The Dictatorship
Privacy official resigns at DOJ’s Civil Rights Division as Trump menaces midterms
An official in charge of privacy issues at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which oversees voting rights laws, resigned last week as the Trump administration continues to pursue sensitive voter data for its voter suppression efforts.
NPR reported Friday on the resignation of Kilian Kagle, who worked in the division led by far-right lawyer Harmeet Dhillon:
Kilian Kagle was the chief FOIA officer and senior component official for privacy for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division before leaving his post in recent days. His resignation has not been previously reported. For nearly a year, the DOJ has been making unprecedented demands for sensitive voter data from most states — including voters’ driver’s license numbers, partial Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses — that some say violate privacy law.
In the past year, President Donald Trump has suggested that “we shouldn’t even have” midterm elections in 2026 and that Republicans should “take over” elections in parts of the country controlled by Democrats. And to help implement his autocratic ambitions, the president has installed election-denying zealots at the Justice Department, which has demanded sensitive voter information from states to feed into the administration’s error-prone SAVE voter eligibility tool. More than a dozen Republican-led states have complied with the demand, while other states’ attorneys general are suing in court — with good reason.
Kagle confirmed his departure to NPR but declined to comment. Neither Kagle nor the Justice Department responded to MS NOW’s request for comment.
Though he didn’t give a specific reason for his departure, Kagle joins scores of other former employees from the Civil Rights Division who have left as Dhillon has perverted it into an agency known for assaulting many of the rights it historically defended, including voting rights. In December, almost 300 now-former DOJ employees signed an open letter warning that Dhillon and her allies at the division were undermining civil rights and causing lasting harm to the department’s credibility.
They wrote:
Every election brought changes, but the fundamental mission of our work remained the same. That’s why most of us planned to stay at the Division following the 2024 election. But after witnessing this Administration destroy much of our work, we made the heartbreaking decision to leave — along with hundreds of colleagues, including about 75 percent of attorneys. Now, we must sound the alarm about the near destruction of DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel.
The first year of Trump’s second term has been a nightmare for privacy experts, who raised issues to NPR about the president’s efforts to acquire sensitive voter data.
Others have sounded the alarm elsewhere on other controversies, including the administration’s interest in high-tech surveillance tools that have been deployed by authoritarian governments.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.