Over three months after the FBI seized 2020 election materials from Fulton County, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is now seeking the identities and personal information of thousands of people who helped run the vote in the county.
In a court filing Monday, the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections asked a federal judge to quash a new federal grand jury subpoena, which seeks the election workers’ and volunteers’ names, home addresses, emails and phone numbers.
In a statement, Robb Pitts, the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, said the request amounted to “harassment” and accused the DOJ of abusing the criminal process.
“This is yet another act of outrageous federal overreach designed to intimidate and to chill participation in elections,” Pitts said. “I will always stand up for our elections workers and for the truth.”
“Let me be crystal clear. Fulton County will not be intimidated,” he added.
Since his loss in 2020, Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed the election was stolen from him. And Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, has long been a leading target for those in the election denial movement. After 2020, Fulton County election workers and volunteers were flooded with death threats because of false claims of election fraud.
The DOJ’s new request came as midterm primary voting was underway in Georgia.
According to Fulton County’s filing, the subpoena was purportedly approved by a grand jury in northern Georgia, though it was initiated by Dan Bishop, a staunch Trump ally who became U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina last year.
Before Trump fired her for not prosecuting his political enemies vigorously enough, former Attorney General Pam Bondi tapped Bishop to pursue elections-related probes across the country.
Bishop has a history of promoting false fraud claims and, as a member of the House of Representatives, voted against certifying former President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“By any measure, the Subpoena is improper and must be quashed,” Fulton County’s motion, which was signed by county attorney Soo Jo and prominent defense lawyer Abbe Lowell, reads. “Its purpose is to target, harass, and punish the President’s perceived political opponents.”
The motion noted that, instead of requiring a county records official to provide the election workers’ information to the grand jury, the subpoena directs the official to give the information directly to Bishop.
“So by its terms, the Subpoena does not suggest that the grand jury is conducting an investigation of its own (for which it intends to receive the records), but rather, that DOJ is simply conducting its own investigation,” the motion reads.
In fact, nothing in the subpoena indicated “that the grand jury is even aware of this investigation, that the records will be returned to the grand jury, or that the grand jury would knowingly participate in a politicized abuse of its subpoena process,” Fulton County’s motion alleged.
According to the subpoena itself, which was issued in mid-April, the new request and the FBI’s raid are linked.
If the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections had any questions about the new request, the document directed it to reach out to Hugh Evans, an Atlanta-based FBI special agent.
Earlier this year, Evans was assigned to investigate voter fraud claims within a criminal referral from Ken Olsen, a notorious election conspiracist whom Trump hired to investigate the 2020 election. Evans was behind the abnormal search warrant affidavit that backed the FBI’s raid in January.
In addition to basing the document on debunked claims from notorious figures in the election denial movement, Evans’ affidavit did not identify a suspect. Instead, it claimed that the bureau was investigating “unknown persons” for potential violations of election record retention rules and voter fraud laws.
It’s unclear why the subpoena, if approved by a grand jury in Georgia, was issued by Bishop’s office in North Carolina. It claimed that the requested material may be used in a federal trial in Georgia “at some point in the future.”
Thomas Albus, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, has been defending the federal government in Fulton County’s lawsuit seeking the return of the sensitive election records, which included original ballots.
Like Bishop, Bondi also tapped Albus to look into election fraud claims.
A new timeline of the FBI’s Fulton County criminal investigation, released by the DOJ last week, indicated that the bureau initiated the probe just days after receiving Olsen’s referral. It also carried out the raid 14 days after formally opening its investigation.
In its lawsuit, Fulton County has argued that the DOJ used the criminal referral to circumvent proceedings in the Civil Rights Division’s ongoing lawsuit against the county, which sought the same election documents seized by the FBI.
