Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has its sights fixed on Georgia, its election system and those who run it.
Should our state and local election officials be nervous? No, because they’ve done nothing wrong.
But yes, because this isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about power.
Just this week, Trump officials sent letters to elections officials here in Georgia and other states, threatening them with criminal prosecution if they knowingly allow noncitizens to vote. The letters are pure bluster that shouldn’t be taken seriously, mainly because safeguards against noncitizen voting are already so strict that it almost never happens.
Other actions are more serious.
Back in January, you may remember, FBI agents swooped in to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots cast in Fulton County during the 2020 elections. Presumably, they’ve spent the last six months sifting through those boxes in search of something, anything, and so far we have no indication that their search has been successful.
The Trump administration has also demanded names and contact information for thousands of Fulton County employees and volunteers who had worked on the 2020 election, without really explaining why they needed such data. Earlier this week, a federal judge quashed that request, calling it “staggering … unreasonable.” It “would not be a legitimate use of the grand jury and its subpoena power,” he wrote, warning that it “threatens to chill participation in future elections.”
The judge, William Ray, was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2017.
In addition, according to an internal FBI memo leaked last week, some 260 FBI analysts from all around the country have been yanked from their normal crime-fighting duties for additional intense scrutiny of Fulton County’s 2020 election, with agents and analysts told to work overtime and on weekends to complete whatever task they’ve been given.
I make two predictions:
They’ll find nothing.
They won’t admit they found nothing.
They won’t admit they found nothing because they can’t admit they found nothing. That outcome is simply not acceptable to Trump. It is not acceptable to his ego, and it is not acceptable to his plans to disrupt the 2026 midterms. Admitting they found nothing, after six years of whining from Trump, would undermine the last remaining structural support from an administration that may already be teetering on collapse.
Most likely, I suspect they will claim to have found thousands of mail-in ballots in which signatures don’t match, because you can always claim that signatures don’t match. From day to day, my own signature doesn’t match exactly, and the same is true of most people. For that and other reasons, claims of unmatched signatures won’t hold up in a court of law, but to Trump that won’t matter. He intends to make his claim in the court of public opinion, which operates under a different, far less rigorous standard.
Since he can’t produce proof of criminality and fraud, he wants to create the public illusion of it, particularly involving voting by mail. Armed with that illusion, he can create a whirlwind of controversy to try to justify seizing control of elections not just in Fulton County or Georgia but nationwide, allowing him to decide which votes to count and which to discard.
In ordinary times that charge might sound hyperbolic, but it’s hard to reach a different conclusion given the many unprecedented, previously unimagined ways in which Trump is seeking to undermine faith in fair elections and seize control. To cite yet another example, his administration is now withholding terrorism-prevention funds from states that refuse to give him control over their elections.
These are not separate actions. These are not just things that are happening. These are actions carried out with one particular goal in mind, which is to dictate who wins and loses this November and in Novembers yet to come.
And we in Georgia just happen to be at Ground Zero in that struggle.