As my colleague Matt Margolis and I reported on Wednesday, the FBI executed search warrants on a Fulton County elections facility in Union City, Ga., just south of Atlanta. The search involved questions about the 2020 election, which remains unresolved in the minds of a lot of people, especially conservatives.
“They took 24 pallets, which encompasses 656 boxes of 2020 election documents,” Ché Alexander, Fulton County clerk of superior and magistrate courts, told WSB-TV’s Mark Winne on Wednesday night.
That’s an awful lot of documentation. Matt explained some of the logistics of the FBI action:
That investigation exposed a serious chain-of-custody failure in Fulton County that potentially affected about 315,000 votes. At the center of the problem were unsigned tabulation tapes, a basic safeguard required to certify election results. Even Ann Brumbaugh, an attorney for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, acknowledged that the tapes were never signed.
Those signatures are the only legal confirmation that reported vote totals are legitimate. Without them, confidence in Fulton County’s 2020 results erodes quickly. The stakes were enormous given Georgia’s razor-thin outcome, with Joe Biden declared the winner by just over 11,000 votes. Taken together, these findings make it increasingly clear that concerns about Georgia’s 2020 election deserved far more serious attention than they received.
Admittedly, I might have womp-womped a bit about how the investigation into the 2020 election may be a moral victory, but it doesn’t erase the results or the four years of Biden administration misery:
Even if there’s enough evidence to swing the election for Trump, Georgia only has 16 electoral votes. The final electoral college total was 306 for Biden and 232 for Trump, so flipping Georgia would change the total to 290-248. It’s a lot closer, but it still leaves Trump 22 electoral college votes short of a win.
The other part of this equation is that, unless the FBI is working on some really cool time-travel technology, flipping Georgia red for 2020 won’t undo the Biden years. It won’t reverse the lawfare that that administration undertook. It won’t undo the otherization of the unvaccinated. It won’t erase the Independence Hall speech that made Biden look like the authoritarian that the left wants Trump to be.
Related: FBI Raid Vindicates Georgia Election Concerns — Even If It Changes Nothing
But what might be more telling than anything else is the reaction of Fulton County Democrats to Wednesday’s actions. One state senator spoke about it at the Gold Dome.
“The message that we're sending voters is that truth is optional, facts are partisan, and elections are only legitimate when Republicans win,” said State Sen. Elena Parent (D- 44th District) from the floor of the Georgia state legislature.
That’s par for the course on what you might expect from a Democrat. However, Parent fails to recognize that her party does this with every election when a Democrat loses — compared to just one Republican loss. But it gets even better at the county level.
“I want to be crystal clear. Fulton County has been targeted for years because I stood up to Donald Trump's big lie and refused to bend to the pressure,” said Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts. “In 2020, I told him, and others, including then-Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, then-Congressman Matt Gaetz, and the president himself, to stay the hell out of Fulton County. I meant it then, and I mean it today. Every audit, every recount, every court ruling, has confirmed what we the people of Fulton County already knew: Our elections were fair and accurate, and every legal vote was counted.”
There’s a lot of moralizing, defensiveness, and defiance from Fulton County’s Democrats, but I can’t help but think that it could lead to a perception problem. (My colleague Scott Pinsker might refer to it as “PR Fallout.”)
For all their bluster and heated rhetoric, officials show no convincing confidence that the FBI won’t find anything corrupt or wrong. Fulton County Democrats could easily — and calmly — say, “Everything in this election was above board, and the FBI’s investigation will bear that out.” Instead, we get legislators like Parents calling Republicans sore losers and local officials like Pitts defiantly telling the administration to “stay the hell out” of the county.
If the Democrats in Fulton County are right that the election was fair and honest, they sure aren’t acting like it. And that should be more than enough to trigger our suspicions.
Like what you’re reading? There’s a lot more where that came from.
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