The Department of Justice announced Friday it’s suing Georgia as part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to pursue long-debunked 2020 election conspiracies.
The suit demands that the state turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
County officials reportedly told the DOJ that those records are sealed and that the federal government would need a court order to turn them over.
Former President Joe Biden defeated Trump in Georgia by more than 12,000 votes. And in Fulton County, where the county seat is the capital city of Atlanta, was even more overwhelming—a margin of more than 243,000 votes.
Trump has never been able to accept the fact that he is the first GOP presidential candidate to lose the state since 1992, when George H.W. Bush lost to Bill Clinton.
Despite the DOJ’s actions and Trump’s rhetoric over the last five years—including falsely claiming that the election was rigged—it was actually Trump who tried to steal the race.
In January 2021, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pressuring him to certify him as the winner of the race against the will of thousands of Georgia voters. Trump was criminally charged for his attempt to subvert the election, but those charges were dropped earlier this year.
The right has been reeling since Biden’s victory in Georgia, and the state has been the focus of baseless conservative conspiracy theories.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who acted as Trump’s lawyer in a slew of election lawsuits that were thrown out, pushed the conspiracy that two Georgia election workers manipulated vote totals in favor of Biden. After he was sued by plaintiffs Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss for defamation, Giuliani settled for nearly $150 million.
Trump lost Georgia in 2020. And now he’s using the DOJ as a weapon of revenge for that humiliation—and it’s all on taxpayers’ dime.
Oliver Willis
Source link