Fulton County officials said Tuesday they did not hand over the personal information from thousands of election workers subpoenaed by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a federal probe into Donald Trump’s 2020 loss.
A spokesperson for Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said the Justice Department was given time to respond to Fulton’s motion to quash the subpoena, which was made public Monday. Fulton will not provide the documents until a judge instructs them to do so, the spokesman said.
The sole Republican on the Fulton County Board of Elections, Julie Adams, arrived at U.S. District Court in Atlanta on Tuesday morning and spoke with officials just outside the door to the grand jury suite, which was propped open.
Adams said she had not communicated with other board members about the subpoena and was unaware whether other members were in the building. Adams is supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to investigate the 2020 election, but she is a minority voice on the board. She did not have documents sought in the subpoena.
The subpoena is the latest in the administration’s effort to reexamine the heavily Democratic county’s administration of the 2020 election. Fulton has long been a focus of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud.
The Justice Department subpoena, dated April 17, demands information on the county’s paid and volunteer election workers during the November 2020 election, including their names, duties, addresses, email addresses and personal phone numbers. Dan Bishop, U.S. attorney for North Carolina’s Middle District, wrote in a letter attached to the subpoena that the information was for an ongoing investigation that could later be used in trial.
Bishop has been tapped by the Justice Department to head up the investigation into the 2020 election.
In a legal brief seeking to block the subpoena, Fulton cast the subpoena as politically motivated, accusing the DOJ of weaponizing the grand jury process. County attorneys argued the subpoena is aimed at harassing and punishing the “President’s perceived political opponents.”
Fulton’s attorneys added it would burden election workers’ First Amendment rights and suppress turnout.
“The Subpoena is a chilling escalation in the campaign to terrorize Fulton County election workers, but harassment and political retribution are in no way permissible purposes for a grand jury subpoena,” Fulton’s attorneys said in a Monday legal filing.
Fulton contended the subpoena is overly broad and cannot yield evidence that could result in criminal prosecution.
“Because there is no reason to believe that the records sought by the Subpoena can support a prosecutable criminal case within any applicable statute of limitations, DOJ cannot identify any reasonable interest in such information,” Fulton’s attorneys wrote.
Trump has moved aggressively during his second term to insert the federal government into elections through executive order and other means. After reclaiming the White House, the administration has sent federal agents to seize troves of 2020 election records and sought unredacted voter rolls from states across the country.
In January, FBI agents descended on Fulton County’s election operations center, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records, including ballots. Federal authorities have said they need the records for part of a criminal investigation into 2020 election “irregularities.”
In addition to Fulton, the FBI subpoenaed reams of records from the 2020 election in Maricopa County, Arizona.
Once-fringe activists have now gained prominence during Trump’s second term. Trump has installed election deniers in federal posts and found sympathetic allies at the state and county level, some of whom were cited as witnesses justifying the extraordinary ballot seizure.
Trump has continued to make baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. Multiple vote counts, including a hand-counted audit of every ballot cast, upheld Democrat Joe Biden’s razor-thin victory in Georgia. Court challenges by Trump’s allies failed, and investigators have never found evidence of widespread fraud.
Gowri Ramachandran, the Brennan Center for Justice’s director of elections and security, said in the context of all the other actions taken by the Trump administration, the subpoena looks like a “fishing expedition.”
Ramachandran is hopeful this won’t deter people from working the polls in the midterms and other future elections, but has concerns about what could happen if similar actions against election workers continue.
“If this kind of behavior occurs repeatedly, it definitely has an impact,” she said. “It’s not good for democracy.”
It’s not the first time Trump has targeted Fulton County election workers. A month after the 2020 election, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani played Georgia senators video of vote counting at State Farm Arena that he called a “smoking gun” for election fraud. He said the video showed workers counting “suitcases” full of ballots after ordering Republican observers to leave.
State investigators and the FBI found the video showed only ordinary ballot counting.
Giuliani and Trump continued to accuse election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss of election fraud long after their claims had been disproven. The accusations led to death threats and upended the election workers’ lives.
Freeman and Moss later won a $148 million defamation verdict against Giuliani.
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