Trump justice department seeks 2020 election records from Georgia county | US elections 2020
ministry of justice on thursday He asked election officials The demand in Georgia’s Fulton County to turn over records related to the 2020 election is one that underscores how the administration is trying to revive one of the president’s biggest lies about the election he lost five years ago.
Investigators cleared Malpractice in Fulton County 2020. However, the Republican majority on the board voted in favor reopen Last year’s investigation 2024 presidential election night, board votes to subpoena a lot of documents. This summer, the board adopted a resolution requesting the justice department. intervene and help them get the documents. The subpoenas, issued last year, seek records related to voter rolls, chain of custody forms, ballot images, security seals and ballot scanner paperwork.
30 October letter A document obtained by the Guardian from the department’s civil rights division asks Fulton County to turn over a set of records subpoenaed by the state election board. existence of the letter first reported By Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“Transparency in Georgia appears to have been frustrated too many times,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who leads the civil rights division, wrote in her letter. He also said the voting division had received correspondence from “voter transparency advocates” about “multiple examples of government obstruction of transparency requests, including high-resolution ballot scans, signature verification documents, and various metadata requests.” He asked the district to turn over the records within 15 days.
A spokesperson for the Fulton County Board of Elections did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment beyond the information contained in the letter.
The department’s request comes as the justice department asked 40 states to turn over voter roll information and filed lawsuits against eight states that refused. The White House also recently hired attorney Kurt Olsen, who has worked on cases aimed at overturning the 2020 election results, to work on voting issues. Heather Honey, another prominent election denier whose misleading research was used to cast doubt on the 2020 election results, has also been appointed to an election-related post at the Department of Homeland Security.
To justify its request, the Justice Department cited a provision of the Civil Rights Act that requires election officials to preserve election records and gives the attorney general the right to request those records. The law requires records to be retained for 22 months after the federal election; this has been a long time since the 2020 competition.
The letter also said the department required the registration to comply with two federal statutes, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the federal law that allows the Justice Department to request election records requires the department to provide a “basis” for requesting them. He said this was not included in Dhillon’s letter.
“I see a purpose in the DOJ’s letter: We want to check what you’re doing,” he said. “But the letter cites a general section of federal law without saying anything about why there is a basis for believing that the records they sought would shed light on a violation of federal law. [The] “The DoJ doesn’t go fishing just out of curiosity.”
