As the midterm elections approach, the legacy of 2020 weighs heavily on the Justice Department.

The Justice Department’s top leaders, many of whom are veterans of President Trump’s legal and political wars over the past decade, share a singular and striking attribute: They have not admitted, unequivocally or clearly, that he lost the 2020 election.

Attorney General Todd Blanche; his predecessor, Pam Bondi; FBI Director Kash Patel; and Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the department’s civil rights division, all avoided giving yes or no answers on the election in their appearances before Congress. Instead, they only acknowledged that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory was legally certified.

Emil Bove III, a former aide to Blanche, offered a telling non-answer during his confirmation process for a federal judgeship last year: It was inappropriate to pronounce on 2020 because it was an unresolved “political or policy debate,” he wrote in a questionnaire.

This refusal to acknowledge Mr. Trump’s defeat, a tactic favored by candidates seeking to avoid contradicting the president, has become so common that it no longer merits much attention. Yet it reflects the enduring legacy of a polarizing election whose repercussions are still being felt, perhaps due most of all to the department’s presumption that voter fraud is so endemic that it requires a forceful federal response. This premise has been disputed by state election officials and expert analyses.

“This is a different approach than we’ve seen in any previous Department of Justice, whether run by Republicans or Democrats,” said Karen Brinson Bell, former executive director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Ms. Brinson Bell said the administration’s current initiatives, such as its attempt to restrict mail-in voting, failed efforts to obtain sensitive state voter data and threats against local officials, underscore themes Mr. Trump touched on six years ago.

The 2020 election “seems to have been somewhat of a catalyst” for their current actions, she added.

Mr. Trump has built a powerful political movement by mobilizing his supporters to align with his grievances, including his debunked claims of a plot to steal the election and his rage at being prosecuted for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

And the president explicitly linked his “Stop the Steal” message from six years ago to this year’s midterm elections.

It exploded after a federal court recently rejected the department’s request that California authorities stop counting 20,000 mail-in ballots, fearing the batch included noncitizens who voted illegally, even though such cases are extremely rare.

“Why would they refuse to fix electoral fraud? ” Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday as he continued to express concern over the Supreme Court’s refusal to consider his efforts to overturn the 2020 results.

“It’s like the rigged and stolen election of 2020, when we had a great case, but the Supreme Court didn’t want to hear it because they said that I, the President of the United States of America, had NO JURISDICTION to bring such a case.”

This spring, Mr. Blanche, the president’s former defense lawyer, told Fox News that “there is a ton of evidence that the election was rigged.” But he added that it was “very difficult to produce evidence that would hold up in court, because they are very good at covering up their wrongdoing and what they do.”

Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, rejected the notion that the department’s actions in California and its efforts to preemptively challenge the results of Alaska’s Senate race were driven by lingering grievances over the course of 2020, simply by a determination to enforce laws the Biden administration didn’t want.

“The Department of Justice is focused on 2026 and enforcing the federal laws that protect it,” Ms. Pels said. “Non-citizen voting is a federal crime. Prosecuting these cases does not mean ‘interceding’ in state elections. That is our job.”

If the ministry faces criticism from the left for doing too much, some on the right believe that Mr. Blanche and his team are doing far too little.

Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump aide who has long argued that the 2020 election was stolen, said most of the department’s recent actions were aimed at satisfying his boss, not uncovering what he called a vast conspiracy to undermine Mr. Trump.

“Everything the DOJ does is totally performative to put a certain patina on the action,” he said in an interview. “They don’t have the heart for it. They came up with a plan over the last 60 days after Trump started really getting into it.”

Several figures who played central roles in the post-2020 struggle have become influential voices in Mr. Trump’s ears. He recently met with Tina Peters, a former Colorado elections official who served prison time for violating a county’s election system. She urged him to use the power of federal law enforcement to aggressively investigate the election without seeking court orders or cooperation from state officials.

“He already has the power to do all of this — he doesn’t need to go to Congress and ask for it,” she told MS NOW on Monday. “If there’s something that’s criminal in nature, he has every right to ask the administration, the attorney general’s office or, you know, law enforcement to step in and investigate.”

The assumptions underlying the department’s two main lines of legal attack — the effort to sequester ballots based on disputed claims of illegal voting and the intervention, at Mr. Trump’s behest, in the Alaska race — echo the drumbeat of denial from the 2020 election.

“State-facilitated voter fraud is unacceptable in the United States of America,” Mr. Blanche said after suing California on October 15. The move marked the start of a period of litigation so intense that his small team of deputies had to work around the clock to meet document-drafting requirements.

This effort, he added, is essential to “restoring confidence in American elections.”

Critics say the goal was just the opposite, part of a determined political effort to undermine confidence in elections — and doomed to fail in court.

“We’re seeing the same failure scenario as 2020,” said Sam Oliker-Friedland, a former litigator in the voting rights section of the department’s civil rights division. “It’s clear they haven’t learned much.”

The federal judge in the California case, David O. Carter, rejected the department’s argument. He accused the administration of seeking to “disrupt elections already underway, create a chilling effect on election workers and voters, and exclude the votes of American citizens.”

The department’s appeals in the matter have so far proved unsuccessful. On Monday, he asked the Supreme Court to grant the complaint, but was quickly rejected hours later.

The trial embodies the evolution of the Trump administration’s strategy. He abandoned investigations into widespread allegations of widespread voter fraud that William P. Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general during the 2020 election, had called “completely false.”

Mr. Blanche and his team coordinated closely with the Department of Homeland Security to target illegal voting by undocumented immigrants. The approach is part of the overall immigration crackdown led by Mr. Trump’s top domestic adviser, Stephen Miller.

In the last nine weeks alone, the department has charged 192 immigrants in 26 states with illegal voting and registration crimes. Since the start of this administration, the department has charged 236 people with crimes related to election fraud, Ms. Pels said.

Another approach with 2020 undertones was the department’s targeting of state and local election officials. Six years ago, Mr. Trump and his allies accused election officials in Georgia and elsewhere of intentionally mishandling ballots. In October, the department sent warning letters and subpoenas to California officials, accusing them of failing to comply with their demands.

On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the department not to “threaten, intimidate, or coerce state or local election officials,” based on the government’s suspicions that a voter might be a non-citizen. She scheduled a hearing for Monday.

Mr Blanche’s team said his actions were necessary to safeguard the process. The flurry of last-minute activity, they said, represents the urgency of responding to the threat posed by illegal voting in an effort to remind local officials of their legal obligation to preserve records for later review.

Mr. Blanche has repeatedly assured that the ministry’s recent activities were motivated by evidence and not by political considerations. Last month, he told reporters that the department would never “inappropriately interfere with elections or the state certification process.”

In the meantime, dodging questions about the 2020 election remains the preferred tactic of those seeking positions of power within the administration.

“Who won the 2020 elections? Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, asked Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, during his confirmation hearing in July.

“I’m not going to do that with you,” said Mr. Clayton, who was Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor before his confirmation.

Mr. Ossoff persisted.

Mr. Clayton repeated that Mr. Biden had been certified the winner.