President Donald Trump speaks before Steve Witkoff is sworn as special envoy during a ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House, Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein).
In a significant oversight, the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Justice has found itself needing to correct a mistake, according to a court filing made public on Friday.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, along with several division prosecutors, submitted a motion to retract a document mistakenly filed in a federal court in New Hampshire.
The two-page request courteously urges the court, in a September 2025 case concerning election fraud in New Hampshire, to retract a document described as a notice of supplementary authority, which had been erroneously submitted earlier that Friday.
The motion clarifies, “The Notice was filed in error and was not intended for filing in this matter,” and it respectfully asks the court to remove the incorrect filing from the record.
The filing also mentions that the Department of Justice promptly submitted the correct document following their request to withdraw the erroneous filing.
The misplaced supplemental authority notice was actually related to a Minnesota voting fraud case – which the DOJ filed against the Land of 10,000 Lakes, as well as the Minnesota secretary of state, on the exact same day the New Hampshire case was filed last year.
This is not the first time the second Trump administration has had to alert a court to a filing error.
And, in fact, the types of errors have been quite different.
In early October 2025, the DOJ filed a 28-page response in opposition to a motion for a temporary restraining order in a case about the firing of federal workers during the government shutdown. A great deal of that work was done with little attention to detail.
On at least 19 occasions, the document is pockmarked with various iterations of the phrase: “Error! Bookmark not defined.” In many instances, the phrase is rendered in all caps. The error message is native to Microsoft Word and means a user has updated a field with a broken link to a bookmark. Or, in other words, a change was made attempting to point to a link that no longer exists.
The DOJ later filed a 3-page errata – a formal document admitting to, and correcting, certain mistakes.
“In finalizing their Opposition, Defendants inadvertently encountered errors in the Table of Contents required by Local Rules, including a technical error preventing proper display of the page numbers,” the errata reads. “Defendants apologize for the error, and respectfully submit the accompanying correction to their Memorandum in Opposition to Plaintiffs’ Motion for Temporary Restraining Order.”
Then, in late October 2025, the DOJ admitted to a serious factual error in a filing for a legal battle over the federal use of state National Guard troops to police American cities.
In a letter motion addressed to the clerk of court for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the U.S. Department of Justice admitted that multiple prior representations about federal deployments to Portland, Oregon, were “incorrect” and expressed “regret” for making numerous such “errors” in various court filings.
“Defendants do wish to correct a factual discrepancy discovered in the course of responding to plaintiffs’ letter,” DOJ wrote in that error-correcting effort. “We are informed by our clients that this 115 figure was the number of deployments and that some individuals were deployed multiple times. Based on DHS’s review of the deployment data, the number of individual FPS officers deployed during the time period appears to be 86 officers.”
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