Newly released files show canvassers admitted submitting fabricated registrations, federal agents identified widespread irregularities and one investigator questioned why the case had not received a full inquiry before the Justice Department declined prosecution.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
Declassified FBI records released by President Donald Trump provide the most detailed account to date of a federal investigation into suspected voter registration fraud in Muskegon, Michigan, revealing witness admissions, extensive problems among sampled applications and repeated delays before the Justice Department closed the case without charges.
The documents concern GBI Strategies, a voter registration organization first scrutinized by local and state authorities in 2020 after the Muskegon City Clerk’s Office reported applications containing apparently false information.
Trump made the investigative materials public Thursday as part of a broader release of election-related records. The files show that FBI agents interviewed canvassers who described fabricating names, signatures and other personal information to meet daily registration quotas, according to reporting by Just the News.
“The documents state that some canvassers admitted to FBI agents that they signed voter registration forms in other people’s names, submitted fraudulent registration for people who did not exist, and received gift cards tied to their number of applications that they produced,” Trump said Thursday. “In other words, it was pay, play, and cheat.”
Trump said he would ask the FBI director to reopen the matter and accused the Biden administration’s Justice Department of delaying the inquiry until it was effectively ended.
The Muskegon Police Department opened the original investigation after the city clerk reported suspected fraud. An Oct. 16, 2020, police report obtained through a public records request showed that Muskegon officers and Michigan State Police investigators found applications containing nonexistent addresses and personal information that could not be matched to real people.
The Michigan attorney general’s office eventually referred the case to the FBI because investigators believed the activity could extend beyond the state.
The federal investigation remained largely hidden from public view for years. In September 2023, the FBI rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for records related to the case, invoking a federal FOIA exemption covering certain law enforcement investigations.
The newly disclosed FBI-302 reports, which summarize interviews conducted by federal agents, show that Detroit-based investigators questioned multiple canvassers employed in the registration campaign.
One witness told agents that local supervisors instructed employees to complete applications with invented information when they were unable to obtain enough legitimate registrations.
“[Name redacted] told all of the employees that if they couldn’t get enough applications, they should just fill them in,” one FBI-302 stated. “One of the employees asked what this person meant […] whichever [person] it was picked up a blank application and filled it out with made-up information and said, ‘this is what I mean.’”
The same witness alleged that employees were told “to put any number she could think of for the social security number, but not to use her own social security number or date of birth” and that “she could make up names or use anyone else’s name.”
According to the interview summary, the canvasser returned to the office after her shifts and completed additional applications using fictitious identities until she reached her required total.
“[Redacted] would return to the office at the end of her shift and fill in enough blank sheets with made-up people so that she reached her daily quota,” the FBI-302 stated.
The witness estimated that she personally submitted “100 fake voter registrations” to the organization.
The complete collection of released Muskegon FBI investigative records includes additional interviews describing similar practices.
One canvasser who worked for the company for approximately one week in 2020 told investigators that he “never collected any names.” Instead, he said he would “just sit in his car the whole shift and would put down a name of a friend or relative in order to have something to turn in with his clipboard.”
Another employee denied that company supervisors explicitly directed workers to falsify registrations but said fabricated applications were common because of the financial incentives.
“Most of the employees submitted voter registrations with false information because it was ‘easy money,’” the employee told investigators.
“She never submitted any applications with fake signatures. She only heard about people submitting falsified forms,” the agents wrote.
Several other canvassers either said they had been instructed to enter false information or told investigators they believed coworkers were doing so, according to the memos.
Despite the allegations gathered by Michigan authorities, the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section initially authorized only a limited investigation focused on debit cards used to compensate GBI Strategies employees.
“PIN does not concur at this time, barring further predication, with a specific investigation focused purely on the voter registration fraud that has been investigated by State law enforcement officials,” a Justice Department Criminal Division official wrote to FBI personnel in March 2021.
By November 2021, officials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan and the FBI had decided not to seek “further investigative or prosecutive action at this time,” according to an internal email.
As the Detroit field office prepared to close the matter, an FBI agent raised concerns in June 2022 that the core allegations had never received a full field investigation.
“I am one of the agents assigned to the [redacted] investigation out of FBI Detroit. We are preparing to close the investigation. Before we do so, I was hoping to discuss with you the limited scope that PIN approved into the investigation of the fraudulent voter registration applications,” the agent wrote.
“After reviewing ‘Federal Prosecution of Election Offenses’ (December 2017), put out by the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, it appears as though this type of fraud would result in a full field investigation.”
The agent argued that the reported conduct appeared to satisfy federal standards for a broader voter fraud inquiry, including allegations that canvassers submitted false information and received payments tied to completed registrations.
“I understand that proving this was done ‘willfully’ would still be difficult, but I wanted to raise my concerns before closing the case and was hoping to better understand the reasoning behind not approving a full investigation,” the agent wrote.
The Public Integrity Section subsequently allowed Detroit agents to examine voter registration applications and conduct database checks.
One review involved 107 applications flagged for potentially fraudulent information. Investigators could not locate 91 of the listed individuals in the relevant databases.
Of the 16 people whose identities could be confirmed, only four had signatures matching those on the registration forms.
Agents also examined 20 randomly selected applications from a larger group previously identified as suspicious by Michigan investigators.
Seven contained “completely fabricated information,” according to the records. Four used the names of real people but included inconsistent biographical details. One named a person who apparently had never lived in Muskegon, while another contained an incorrect middle name.
The remaining seven appeared legitimate.
After those preliminary reviews, the Public Integrity Section authorized a full investigation, allowing FBI agents to conduct the canvasser interviews that continued into 2023.
The declassified timeline shows that investigators then encountered delays obtaining laboratory findings and handwriting analysis. The U.S. Attorney’s Office told the FBI that it could not make a final prosecution decision until the testing was complete.
The last testing materials were delivered to an assistant U.S. attorney by May 2024.
Later that summer, the Justice Department decided that no charges would be filed.
The timeline indicates that the U.S. attorney reconsidered prosecution in October 2024 and requested copies of the FBI-302 interview reports from the Detroit field office. The released records do not show that any additional charging decision followed.
Trump cited the lengthy timeline, the witness statements and the absence of charges as evidence that federal officials failed to pursue the case aggressively.
“The Biden Department of Justice slow-walked the investigation and killed it,” Trump said.
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