Two top officials at the Department of Public Safety named Gov. Greg Abbott’s office as a driving force in the state’s program to purge nearly 100,000 suspected non-U.S. citizens from Texas’ voter rolls, emails made public Tuesday show.

Abbott’s office, however, on Tuesday denied it had any contact with the agency before the launch of the effort in late January.

The voter purge was scrapped in April after the state settled lawsuits challenging it, and after Secretary of State officials publicly admitted that tens of thousands of naturalized citizens had been wrongly flagged for removal from voter rolls.

On ExpressNews.com: Court OKs settlement ending state’s voter purge program

The emails were made public Tuesday by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, which represented plaintiffs who sued the state.

In an August 2018 email, John Crawford, a top official of the driver license division at the Texas Department of Public Safety, told employees that DPS had previously turned over records to compare with state voter rolls, and “we have an urgent request from the governor’s office to do it again.”

That same day, the director of the driver license division, Amanda Arriaga, wrote in a separate email that “the Governor is interested in getting this information as soon as possible.”

In a statement, Abbott denied talking to the Department of Public Safety about the issue until March of this year.

“Neither the Governor, nor the Governor’s office gave a directive to initiate this process,” said Abbott spokesman John Wittman. “No one speaks for the Governor’s office, but the Governor’s office.”

DPS officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The extent of Abbott’s involvement in the attempted voter purge has been unclear, as his office and other state agencies have largely declined to release records related to the effort.

From the emails, it appears employees from DPS and the Secretary of State’s office had been working on voter purge information since March 2018.

On Jan. 25, the Texas Secretary of State’s office sent out an advisory warning county election officials that more than 95,000 registered voters were believed to be non-citizens and that 58,000 of them had cast ballots in elections.

The advisory directed county officials to request proof of citizenship from those voters. Attorney General Ken Paxton touted the news in a “VOTER FRAUD ALERT” on Twitter, and Abbott thanked Paxton and Secretary of State David Whitley “for uncovering and investigating this illegal vote registration.”

The governor added: “I support prosecution where appropriate.”

But once county election officials found tens of thousands of citizens had been wrongly flagged, Abbott blamed DPS - not Whitley, his former aide and nominee for secretary of state, whose office directed the project.

Abbott complained that DPS had used “faulty information” for the list. DPS Director Steve McCraw in March took “full responsibility” for data errors.

The emails released Tuesday, however, suggest that those DPS officials were responding to pressure that Abbott’s office applied, said Luis Vera, LULAC’s national general counsel.

“The bottom line is this was the governor’s program,” Vera said. “He threw Whitley and the DPS secretary under the bus. All along it was the governor pushing for (the program.)”

Texas elections officials acknowledged in federal court that they pushed out the voter purge lists knowing there might be problems with them. But they said they determined that cleaning up the data would have been too time consuming. When questioned about the program’s origins, none of the state officials who testified mentioned that Abbott was pushing for it. They characterized it instead as “routine” maintenance of the voter rolls.

On ExpressNews.com: Judge blasts Texas voter purge program

As the purge effort unraveled, all 12 Senate Democrats pledged to block Whitley’s confirmation. After Whitley resigned at the end of the legislative session, Abbott brought him back onto his office’s payroll as a special adviser.

Guillermo Contreras covers federal courts in San Antonio and international legal issues. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | gcontreras@express-news.net | Twitter: @gmaninfedland | Allie Morris covers politics and policy in Austin. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | amorris@express-news.net | Twitter: @MorrisReports