Former Top DOJ Officials Say Trump’s Claim about Saving DeSantis in 2018 Is Fake News

Former president Donald Trump’s claim that he “sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys” to South Florida to stop the 2018 election from being stolen from Republican Ron DeSantis is not true, according to former top Department of Justice officials and a former federal prosecutor who spoke to National Review on Friday.

In a Truth Social post Thursday, Trump claimed that he saved DeSantis from losing to Democrat Andrew Gillum in 2018, by fixing his campaign, “which had completely fallen apart,” and by stopping the election from being stolen in Broward County. Trump claimed that “when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen …”

But that is not true, the according to the officials who spoke with National Review.

The South Florida prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while it was true that there were some voting irregularities and a slow ballot-counting process in Broward County, what Trump claimed “did not happen. That never happened.” The prosecutor noted that the Department of Justice does not get involved in elections as they are going on, but will review them afterward. The prosecutor said the Broward election was reviewed and no evidence of massive fraud or attempts to steal the election was found. “There was nothing that we saw in federal court that the FBI was able to see that impacted anything,” the prosecutor said. “Once the election was called, we went back, we didn’t find any law violations.”

One top Department of Justice official, who also declined to be named for this story, said that if Trump had requested that federal investigators review the Broward election, it would have gone through the top levels of the U.S. Department of Justice. “I don’t think anything like that happened,” the former official told National Review. Any review of the Broward election, “was not at the request of the White House,” the official said. “If FBI agents had been involved in any way, you would have known about it, because the folks in Broward would have reported it.”

Another former top DOJ official who was familiar with Trump’s claim also denied it was true. “The Department of Justice, the FBI, wouldn’t do it because the president called up,” the official said. “If there were people down there, law enforcement people, or the U.S. attorney or something said, ‘Hey, there seems to be a problem here,’ they might look into it. But the idea that the president calls them in is just bullshit.”

Others who were closely following the 2018 election results in Florida also pushed back on Trump’s claim. Sarah Isgur, a former DOJ spokeswoman who served during the Trump administration, tweeted Friday that it, “Never happened.”

Jared Moskowitz, who was a Democratic state representative in Broward County in 2018, also said Trump’s claim was bogus. “It’s an absolute lie,” he tweeted Friday. “I was there. All sides had attorneys there. Multiple court appearances. The recount completed. Dems lost.” Moskowitz, who was elected to Congress on Tuesday, served in DeSantis’s administration as director of emergency management. Attempts by National Review to reach him were unsuccessful Friday afternoon.

DOJ leadership was being reshuffled in the fall of 2018. Trump forced out former attorney general Jeff Sessions one day after the 2018 election.

Broward County’s vote counting in 2018 was slow and problematic. The county submitted its machine recount data two minutes late, and its updated numbers were not counted by the state. But that did not hurt DeSantis or Scott, who both narrowly won their races.

There were more than eight million ballots cast in the 2018 race for governor, and DeSantis defeated scandal-plagued Democrat Andrew Gillum by fewer than 35,000 votes. On Tuesday, DeSantis routed his opponent Charlie Crist by more than 1.5 million votes.

The landslide victory by a potential 2024 rival appears to have unnerved Trump, who has tried to take full credit for DeSantis’s rise, and is now dismissing him as an “an average REPUBLICAN Governor with great Public Relations.”