Did Trump secretly order an illegal recount of the 2020 election?
The President and his team have been caught in lies. New information is casting further doubt on the raid of a Georgia election office.
In a portion of an NBC interview this week, Donald Trump said something that should have set off blaring alarm bells across the country. He suggested FBI agents who raided a Georgia election office were going to determine who “really won” the 2020 election. If that was the objective, it’s illegal. But now the story is getting worse. Trump is pointing fingers inside his administration, and — in doing so — raising the specter of an even wider coverup.
That remark — almost tossed off in passing — is far more revealing than anything else the administration has said about the controversial raid in the past week. For days now, Trump’s team has insisted the purpose of the operation was to investigate “foreign interference.” That’s the official story. That’s the legal cover from the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, whose leader was caught by Reuters lurking at the raid.
But Trump himself may have let the incriminating part slip.
If federal agents were indeed sent to Georgia to “find out the true winner” of a presidential election decided five years ago, that has nothing to do with an intelligence investigation into foreign meddling. That’s a blatant attempt to relitigate a state’s certified election results using federal power, which would be an abuse of authority so extraordinary that it raises constitutional and criminal questions that have never been tested in our country’s history.
No president has ever forcibly taken voter’s ballots to do his own, personal recount of an election. Perhaps until now.
The “official” explanation for why this raid happened demands a remarkable suspension of disbelief. We are supposed to believe that — five years after the 2020 election that Trump contested — there is suddenly new evidence of foreign interference in the exact place where he famously pressured officials to “find” him 11,000 votes in 2020? We are supposed to believe that this discovery just happened to surface after he returned to office? And we are supposed to accept that the investigation coincidentally involves the very ballots tied to his baseless claims that the election was stolen from him?
Also, the White House wants us to believe it had nothing to do with it. “I’m not involved,” Trump told NBC News. He suggested the investigation emerged organically, and the FBI is handling it independently.
That’s one hell of a coincidence.
When Trump was asked why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was physically present at the Fulton County site, he first claimed he didn’t know. Those were his words: “I don’t know.” That answer might have stood, if Gabbard hadn’t already sent Congress a letter saying, in black and white, that her presence was “requested by the President.”
Yesterday, the story got worse. When Trump was confronted with that contradiction, he changed his story again. He said Attorney General Pam Bondi had directed Gabbard to be there. That suggests the President of the United States has also been communicating with his Attorney General about the FBI raid — not just with his Director of National Intelligence — not to mention the fact that Tru spoke by phone with FBI agents at the scene after they were finished.
Now, put that all together.
Based on what we know, we can reasonably say that: (1) Donald Trump knew an FBI raid was coming at a key location where he was previously indicted for election tampering; (2) he was in contact with his chief law enforcement officer about that raid, likely in advance; (3) he was micromanaging who would be there, including dispatching his top spy chief; and (4) he was following the whole situation closely enough to call the agents afterward to see how it went and to thank them.
That’s not distance or ignorance. It’s proof that he lied to the country when he said this week, “I’m not involved.” Even more damning is the fact that in early January, the President lamented in an interview with the New York Times that he hadn’t “seized” voting machines in 2020. Are we really supposed to think that’s a coincidence, too? That the President was recently moping about how he should have snatched bags of votes when he had the chance… and then — weeks later — the FBI goes and does it for him?
Even more troubling is what Bondi’s role implies. The Attorney General doesn’t invite the nation’s top intelligence official in routine law enforcement searches. But if the goal was to create the appearance of a “foreign interference” investigation, then suddenly Gabbard’s presence makes sense. She shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but if you want to tell the country this is the nefarious work of Russia or China or some other country, then having the Director of National Intelligence on site is a useful prop, since it’s her job to spy on foreign adversaries.
We’ve seen the Trump team use this playbook before. It’s the “bring-your-buddy-to-work” trick.
Just weeks ago, when U.S. forces stormed into Venezuela in what looked very much like a military operation, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “invited” FBI agents along. The administration insisted it wasn’t an invasion or a coup. Because the FBI agents were with them, it was simply “an arrest,” as if the Pentagon was just helping a friend in the neighborhood execute a warrant. Even the most gullible observer could see the maneuver for what it was: they brought a civilian agency along so they could pretend it wasn’t a military invasion and that regime change wasn’t the objective.
Now it appears the same trick is unfolding at home in an American election office. But the goal isn’t to carry out a foreign coup. One might say it looks like an effort to perpetuate a domestic one by continuing Trump’s evidence-less crusade to portray the 2020 election as fraudulent and his loss as illegitimate.
Let me remind you once more: Donald Trump was already charged with crimes for attempting to do this. Trump was indicted in Fulton County, Georgia on 13 felony charges related to efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Last week, FBI agents returned to the scene of the crime — apparently at Trump’s direction — and literally took all the ballots. You can either: (1) believe the White House’s shifting stories; or (2) reasonably speculate that the President is sending agents to finish a criminal scheme that he began five years ago.
Who knows? Maybe there really is some newly-discovered foreign intelligence operation that just so happens to intersect perfectly with Donald Trump’s long-standing effort to overturn his defeat in Georgia. Maybe this all a remarkable coincidence of cosmic proportions. But if the old saying about smoke is true, then there’s a fire here somewhere. Judging by the lies, it’s a wildfire.
The White House isn’t allowed to order secret recounts of American elections. If that’s happening, who’s to say Donald Trump will stop here? To anyone with a functioning moral compass (or the intelligence of a pocketful of almonds), this looks less like “election security” and more like a sitting president using the power of the federal government to reopen an election he lost — and to continue a criminal conspiracy he left unfinished.
Your friend, in defiance,
I am so fucking furious this morning with that POS in the White House that I'm not sure I am able to put together coherent thoughts around this, let me just say that he absolutely needs to be removed from office before he further destroys our country.
The ballot chain of custody is now broken… nobody can recount the 2020 Georgia votes