One of the oddities of Donald Trump’s personnel choices in his second term is how often he has chosen failed GOP candidates for important positions. Indeed, the White House seems to be a jobs program for Republicans who’ve been rejected by voters, hiring so many failed candidates that Roll Call last year said the president had created a “Team of Losers.”

Dan Bishop, however, appears to be a unique example, largely because of the number of positions he’s been assigned.

The North Carolina Republican served three terms in Congress before making a surprise move in 2024, announcing he was giving up his House seat to run for state attorney general. He lost that race, in an otherwise good year for GOP candidates.

In early 2025, he was tapped to serve as the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. Then last fall, the White House rewarded Bishop with an even more plum assignment: U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina.

To his many critics, this was not good news. As my MS NOW colleague Ja’han Jones explained in November, Bishop has earned a reputation as an election denier who believes in using the courts to go after his political and ideological foes. Putting him in charge of a federal prosecutors’ office seemed like a spectacularly bad idea.

Five months later, the North Carolinian has taken on yet another role in the administration. The Wall Street Journal reported on the latest developments in Team Trump’s crusade to target the president’s defeat in the 2020 election:

Senior officials across the Trump administration are now hunting for an array of evidence to support Trump’s claim that he defeated Joe Biden — and to bolster the case for new election laws as the president urges Congress to pass the SAVE America Act.

That effort is now unfolding on multiple fronts. Attorney General Pam Bondi last week quietly authorized Dan Bishop, a U.S. attorney in North Carolina, to pursue election-related probes across the country, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Bishop, a former congressman who voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 win, will also examine voter-roll data the Justice Department has been collecting from states in an effort to determine whether noncitizens have illegally registered or cast ballots, a department official said.

Given his record, it’s tough to be optimistic about Bishop overseeing these efforts in a detached and independent way.

It’s worth emphasizing that the Journal’s reporting suggests the lines have grown blurry at the politicized Justice Department between pursuing contemporary election-related investigations while looking for evidence that might bolster Trump’s conspiracy theories about his loss in 2020.

Making matters worse is the scope of the efforts. The Bishop news is important, but it dovetails with the president and his team seizing ballots and election records in Georgia and Arizona; seizing voting equipment in Puerto Rico; waging an aggressive campaign to acquire voter rolls from states where Democrats won; organizing an unnecessary FBI elections “briefing” for state officials; and providing Kurt Olsen, one of Trump’s highly controversial former campaign lawyers, with classified information as he tried to advance election conspiracy theories.

All of this stems from the president’s obsession with relitigating the election he lost, and it coincides with evidence of his ongoing interest in a possible federal takeover of the nation’s electoral system. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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