FBI Raids Fulton County, Georgia To Seize Ballots On Behalf Of A Guy Who Refuses To Believe He Lost The 2020 Election

Trump’s going to win the election he lost, no matter what he has to do to make that happen. Surrounding himself with a better set of sycophants this time around has really allowed him to gain some ground in his “be the despot you wish to see in the world” efforts.

His top appointees are just as willing to lie, defame, deride, and overstep the long-accepted limitations of their positions as the president himself. Now that Trump has pardoned the people who raided the Capitol on his behalf in January 2021, he’s going after everyone and everything that pissed him off about that particular election cycle.

Trump’s Revenge Time Machine is taking him and his administration back to Georgia to engage in an unprecedented seizure of voting records, as ABC News reports:

Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center.

[…]

The search warrant authorized the FBI to search for “All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election,” in addition to tabulator tapes from voting machines and 2020 voter rolls, among other documents, according to a copy of the warrant obtained by ABC affiliate WSB. 

The warrant says the material “constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense” and had been “used as the means of committing a criminal offense.”  It was signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

It’s not surprising that Trump would attempt to extract some sort of penance from Georgia after he failed to convert that state into electoral college votes. The governor of the state, Brian Kemp, did all he could to swing the state back into Trump’s favor post-election, including being sued by the DNC for claiming (with zero facts in evidence) that the Democratic party had “hacked” his state’s voting machines.

Trump kept this issue alive by bringing Heather Honey — a fellow 2020 election denier from Georgia — into the in-group, appointing her to a high-level position in the DHS where she would [vomits] help oversee future election security efforts.

What is surprising is that any judge would sign this warrant. The allegations range from “threadbare” to “hallucinatory.”

Specifically, the warrant listed possible violations of two statutes — one which requires election records to be retained for a certain amount of time, and another which outlines criminal penalties for people, including election officials, who intimidate voters or to knowingly procure false votes or false voter registrations.

Records were seized, which means it’s unlikely records were deleted prematurely. And there’s been nothing shown to this point that any sort of voter intimidation occurred… at least not on the behalf of the Democratic Party.

This appears to be voter intimidation of a different sort. Last month, the DOJ sued Fulton County (where the raid took place) for access to 2020 election records. This followed attempts to hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the 2020 election — acts that included Trump asking the Secretary of State to “find” the votes needed to swing the state, as well as its targeting of Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who brought election interference charges against the then-outgoing Trump.

And, for some fucking reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard attended the raid to seize these voting records.

Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country’s spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.

Asked about the rationale for her visit to Georgia, a senior administration official said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”

Whatever, “senior administration official.” This is Gabbard hoping to show up on Trump’s radar again, after being sidelined during actual foreign-facing activity, like the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president. Perhaps she’s tired of seeing Kristi Noem flouncing from photo op to photo op as Barbie-in-Chief of the DHS’s invasion of the United States.

I mean…

Two senior officials with knowledge of the matter said Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County was unnecessary and was not requested by the Justice Department. 

Yes, it’s another performance from the most performative administration in US history. And it will always play well because people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like. The GOP is a flat circle, or perhaps more accurately, a human centipede.

Breaking up this endless cycle of shit ingestion and shit creation are the side effects of this sort of mutual masturbation: the constant shedding of talent from agencies that already don’t have enough of it, thanks to the administration’s constant purging of anyone who’s not MAGA enough.

The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was forced out this month after questioning the Justice Department’s renewed push to probe Fulton County’s role in the 2020 election, two people familiar with the matter told MS NOW.

Paul Brown was ousted after expressing concerns about the FBI’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s longstanding and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in the county anchored by Atlanta, and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election, according to the sources, who spoke to MS NOW on condition of anonymity.

Remember all the shit we talked about the USSR and its efforts to rid itself of anyone but party loyalists? Well, we’re doing it right here and now, nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The GOP says there’s nothing wrong with this as long as it’s the GOP doing it. The MAGA faithful have no problem with this as long as it’s the MAGA front doing it. And the rest of us are expected to live with it, because the opposition party still seems to believe there’s a polite, non-confrontational set of options to be deployed. Let’s hope they’ll realize that’s no longer the case long before they have to issue a strongly-worded social media post about objecting to being first against the wall.