Federal agents have seized voting records in Democratic-run Fulton County, Georgia, and Republican-run Maricopa County, Arizona, as President Donald Trump pushes a new review of the 2020 vote and prepares a primetime White House address on Thursday night.
Who Holds the Levers
Trump is expected to use the White House stage to keep pressing his claims about the 2020 election six years after he lost to Joe Biden. That’s the machinery of power on display: the president, the federal agents, the agencies, the address to the nation. Since returning to office, he has launched a review of the vote and tapped Kurt Olsen, a lawyer known in the world of election conspiracy theorists, to head the probe.
The federal sweep has already reached into county election records in two major metropolitan swing state counties that figured prominently in 2020 conspiracy theories. AP said a search warrant affidavit filed in the Fulton County case was full of old, debunked conspiracy theories about the vote in the county. The FBI reassigned hundreds of analysts to go through the material. That’s a lot of taxpayer-funded labor aimed at a story the record has already buried.
What the Record Says
The people Trump appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies and intelligence departments all said after the election that the vote was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference. In his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite that history, and AP said he was expected to try again with his address to the nation.
The paper trail keeps cutting against the spectacle. AP said there has been an enormous amount of reviews of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before judges the president appointed himself. Numerous audits, recounts and investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with the vote or count. Trump’s own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there were no signs of significant fraud, and Trump’s appointee to run the agency that watches for cyberattacks on American election infrastructure, Chris Krebs, declared that the 2020 election was secure and there were no signs of tampering.
Trump fired Krebs and demanded an investigation of him upon returning to power in 2025. That’s the hierarchy speaking plainly. Loyalty gets rewarded. Facts get punished.
The Cost of Manufactured Doubt
AP said Trump has already appointed loyalists who have echoed his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and has made clear he expects everyone to follow his lead. Many of his nominees have refused to directly answer who won in 2020, instead tersely noting that Biden became president. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to become the next national intelligence director, said at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday, “He had the most electoral votes. He was declared the winner.” When Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, asked, “And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins or the person who loses?” Clayton replied, “That’s your characterization. I’m not going to continue to do this.”
Trump has also embraced baroque conspiracy theories about an international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines, theories that have led to libel suits against his allies when they’ve repeated the claims. Ahead of his speech, Trump teased “really big news” and said “it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.” Election experts feared another round of falsehoods. Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting the state officials who run elections, said, “There has been six-plus years of consistent findings from the intelligence community and from everyone who’s looked at it that there was no foreign interference in 2020, and our voting systems were secure and accurate. I suppose the president could come up with some new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence.”
The state apparatus has already spent heavily on this obsession. David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Integrity & Research, said, “He has committed untold taxpayer resources. They’ve found nothing.”
Last year, Trump signed a federal document as part of a regular review of possible foreign influence in elections that declared “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election.” An intelligence assessment completed on Jan. 7, 2021, in Trump’s last days in office found no foreign tampering with vote totals or election equipment in 2020.
The conspiracy machine keeps grinding anyway. One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory. AP said Venezuela’s former president, Nicolas Maduro, is currently awaiting trial in Manhattan on federal charges of drug trafficking after the U.S. military took him from that country’s capital.
Those theories have also produced a trail of payouts. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle one lawsuit over airing those claims and others on the air in late 2020. Conservative networks Newsmax and One America News have also reached settlements with voting companies over airing those allegations. A Denver jury found that Mike Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy theorist who Trump this week endorsed as a Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, defamed an employee with a voting machine company by calling him a traitor.
Becker said there has been a clear pattern over the six years of election conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s loss. He said conspiracy theorists, including Trump himself, make sweeping allegations in public, sometimes with what seems to be massive reams of documentation from elaborate election databases, but they’ve lost regularly in court, where the threshold is whether there’s any factual basis to the claims. Becker said, “If someone’s alleging a crime that occurred six years ago, we shouldn’t be responding to their claims. We should be demanding they meet the burden of proof.”