The Trump administration's months-long campaign to challenge how states conduct elections and pushback against those efforts came to a head on Election Day on Tuesday.
Those efforts have included lawsuits, an attempt to implement a new U.S. Postal Service rule for mail-in ballots this year, threatening letters to state election officials and a plan to increase the number of poll monitors.
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On Tuesday afternoon, The New York Times reported that the Department of Justice had sent letters to about 20 Democrats, among them prominent election lawyer Marc Elias, informing them that they might be targets in a criminal investigation of how a candidate with the same name as incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan ended up on the ballot of the Alaska Senate race.
NBC News reported that the tally of letters includes both target letters "and preservation requests to third parties to retain records."