#georgia-election-investigation

#georgia-election-investigation

What in the hell were FBI agents doing in an election facility in Fulton county, Georgia, last week? They surely weren't investigating a crime. Nor were they serving the public. Justifying President Trump's Big Lie about winning the 2020 election may seem like his own lost cause but like his Confederate forebears, he is weaponizing it, damage be damned. Not even his subsequent election victory has quieted Trump's appetite for more power, earned or otherwise.

Now that he's president again, Trump is pushing the federal government to back up those bogus claims. On Wednesday, the FBI served a search warrant at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia, which includes most of Atlanta, seeking ballots from the 2020 election. That follows Trump's comments earlier this month when he suggested during a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that charges related to the election were imminent.

The 11th-hour additions of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Director of the Office of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard come as the Trump administration pushes for more voter data from states and hunts for evidence to back up Trump's discredited voter fraud claims. The intrigue: It was not immediately clear what the cabinet secretaries intended to discuss, but organizers have added a new session to accommodate them.

President Trump's firing of IGs and removal of acting IGs, and then the subsequent appointment of some very political folks as IGs ... does raise the specter of a politicized inspector general community," one of those fired watchdogs, Mark Lee Greenblatt, told Nextgov/FCW.

The past month has seen a barrage of election subversion stories that, taken individually, were alarming, but viewed together reveal a deeply disturbing new playbook emanating from the Trump administration ahead of the midterms. On this week's Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick talked with election law gladiator Marc Elias, chair of Elias Law Group and founder of Democracy Docket. Their discussion, edited and condensed for clarity here, highlights a very clear pattern when it comes to Trump and voting: a project that seeks to normalize violence and to test drive the shattering of how elections are typically run. The work of the coming nine months? Keep a close eye on the encroaching lawlessness, don't normalize election subversion, and organize now to protect your friends and neighbors.