FBI Director Kash Patel has green-lit a frantic scramble to find evidence supporting one of President Donald Trump’s biggest and most thoroughly debunked theories.
The FBI is putting resources into what it is calling a “priority” investigation related to the 2020 election in Georgia, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter—an extraordinary deployment of the nation’s top law enforcement agency in service of Trump’s long-running election fraud conspiracy theories.
Documents obtained by MS NOW show that FBI leadership is authorizing intelligence analysts to work overtime, including on weekends and holidays, and that Patel is ordering personnel from field offices across the entire country to participate in the Atlanta-based probe.
“In support of the Director’s Office priority effort, the Directorate of Intelligence and Criminal Division are requesting all FBI field offices to immediately surge support to an FBI Atlanta priority investigation,” reads an unclassified memo issued this week.
The memo specifies that 260 FBI intelligence officials must be contributed by field offices, with the number from each office determined by its size. Dozens of FBI agents are also working the case, separate from the intelligence analysts. Each analyst is expected to complete 708 record checks by July 17. “Overtime (including weekends and holidays) has been authorized,” the memo states.
One official described what analysts are hunting for. “Looking for derogatory information is the short answer,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “The idea is to build a case. Look at associations between people, look into their social media, their business activity, travel, contact with other investigative subjects.”
The investigation follows an FBI raid in January in which agents executed a search warrant and seized more than 600 boxes of records relating to the 2020 election from storage in Fulton County, Georgia, including physical ballots, ballot images, voter rolls, and tabulation materials. When the basis for the search warrant was unsealed, it became clear it relied heavily on claims that had already been debunked—including by Republican-led investigations in Georgia itself.
Joe Biden beat Trump in Georgia in 2020 by 11,779 votes. The result was affirmed by multiple audits, certifications, and court rulings. Trump has spent years promoting claims that the election was stolen, and his administration has now deployed the full machinery of the FBI to try to prove it.
The scale of the operation is striking. Surging 260 intelligence analysts from every field office in the country, authorizing holiday overtime, and setting hard deadlines for records checks represent a significant commitment of federal law enforcement resources to an investigation built, at least in part, on a foundation that multiple Republican-led probes have already examined and rejected.
The White House and the FBI have been contacted for comment.
