Georgia election workers are in Trump's sights, again
Tonight's legal roundup: Trump DOJ wants a list of Fulton County election workers; lawsuits challenge Florida gerrymander; and Blanche backtracks.
The Trump Justice Department has demanded the names of every Fulton County election worker and volunteer who helped administer the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Hours after that report, Fulton County authorities told a federal judge that the Trump administration’s recent disclosures confirm the political machinations playing out behind the scenes.
‘Designed to intimidate and bully’
Since the 2020 election, the Fulton County results have been reinforced by years of audits, recounts and lawsuits, but the Trump administration has tried to rewrite the history of his defeat.
Election advocate David Becker, a former Justice Department attorney serving in the Voting Section, told All Rise News that the attempt to identify every Fulton County election worker shows how “desperate” and “pathetic” that effort has become.
For Becker, the “fishing expedition” also demonstrates that Trump’s prosecutors turned up nothing in their criminal investigation.
“The DOJ doesn't know what it's looking for,” Becker said in an interview. “It is unable or unwilling to seek a warrant. I think probably a little bit of both.”
Earlier this year on Jan. 28, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, executing a search warrant that failed to accuse a single person of a crime.
Becker, who’s now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the goal isn’t investigation.
“This is clearly designed to intimidate and bully the ordinary Americans, the public servants who run our elections as county election officials or even volunteer poll workers,” he said. “This subpoena sought not only the names of these thousands of people, our neighbors who volunteered to work long days[…] but also the addresses, the telephone numbers, the email addresses of these individuals.”
Possible Action Item: Protect Your Rights
Are you or someone you know an election worker who’s concerned about government intimidation? The Election Official Legal Defense Network, a project of Becker’s non-profit group, will connect you with pro bono attorneys regardless of political orientation.
It’s a familiar playbook in Fulton County, Ga., where Trump made his infamous phone call pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn his defeat and sent his surrogates to smear poll workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman.
The New York Times reports that Fulton County’s full list of poll workers and volunteers likely numbers in the thousands, showing the massive sweep of the Trump Justice Department’s dragnet.
“This is law enforcement using the vast tools at its disposal in an effort to engage in propaganda and PR,” Becker said. “That’s incredibly dangerous because there are real people here — those thousands of people who volunteered to serve as poll workers and who work as election officials in Fulton County and throughout Georgia.”
A Brennan Center survey demonstrates the chilling effect of those threats: In 2023, nearly half of all respondents (45 percent) told pollsters that they feared for the safety of election workers.
“They’re the best of the best, the people who make sure we all have a voice in our elections,” Becker said of poll workers. “We should be thanking them after 2020, when they were working in the middle of Covid and getting sick. We should have thrown them a parade, and instead, they have been subjected to years upon years of abuse. And it’s culminating now with abuse coming from the very powerful federal government.”
‘The pleasure of the President’
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee forced prosecutors to reveal more information about the origins of the criminal investigation that led to the seizure of the ballots.
Fulton County said in a new filing on Tuesday that the timeline confirms prosecutors’ “abuse of the warrant power.”
On Jan. 5, 2026, Trump’s sanctioned former 2020 election lawyer Kurt Olsen referred the criminal investigation, weeks before the raid on Fulton County.
“Notably, [the Justice Department] concedes that it opened this investigation not in response to any new allegation of wrongdoing whatsoever, but at the urging of Kurt Olsen, who serves at the pleasure of the President,” the county’s new legal brief states. “And, for reasons that [the Justice Department] has declined to articulate, the FBI acted almost immediately after Mr. Olsen snapped his fingers.”
At least two courts in Arizona have sanctioned Olsen for election-related lies, including a $122,000 fine for “false, misleading or unsupported statements” in federal court — and a separate rebuke from the state’s supreme court for his “unequivocally false” statements.
“The admission that Mr. Olsen’s referral triggered an immediate investigation raises disturbing questions about whether non-DOJ employees, who serve at the pleasure of the President, have the unilateral authority to force the FBI to investigate a criminal matter,” Fulton County said.
Before opening the criminal investigation, the Trump Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — led by fellow 2020 election denier Harmeet Dhillon — tried to obtain the ballots through two civil lawsuits, but that effort stumbled after judges made clear that any disclosure of the ballots would involve judicial oversight.
Fulton County argues that the criminal process was the Trump Justice Department’s “backdoor” for its failing civil litigation — and that Dhillon admitted as much on the right-wing outlet Real America’s Voice.
“[A]fter we’ve tried to go through the front door and get these materials voluntarily, if they’re not complying—to help us help them do their jobs correctly—then it may become criminal in nature,” Dhillon said.
Judge Boulee hasn’t yet ruled on whether to grant a request to return the ballots, which would require finding a “callous disregard” of the county’s rights.
It’s a high bar: Federal investigators have wide discretion over their handling of seized materials, and Fourth Amendment challenges to the legal adequacy of a search warrant typically occur after an indictment. That’s why Donald Trump ultimately lost his attempt to throw a wrench in the FBI’s investigation of highly classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, despite an early victory in the court of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
The 11th Circuit overruled Cannon’s “radical” injunction, and its jurisdiction also includes Georgia.
However Fulton County’s challenge ultimately fares, it’s already revealed how Trump’s election deniers spearheaded the latest phase of his campaign to discredit the 2020 election. The litigation also uncovered new details about how flailing and fruitless that effort has been.
Read Fulton County’s latest filing here.
Look out for the full video interview with David Becker soon on the All Rise News playlist on Legal AF.
Also in tonight’s legal roundup:
* Why Florida’s state constitution could doom DeSantis’s gerrymander.
* How Todd Blanche is already backtracking on the SPLC.
* Judge refers Trump DOJ lawyer for possible discipline.
