By Matt Cohen
December 16, 2025
Eric Neff, a Republican attorney with a web of ties to election-conspiracy theorists, is the new acting chief of the voting section at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), according to the department’s website.
Neff replaces Maureen Riordan, who spent almost two decades in the department’s voting section from 2000 to 2017. In 2021, Riordan served as litigation counsel at the anti-voting legal group the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) before she returned to DOJ when President Donald Trump returned to the White House.
A Dec. 2 legal filing identified Riordan as a “senior counsel” in the voting section. A DOJ spokesperson did not immediately respond to an inquiry about her current role.
As Democracy Docket previously reported, in his previous role as a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, Neff was put on leave after bringing charges against an election software executive based on information from conspiracy-driven election denier group True the Vote. The saga ultimately cost taxpayers $5 million to settle a lawsuit over the flawed prosecution.
It was not the only time Neff worked with election-conspiracy theorists before joining DOJ. In July, Neff briefly represented Patrick Byrne, the prominent election-conspiracy theorist who aided Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. In that case, in which Byrne was being sued for defamation by Hunter Biden, Neff briefly worked under Stefanie Lambert, another leading election denier who will soon face trial in connection with a scheme to access vote tabulators in Michigan.
Neff himself has spread election conspiracy theories — he wrote several articles last year for the conservative news site RedState raising questions about Dominion voting machines — another popular right-wing conspiracy theory.
Neff is a relatively new addition to the voting section — his name started appearing in September in legal filings related to DOJ’s push to obtain state voter records.
Riordan herself had a history of cozying up with election deniers. In 2022, she appeared on a podcast hosted by Cleta Mitchell, the right-wing lawyer and anti-voting activist who played a key role in Trump’s failed bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
“What we have now is an election integrity movement,” Mitchell declared on the podcast with Riordan. “And we want to keep building on that and training people and deploying them in a way that actually does reclaim our election systems from the left.”
“I agree,” said Riordan.