President Donald Trump is facing fresh legal peril over his latest efforts to sow doubt about the 2020 election, with lawyers in Georgia preparing to sue after his FBI raided an election hub last week.
Days after FBI agents seized records relating to Trump’s defeat in Georgia six years ago, Fulton County authorities plan to file a motion on Tuesday challenging the move in a bid to force the government to return the ballots, voting records, and other material taken.
“I’ve asked the county attorney to take any and all steps available to fight this criminal search warrant,” said attorney and Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.
“We want to ask for forensic accounting, we want the documents to stay in the State of Georgia under seal, and we want to do whatever we can to protect voter information.”
The administration has not disclosed the purpose of the search, which raised eyebrows last week, partly because of the mysterious appearance of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
“My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counterintelligence (CI), foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity,” Gabbard wrote in a post on Monday night after Democrats demanded an explanation.
But the move is nonetheless contentious, with Trump warning this week that “interesting things” were about to happen in Georgia as he insisted, yet again, that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
As the midterms loom in November, the president also urged Republicans to seize control of elections more broadly and place voting under federal authority—one of his most explicit signs yet that he wants to game the system.
“The Republicans should say, we want to take over,” Trump said, claiming without evidence that people were being “brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally.”
“We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
The FBI’s raid took place despite dozens of challenges to the results of the 2020 election yielding no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud.
After losing the state to Joe Biden that year, Trump personally pressured state officials, famously urging Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse the result.
His allies also pursued debunked claims of fraud, targeted local election workers, and supported fake electors who falsely claimed Trump had won the state.
Those actions ultimately led to the president being indicted for racketeering, but the Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidential immunity for acts that take place in office helped him avoid trial.
Despite this, Trump used a softball interview on The Dan Bongino Show on Monday to reassert his false claim that Biden “stole” the election that year, and hinted: “You’re going to see something in Georgia.”
A Fulton County official told the Daily Beast the Arrington’s office would file a lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia on Tuesday. The Daily Beast has reached out to the administration for comment.
Asked about the FBI’s seizure of the records last week, FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview on Fox News: “The FBI and the DOJ went in and collected numerous pieces of evidence that the judge authorized us to collect, and what we’re going to do next is go through the voluminous amounts of information collected and continue our investigation. At this point, there’s not much more I can say publicly.”
