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I made it very political, and it affected my life for a few years.”
According to Democracy Docket, Levin is now apparently working for the DOJ office responsible for enforcing federal voting rights laws. The Civil Rights Division is headed by Harmeet Dhillon, a conspiracy theorist with a troubled history of dabbling in 2020 election denial and working against voting, reproductive, LGBTQ+, and other civil rights.
“The DOJ did not respond to Democracy Docket’s request to confirm Levin’s employment and title,” Rivas noted. “And Levin’s name has not appeared in court filings made by the department. The DOJ also did not respond to questions about whether officials were aware of Levin’s conviction for hacking election websites before he apparently joined the department.”
As Malcolm Ferguson wrote for The New Republic on Friday:
The Trump administration has made a habit of offering vindication for people who flat out violated election laws in an attempt to stop what they believe was fraud—a lie their president has constantly tried to manifest into existence. Colorado’s Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, was hosted at the White House last month. And more broadly… Dhillon has changed the purpose and function of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division entirely.
Democracy Docket’s reporting comes amid efforts by Trump—who was impeached for a historic second time for inciting the January 2021 Capitol insurrection and trying to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden—to cast doubt on the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections. The Trump administration has also been accused of attempted voter intimidation with a plan to deploy an army of 1,000 law enforcement personnel to polling places to “monitor” midterm voting.
This, amid Republicans’ ongoing voter suppression efforts, including attacks on mail-in ballots, and persistent claims of nearly nonexistent voter fraud.
Reporting this week exposed the Trump administration’s inability to back up a claim that nearly 16,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in Nevada, with the Department of Homeland Security only able to find 185 such cases—just over 1% of the number claimed.
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