Democracy Docket reported on August 21 that David Michael Levin — a Florida attorney who pleaded guilty after using SQL-injection attacks to breach the Lee County Supervisor of Elections and Florida Division of Elections websites in 2016 — appears to have joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Levin was photographed at Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s July 8 swearing-in of more than 100 new Civil Rights Division attorneys, and appeared on video outside a Minneapolis polling site during the Department’s monitoring of Minnesota’s August primary, alongside Voting Section senior counsel William F. Mohrman. A Minnesota election judge checked their credentials and required them to move back 100 feet. The report matters because Dhillon has said the Department will deploy roughly 1,000 election monitors for the November midterms, and the Department declined to confirm whether it was aware of Levin’s conviction. It illustrates how the staffing of a civil-rights enforcement office can itself become an instrument of election-related pressure.

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