These Trump fools and grifters are outright ludicrous — but extremely dangerous too

The moment that FBI agents showed up with a search warrant at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, one of two things had to be true.

The first was that federal investigators must have made an important breakthrough, uncovering previously unknown evidence that fraud had been committed in Georgia’s 2020 election. After all, you can’t get a search warrant without probable cause of a crime, right? Given the presence at the scene of Tulsi Gabbard, our director of national intelligence, that evidence might even include foreign interference!

The second, more likely possibility was that federal investigators had no new evidence of election fraud, and no old evidence of election fraud. Instead, they had merely repackaged discredited, long-ago-disproved allegations in an effort to please President Donald Trump and hornswoggle a gullible federal magistrate into issuing a search warrant.

With release of the FBI affidavit this week, we know the hornswoggle scenario to be the correct one. There is nothing new in those documents, no evidence of crime or even of criminal intent. It is an embarrassment to the FBI and to the magistrate judge who approved the search.

In that FBI affidavit, for example, the agency claims that Republican auditors during one of three recounts of the 2020 ballots claimed to have found many “pristine,” unfolded ballots that may have been smuggled into the vote count on behalf of Joe Biden.

That much is true. Such claims were indeed made. What the affidavit does not tell us — and did not tell the magistrate judge — is that those claims were already fully investigated and proved to be false.

One GOP recount auditor told state investigators they would find these suspiciously “pristine” ballots in Box 5, Batches 28-36. So investigators looked in Box 5, Batches 28-36.

Hmmm. No such ballots existed.

The auditor then claimed to have been mistaken, suggesting that she had instead found the fake ballots in Box 135, Batches 28-36. Again, investigators looked. Again, the ballots did not exist, nor did the batches in which they were supposedly held.

So why did federal prosecutors and FBI agents include previously disproved allegations in a search warrant? Again, one of two things must be true:

• The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI did not know that the allegations had been disproved, in which case they are grossly incompetent.
• The U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI did know that the allegations had been disproved but included them anyway, in which case they deceived the magistrate.

The FBI affidavit is full of similar examples of alleged “discrepancies” presented as fact or at least as open questions, when in reality they had long ago been investigated and fully explained. The affidavit also relies heavily on allegations by well-known election conspiracy theorists with reputations that are questionable at best, yet its narrative gives the unwary reader no hint of that.

One section, for example, features allegations by a man named Clay Parikh, whom the FBI portrays as some kind of election security expert. He is not. To the contrary, he’s part of the bizarre “stolen election” subculture that travels the country making false and extraordinary claims that time and again are proved to have no basis in fact.

In the past, Parikh has worked with election conspiracy nut Mike Lindell, of MyPillow fame, who himself faces millions of dollars in damages for false election-related statements. In 2023, Parikh was also a star witness in an Arizona lawsuit filed by Kari Lake, who alleged that fraud had caused her defeat in a race for governor.

In the suit, Lake demanded that the outcome be overturned and that she be named as governor. Her case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Today, Parikh is a “special government employee” in the Trump administration, hired for “election integrity” work. Another prominent witness in Lake’s failed Arizona case, Heather Honey, was involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and is infamous in part for her absurd claim that in Pennsylvania, more people had voted than were registered to vote.

Today, Honey is “deputy assistant secretary for election integrity” in the Department of Homeland Security.

Lake’s lead attorney in that Arizona case, Kurt Olsen, was also heavily involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. The Arizona Supreme Court later sanctioned Olsen for making false statements to the court in that Lake case.

Today, Olsen is also a “special government employee” in the Trump administration, with the title of “Director of Election Security and Integrity.” In fact, the FBI affidavit credits Olsen for making the criminal referral that began its Fulton County investigation.

It’s just fools and grifters from top to bottom.

• Jay Bookman covered Georgia and national politics for nearly 30 years for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, earning numerous national, regional and state journalism awards. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award and the Walker Stone Award for outstanding editorial writing, and is the only two-time winner of the Pulliam Fellowship granted by the Society of Professional Journalists. He is also the author of "Caught in the Current," published by St. Martin's Press. Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.