One of the more extraordinary aspects of President Trump’s second term is this: Some of the most far-out election conspiracists who helped him spread lies about the 2020 election and then tried to overturn it are now inside the government, using the power of the state to keep Mr. Trump’s denialism alive.
This dynamic came into focus on Tuesday when an unsealed F.B.I. search warrant affidavit revealed that the recent criminal investigation into the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., had been instigated by Kurt Olsen, a rather prominent character in Mr. Trump’s election denialism movement. Mr. Olsen, who is a lawyer, was considered by people in the first Trump administration to be a fringe menace.
In the second Trump administration, he is the director of “election security and integrity,” with the power to refer criminal investigations — criminal investigations into things that have been thoroughly debunked. No matter how many times the results of the 2020 election have been rehashed, Mr. Trump’s fixations have not abated. Mr. Olsen’s position is proof of that.
But he is not the only one. The president has installed proponents of his fraud claims all across his administration. And increasingly, he has started to cast doubts on the coming midterm elections as Republicans face potentially big losses in November.
Mr. Olsen did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Asked about Mr. Olsen’s role, Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said, “The president has the most talented and qualified individuals serving as part of his team, including Kurt.”
Still, in a constellation of conspiracists, Mr. Olsen stands out.
“Kurt Olsen has a history of abusing his law license to spread lies about our elections,” said Christine P. Sun, a senior vice president at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “Now, he’s using his role in the administration and the power of the federal government to take actions fueled by those same lies. It’s part of a multipronged approach that threatens state power over our elections.”
Mr. Olsen has said he began his career in the 1990s at the large corporate Washington firm Kirkland & Ellis. He went to Christmas parties at the home of Jeffrey A. Rosen, a partner in the law firm at the time who would go on to become the acting attorney general during Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Olsen has said. Mr. Olsen has said that he never did any election legal work.
During the frantic weeks following the 2020 election, Mr. Trump and others immediately began claiming, without evidence, a wide variety of problems with election machines. Mr. Olsen, too, came to believe that “something was not right,” he said in a legal deposition in 2023.
Through an acquaintance, he contacted the former special counsel Ken Starr, a Republican lawyer and former colleague at Kirkland & Ellis, who connected him with a group of Republican attorneys to try to get the election results overturned, according to the testimony.
That started him on a path of taking on cases that many other Republican attorneys avoided putting their names on, including one brought before the Supreme Court in December 2020 seeking to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat at the polls. Mr. Olsen has said that the team worked “round the clock” to put the case together.
After the Supreme Court rejected the case, Mr. Olsen said he spoke to Mr. Trump and discussed a strategy to have a similar suit brought by the Justice Department. He also pressed his old colleague Mr. Rosen to bring the case on behalf of the country.
But Mr. Rosen told Mr. Trump in an Oval Office meeting that the case would not be accepted because of a lack of standing. Mr. Trump responded that Mr. Olsen had promised it was a “slam dunk,” according to a report from the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Even after Mr. Trump left office, Mr. Olsen continued to press the false claims about election machines. He found a like-minded ally in February 2021 when, according to Mr. Olsen’s testimony, Mr. Trump introduced him to Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow, who has become best known for promoting the falsehood that voting machines are often rigged and have flipped elections.
The two worked together for years with a movement of activists and cybersecurity experts around the country to promote conspiracy theories about election machines through lawsuits, media appearances and yearly conferences.
Mr. Lindell was a public face of the movement. With less bombast, Mr. Olsen served as the lawyer for many of the cases, including an attempt to overturn the 2022 election for Arizona governor. Mr. Olsen represented Kari Lake, an election denier who ran failed campaigns for statewide office in Arizona. (She was also rewarded with a role in the new Trump administration, one that allowed her to oversee the firing of most of the journalists at Voice of America.)
Repeatedly, though, Mr. Olsen faced resounding defeats. In Arizona, he was sanctioned in federal court for making false claims. In Georgia, a legal effort on behalf of the DeKalb County Republican Party challenging the state’s use of election machines failed.
Still, the movement’s proponents have survived despite those defeats.
Heather Honey, who was a witness for the unsuccessful lawsuit that Mr. Olsen brought on behalf of Ms. Lake, was given a position in the Department of Homeland Security overseeing election integrity. Marci McCarthy, who was the chairwoman of the DeKalb County Republican Party, now oversees public affairs at the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Clay Parikh, who served as an expert witness for Mr. Olsen in his cases in both Georgia and Arizona, is now a special government employee whose analysis was relied on in the F.B.I.’s Fulton County investigation, according to the affidavit.
And not least is Mr. Trump himself — the man who keeps trying to rewrite the country’s past and is now in charge of its future.
Shawn McCreesh is a White House reporter for The Times covering the Trump administration.
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