Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon says Gov. Mikie Sherrill already knew New Jersey was about to disclose tens of thousands of potential noncitizens on its voter rolls when she publicly accused President Trump of lying about election integrity.
Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told Fox News Digital that the sequence of events points to a governor who attacked the president's credibility while sitting on information that would prove his point. "When the president came out with his Primetime speech last Thursday, I believe in the sequencing of events that has been laid out, she already knew that this revelation was forthcoming," Dhillon said.
She did not hold back about what that timing means.
"She knew it, and she still went online and called the president a liar and said he was exaggerating, Shame on you, governor."
The disclosure at the center of the dispute: data from the Department of Homeland Security, released alongside Trump's July 16 primetime address, showing more than 35,000 potential noncitizens on New Jersey's voter rolls. Of those, approximately 6,600 were improperly registered to vote through the state's motor-vehicle system, and roughly 400 actually cast ballots.
After Trump's address, Sherrill joined 23 other Democratic governors in a joint statement formally led by Kentucky Gov. Andrew Beshear. The statement did not hedge.
"It's deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections. No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country's elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure."
The governors added: "Ours is a winning message, which is why he is trying to undermine democracy."
Dhillon's accusation reframes that statement. If Sherrill's administration already knew about the noncitizen registration problem before the governors' letter went public, the decision to call the president a liar looks less like a principled stand and more like a coordinated deflection.
Sherrill has not directly answered that timing question. When Fox News Digital asked her spokesman, Sean Higgins, about Dhillon's accusation, he pointed reporters to comments Sherrill made at an Essex County grocery store, where she had been touring to sign unrelated legislation. Pressed by a reporter there, Sherrill said her administration is running its own investigation.
"We're running an independent investigation right now to get to the bottom of exactly how this happened and what's going on, but it is not a surprise to me that the federal government that the Trump administration wants to immediately weaponize this against people as opposed to focusing on making sure that we're running free and fair elections."
She separately told WCBS that she would not comply with the DOJ's request for voter data, framing the federal demand as politically motivated.
Dhillon sent Sherrill a formal letter giving her five business days to turn over voter registration data, including full names, dates of birth, nationalities, addresses, and registration details for the approximately 6,600 affected noncitizens, plus ballot information for the roughly 400 who voted. The deadline fell on a Tuesday, though the exact date the letter was sent is not publicly confirmed.
The DOJ did not stop at a letter. The Washington Examiner reported that Dhillon filed the notice as "additional basis" in the pending federal case, United States v. Caldwell, the lawsuit the DOJ had already brought against New Jersey Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell over the state's refusal to share unredacted voter rolls. The noncitizen registration disclosure gave the Justice Department fresh ammunition in a case that predates the current dispute.
Dhillon framed the stakes in direct terms in her letter: "Ensuring that U.S. citizens' votes are not illegally diluted by noncitizens' votes is of paramount importance."
But the DOJ's broader legal campaign has hit repeated obstacles. The Washington Examiner noted the Trump administration has lost 16 consecutive district court cases in its nationwide push to obtain unredacted voter files from states, and also lost its first federal appeal. No court has yet ordered a state to surrender an unredacted statewide voter file.
Sherrill's administration has attributed the registration failures to IDEMIA, the private vendor that operates the state's motor-vehicle technology. But Dhillon, speaking to Newsmax, pushed back hard on that explanation. "We're not calling it a glitch or an error or a mistake," she said. "The vendor just transmits the data, so blaming them is a cop-out."
That framing aligns with what IDEMIA itself has said publicly. The vendor stated that its responsibility was limited to transmitting information and that eligibility verification fell to New Jersey's own Division of Elections. In other words, the state agency responsible for catching noncitizen registrations failed to do so, and the governor's office is pointing fingers at the company that moved the paperwork.
Dhillon also confirmed that the DOJ is actively pursuing the roughly 400 noncitizens who cast ballots, with prosecutions already underway and more cases in the pipeline.
"Every single person who voted illegally canceled out the vote of a New Jersey voter; that is shameful."
The pressure on Sherrill is not coming only from the DOJ. Nineteen House Republicans, led by Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, sent the governor a letter with 12 specific questions about how the noncitizen registrations occurred, Breitbart reported. The lawmakers set a response deadline of August 21, 2026, well ahead of the general election.
Among the questions: whether any affected race was decided by a margin smaller than the number of unlawfully cast ballots in that jurisdiction. If the answer is yes, it would mean noncitizen votes may have changed the outcome of an American election.
Van Drew was blunt: "This right here is exactly why we should require ID to vote in our elections. We need answers about how this happened, why it was not caught sooner, and whether more ineligible registrations remain." Rep. August Pfluger of Texas, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, added: "Democrats cannot keep treating election integrity as negotiable when it is the last line of defense for our republic."
Dhillon told Fox News Digital that the DOJ's approach is straightforward. States that cooperate will get federal help cleaning their rolls. States that refuse will face lawsuits.
"It's a bipartisan problem, actually. And I'm really looking forward to helping everyone who will work with us fix this problem. And if they won't work with, we'll sue them and we'll still fix the problem."
Several states beyond New Jersey have resisted the DOJ's data requests, including Pennsylvania and New York, citing federal law and state privacy protections. The DOJ has already sued officials in multiple states, though the specific cases and jurisdictions beyond New Jersey are not fully detailed.
Dhillon directed her sharpest criticism at Sherrill's decision to attack the president rather than address the problem her own state created.
"And instead of pointing fingers at the president, which is what Governor Sherrill did... she should be raising her hand to work with the federal government to clean this up ASAP because that's the vow she took when she ran for office and she got sworn in as the governor of her state is to protect her citizens, and her citizens have a right to vote."
Sherrill's position, stripped to its essentials, is this: she claims to want free and fair elections, says she is running her own investigation, but refuses to share the data that would let the federal government verify whether the problem is fixed. She calls the DOJ's demand a "weaponization", while 35,000 potential noncitizens sit on her state's voter rolls and 400 people who had no legal right to vote already cast ballots that diluted the choices of lawful New Jersey citizens.
If a governor's first instinct after a voter-roll failure of this scale is to call the president a liar and refuse to cooperate, voters are entitled to ask whose interests she is actually protecting.
