Eliana Willis

Raid on Fulton county election office is part of the Trump administration’s wider US push to fuel false claims of fraudThe FBI raid on the Fulton county election office Wednesday was an aggressive new front in Donald Trump’s effort to use his 2020 election loss to continue to sow doubt about American elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.As Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, false claims of malfeasance during ballot-counting in Atlanta became a key part of the big lie about a stolen election. Misleading surveillance video showing ballots being retrieved from suitcases became the basis for a myth that fraudulent ballots were included in the tally. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and a close ally at the time, was ordered to pay $148.1m to the election workers as part of a libel suit for spreading lies about them. He later settled. Continue reading… More

Lawmakers question national intelligence head’s fitness for office after overt, unexplained appearanceDemocratic lawmakers are raising questions about why Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s director of national intelligence, was “lurking” in Fulton county on Wednesday while FBI agents carted off boxes of 2020 election documents.Gabbard visited an elections hub in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, on Wednesday as the FBI executed a search warrant for records related to the 2020 election. The warrant sought all ballots from the 2020 election in the county, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls, according to a warrant obtained by the Guardian. Continue reading… More

Ex-special counsel testifies to Republican-led House panel that he followed law in holding president to accountUS politics live – latest updatesJack Smith, the former special counsel, has defended his decision to seek criminal charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election in his first and perhaps only public appearance to discuss the cases after they were dropped last year.“No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account,” Smith said in his opening remarks before the House judiciary committee. “So that is what I did.” Continue reading… More

President says he ‘should have’ used national guard to seize machines in support of false claim that election was riggedDonald Trump has said he regrets not getting the US national guard to seize voting machines after his 2020 election defeat ended his first presidency, as he continues to falsely claim that he won the race. But he has also questioned whether national guard troops would be “sophisticated enough” to pull something like that off.Trump made those remarks in an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday. The outlet had questioned him about a plan reportedly floated in late 2020, after he lost that year’s presidential election to Joe Biden, to seize voting machines in several key swing states in an effort to search for evidence of fraud. Continue reading… More

Fulton county DA hits back at Republican opponents who investigated her over relationship with special prosecutorFulton county district attorney Fani Willis testified on Wednesday at a combative Georgia state senate committee about her prosecution of Donald Trump for election interference.The state senate created the special committee in early 2024 to investigate Willis after the revelation that she had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, special prosecutor in the Trump case, which ultimately derailed the prosecution of the now-re-elected president. Continue reading… More