Request to Fulton county underscores determination to revive president’s falsehoods about election he lost
The justice department on Thursday asked election officials in Fulton county, Georgia to turn over records related to the 2020 election, a request that underscores how the administration is trying to revive one of the president’s biggest falsehoods about the election he lost five years ago.
Investigators have cleared Fulton county of malfeasance in 2020. Nonetheless, a Republican majority on the board voted to re-open the investigation last year. On the night of the 2024 presidential election, the board voted to subpoena a slew of documents. This summer, the board passed a resolution asking the justice department to intervene and help them get the documents. The subpoenas issued last year seek records related to voter lists, chain of custody forms, ballot images, security seals, and ballot scanner paperwork.
The 30 October letter from the department’s civil rights division, obtained by the Guardian, asks Fulton county to turn over a slew of records that were subpoenaed by the state election board. The letter’s existence was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Transparency seems to have been frustrated at multiple turns in Georgia,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who leads the civil rights division, wrote in the letter. She also said the voting section had received correspondence from “voter transparency advocates” of “multiple instances of government obstruction of transparency requests, including high-resolution ballot scans, signature verification documentation, and various metadata requests”. She asked the county to turn over the records within 15 days.
