Are We Seriously Going to Relitigate Trump’s Dozens of Failed 2020 Election Interference Lawsuits?

Here’s a little statement from Robb Pitts, chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners in Georgia, about the ballots cast in the 2020 Presidential election, which as of yesterday were seized by agents of the FBI who raided the elections office.

“All I know is that as long as those boxes had been in the control of the county in this facility, they were safe and secure,” Pitts said. “I can no longer, as chair of this board, satisfy not only the citizens of Atlanta but the citizens of the world that those ballots are still secure.”

That’s because he doesn’t know where the ballots have been taken. They were simply scooped up by the federal government, as part of some kind of probe into Donald Trump’s long reiterated and obsessive insistence that he could not possibly have lost the 2020 election, but instead had it ripped away from him via systematic, large-scale fraud in numerous states. Never mind the fact that Trump won the 2024 election, conducted while Joe Biden was President; he’s still obsessed with 2020. Trump’s official position can thus be inferred that although Democrats successfully cheated on a massive scale in 2020 (while Trump was President), they simply chose not to bother cheating again in 2024, allowing him to regain the presidency. Sure, why not. Now we apparently get to revisit all of his 2020 election grievances again more than five years later. In the wake of the 2020 election, Trump’s campaign filed more than 60 unsuccessful lawsuits challenging these results and the processes involved in them in nine states, ultimately failing in every instance. But why not take another crack at it with a Trump administration apparatus that is far more nakedly partisan and crooked now than it was during Trump’s first term?

President Trump has never stopped promising retribution on this particularly stupid angle—as recently as last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he found time to pivot back to it, saying that the election was “rigged” in 2020 (but not 2024, remember) and that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

And now that they’ve essentially stolen the ballots of Fulton County, Trump’s lackeys will be free to claim pretty much anything they want, with no physical record left for anyone else to check their claims against. This has of course enraged the state of Georgia’s Democratic elected officials, such as Sen. Jon Ossoff, who called the FBI raid a “seismic event” that was part of Trump’s larger campaign to interfere in elections leading up to the upcoming 2026 midterm elections.

“This is a shot across the bow at the midterm elections,” Ossoff said. “He tried to steal power when he lost it in 2020. We have to be prepared for all kinds of schemes and shenanigans. We have to be prepared for him to try to deprive people of their voting rights in Georgia,” Ossoff warned. He is wielding the American government as an instrument of personal revenge and personal power in a way completely unprecedented for the American presidency. This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal.”

Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County?

[image or embed]

— Senator Mark Warner (@markwarner.bsky.social) Jan 28, 2026 at 11:06 PM

Virginia Senator Mark Warner, meanwhile, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, demanded to know why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (conspicuously absent during today’s meeting of Trump’s cabinet) was present at the FBI raid in Fulton County on Wednesday, when her concern is primarily foreign intelligence. Warner said that there were two possible explanations for why Gabbard would be involved in a search “tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election.”

“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy,” Warner said.

When we talk about this move in Georgia reviving Trump’s 2020-2021 push to avoid giving up power, which culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building, we mean that in the stupidest sense possible, even seemingly bringing back into the fold people who had long been kicked out of Trumpland to renew their delusional crusades. There’s no clearer indication of this than Ed Martin, head of the DOJ’s “Weaponization Working Group” (which weaponizes the DOJ to fight “weaponization of the DOJ”) posting a photo on Twitter today of himself side by side with SIDNEY POWELL, and the caption “Good morning, America. How are ya’?” This is a remarkable thing to see, given that Powell, the disgraced lawyer who worked herself into becoming a major QAnon figure as a lawyer for Gen. Michael Flynn and the Trump administration, had been kicked out of the Trump administration’s good graces in 2020 for her embarrassing lack of professionalism, conspiracy nonsense and total failure in filing and litigating election cases. She would go on to be charged alongside Trump in the federal government’s election interference case in Georgia, and in 2023 she flipped on Trump by pleading guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit election interference in Fulton County Superior Court, agreeing to testify in subsequent trials against co-conspirators. Which is to say, Sidney Powell agreed to testify against Trump, and was saved only by the fact that the American people let Trump off the hook by reelecting him in 2024, causing the federal cases to be dropped. And yet here she is, now implied to be involved in some way in getting revenge on Fulton County, back on Team Trump even after directly betraying them.

Sidney Powell got her info from a woman who thought she might be a ghost and learned about election fraud through time travel.

[image or embed]

— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein.bsky.social) Jan 29, 2026 at 11:50 AM

There are no words for how profoundly stupid this all is. At least we can take the tiniest bit of solace in the fact that Georgia election workers such as Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who were harassed and smeared by Trump allies in the wake of the 2020 election did ultimately prevail in their lawsuits against former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who was ordered to pay them $148 million in damages after a 2023 trial. After years of trying to get out of doing so, Giuliani finally coughed up acceptable payment in 2025.

It seems likely, however, that yesterday’s raid is just the starting point for a new witch hunt that will target some of these same dedicated civil servants in Georgia, en route to the ultimate goal: Validating the tantrums of a 79-year-old infant who increasingly wields the powers of an unchallenged dictator. Lord help us all this November.