Fulton County: A dress rehearsal for election theft?

When FBI agents raided an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia, last week, carting off 700 boxes of ballots and related documents, some commentators shrugged that it was just another doomed attempt by President Trump to substantiate his “big lie” of the stolen 2020 election. But the real “goal is likely far more nefarious,” said Mary Ellen Klas in Bloomberg. Facing a GOP wipeout in November’s midterms, which would end his “ability to fend off accountability,” Trump is mobilizing the government to find or create evidence of electoral malfeasance in Democratic precincts, as a pretext for Republicans “taking control of ballots in key states in November.” Trump himself confirmed the plan this week, declaring that he wants to “nationalize the elections” and have the federal government—meaning Republicans—tally ballots in states he deems guilty of electoral “corruption.” His lackeys are ready to do the dirty work: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s de facto “voter fraud” czar, was on site for the Fulton raid. By statute, the nation’s top spy boss is barred from involvement in domestic law enforcement. But as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained it, Gabbard is “committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again.”

Trump will certainly “try to tamper with the midterms,” said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch. But to understand last week’s raid we shouldn’t discount “the president’s aggrieved paranoia about Georgia,” and Fulton County in particular. Bogus tales of shenanigans by Black poll workers at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena are among Trump’s favorite lies to explain his 2020 loss in the Peach State. And it was Fulton’s district attorney, Fani Willis, who later indicted Trump for trying to overturn the election—including by pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes”—forcing him through the humiliation of fingerprinting and a mug shot. This raid may have been partly revenge for those indignities, partly pre-emptive therapy for the Right’s next “painful election defeat.”

This is about more “than simply keeping Trump happy,” said Philip Bump in MS.now. Days before the raid, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, suggesting the Trump administration would withdraw ICE agents from his state if he handed over all the state’s voter records. Minnesota—one of two dozen mostly Democratic-led states the administration has sued to get their voter rolls—refused the request. Is the big plan to identify and purge Democratic voters, or merely to “gin up” more bogus claims of fraud? We don’t know. But the “threat to American democracy” could not be more villainous if it were spelled out in “letters clipped from newspapers and magazines.”

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The president’s gambit is working, said Jeet Heer in The Nation. Even if Gabbard and FBI boss Kash Patel find no crimes in Fulton, and even if Democrats recapture the House in November, Trump will point to stunts like the Georgia raid “to justify ignoring congressional oversight.” We’re facing horrors far worse than that, said David French in The New York Times. The administration is already defying court orders, and is already deploying masked agents to terrorize Latino and minority communities. In November, how many minority voters will risk a trip to their polling station? And how many, when they get there, will find “they’re no longer on the voting rolls?” Yes, it’s only February. But Trump is stealing the midterms, or trying to, right now “in front of our eyes.”