When it comes to Donald Trump’s obsession with his 2020 election defeat, there are two broad categories to keep in mind: what the president says and what he does.
By now, the Republican’s rhetoric is no doubt familiar to most Americans. He started lying about the 2020 race before Election Day even arrived, and his campaign against reality has been an ongoing crusade ever since. It would probably be a mistake to suggest that his lies are completely irrelevant — they did help inspire the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and they continue to erode Republican voters’ confidence in the country’s electoral system — but most reasonable people roll their eyes in response to his daily conspiratorial nonsense.
Then there’s the other side of the equation, and the realization that Trump is doing a lot more than just whining incessantly about his loss.
In October, for example, Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who has touted election conspiracy theories, joined the administration as a special government employee with one focus: investigating the 2020 election. A month later, The Washington Post reported that the president was “dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election,” adding that “in recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted.”
That’s the context for FBI agents’ execution of a search warrant Wednesday at the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta. MS NOW reported:
‘The warrant sought a number of records related to 2020 elections,’ Fulton County spokeswoman Jessica Corbitt said Wednesday afternoon.
According to a copy of the warrant obtained and verified by MS NOW, the federal government is seeking evidence of voter fraud, as well as violations of a misdemeanor federal statute requiring elections officials to retain records related to presidential elections for 22 months.
According to Fulton County Commissioner Dana Barrett and another Fulton County source, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, the FBI took “pallets of ballots.” A New York Times report noted that the move “harnesses the investigative power of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. behind baseless claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from him.”
The developments come a month after Trump’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Georgia’s largest county over records related to the 2020 election.
It might be tempting to shrug this off as a pointless political stunt. Fulton County, Georgia, has long been at the center of Trump’s delusional claims, but his conspiracy theories about the results have been thoroughly scrutinized and completely discredited.
If the White House wants federal law enforcement officials to waste their time rereviewing what we already know, that’s a shame for the officials who could be doing real work on behalf of the public, but in the grand scheme of things, it might seem trivial.
But it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the president who controls the Justice Department is intent on prosecuting unnamed foes as part of his hysterical crusade, and the FBI’s latest efforts in Fulton County are another step down the same radical path. And as Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California explained well, this is also part of a larger effort by federal officials to interfere in local elections ahead of this year’s midterms.
The developments in Georgia, in other words, are a dramatic and unnecessary escalation that may very well come with lasting consequences. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
