FBI raid in Georgia highlights Trump
DENVER (AP) — Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020. But for more than five years he has been trying to convince Americans that the opposite is true by falsely saying the election was marred by widespread fraud.
Now that he is president again, Trump is pressuring the federal government to back up those false claims.
On Wednesday, the FBI served a search warrant at the Fulton County, Georgia, election headquarters, which includes most of Atlanta, seeking ballots from the 2020 election. This 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 man has obsessions, like a good number of people, but he is the only one who has the full power of the United States behind him,” said Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor.
Hasen and many others noted that Trump’s use of the FBI to pursue his obsession with the 2020 election is part of a pattern in which the president transforms the federal government into his personal tool of revenge.
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Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., compared the search to the Minnesota immigration crackdown that killed two U.S. citizen protesters, launched by Trump as his latest blow against the state’s governor, who was running against him as Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate in 2024.
“From Minnesota to Georgia, exposed to the entire world, there is a president who spirals out of control and uses federal law enforcement as an irresponsible instrument of personal power and revenge,” Ossoff said in a statement.
It also comes as election officials across the country are beginning to prepare for the 2026 midterm elections, where Trump is fighting to help his party maintain its control of Congress. Noting that Trump in 2020 contemplated using the military to seize voting machines after his defeat, some fear he is laying the groundwork for a similar move in the fall.
“Georgia is a model,” said Kristin Nabers of the left-wing group All Voting Is Local. “If they can get away with taking election materials here, what’s to stop them from taking election materials or machines from some other state after they lose?”
Georgia has been at the center of Trump’s 2020 obsession. He infamously called Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, asking him to “find” 11,780 more votes for Trump so he could be declared the winner of the state. Raffensperger refused, noting that repeated reviews confirmed that Democrat Joe Biden had narrowly won Georgia.
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These were part of a series of reviews in battleground states, often led by Republicans, that affirmed Biden’s victory, including Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Trump also lost dozens of court cases challenging the election results and his own attorney general at the time said there was no evidence of widespread fraud.
His allies who repeated his lies have been successfully sued for defamation. That includes former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who settled with two Georgia election workers after a court ruled he owed them $148 million for defaming them after the 2020 election.
Voting machine companies have also filed defamation cases against some conservative-leaning news sites that aired unsubstantiated claims that their equipment was linked to fraud in 2020. News settled one of those cases by agreeing to pay $787 million after a judge ruled it was “crystal clear” that none of the allegations were true.
Trump’s push to include Georgia in his column also prompted an ill-fated attempt to prosecute him and some of his allies by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat. The case collapsed after Willis was removed over conflict of interest concerns, and Trump has since sought damages from the office.
On his first day in office, Trump rewarded some of those who helped him try to overturn the results of the 2020 election by pardoning, commuting or promising to dismiss the cases of about 1,500 people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. He later signed an executive order trying to establish new rules for state election systems and voting procedures, although that has been repeatedly blocked by judges who have ruled that the Constitution gives the states, and in some cases Congress, control of elections rather than the president.
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As part of his retaliation campaign, Trump has also talked about wanting to criminally charge lawmakers who served on the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, suggesting that Biden’s protective pardons for them are legally invalid. He has targeted a former cybersecurity official who assured the public in 2020 that the election was secure.
During a year of presidential duties, from dealing with the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to shepherding sweeping tax and spending legislation through Congress, Trump has found time to move the issue to 2020. He has falsely called the election rigged, said Democrats cheated and even installed a plaque in the White House claiming Biden took office after “the most corrupt election in history.”
David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said he was skeptical that the FBI’s search in Georgia would lead to successful prosecutions. Trump has demanded charges against several enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James, which have stalled in court.
“A lot of what this administration has done is file complaints on social media instead of going to court,” Becker said. “I suspect it’s more about poisoning the well by 2026.”