The Trump administration sued Fulton County, Ga., on Thursday in an effort to seize and inspect old ballots from the 2020 election, as the administration continues to question President Trump’s loss in that race to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump has for years fixated on his defeat in that election and has continued to promote his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Since returning to office in January, he has embarked on a wide-ranging campaign to settle scores related to his effort to overturn the 2020 election — most prominently issuing a sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fulton County, which is largely nonwhite and voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Biden, was one of the main focuses of Mr. Trump’s effort to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. After leaving office, Mr. Trump and some of his allies were criminally charged with election interference in Georgia, and the former president was booked at the Fulton County jail.
Some discrepancies in Fulton County’s recount process did emerge after the 2020 election, but the state’s Republican leadership ultimately affirmed Mr. Biden’s victory there with a manual recount. Mr. Trump then pressured Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, a strident Trump supporter and conservative activist who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, subpoenaed Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in October, but the county resisted turning them over. In the lawsuit filed on Thursday, the Justice Department accused county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act by not handing over the ballots.
Democrats fear that a new inspection of 2020 ballots may be used to stoke suspicions of ballot fraud if the 2026 elections do not go Republicans’ way. The Trump administration has repeatedly argued, without reliable evidence, that the 2020 election was affected by mass voter fraud.
The Justice Department also sued four more states on Thursday — Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Nevada — in an escalating effort to obtain the personal and private information of voters. The administration is effectively trying to establish a national voting database in a quest to bolster an unsubstantiated claim from President Trump that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.
On the same day that the Justice Department delivered its broadside of election lawsuits, Mr. Trump announced that he was pardoning Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of tampering with voting machines in an effort to prove Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. However, the president has no ability to pardon the state crime that Ms. Peters was convicted of, and therefore no legal power to free her from a state prison.
Ms. Peters’ supporters have sought to convince Mr. Trump that she is an important potential witness for the administration’s pursuit of evidence of mass voter fraud in the 2020 election. The pardon that Mr. Trump issued last week was broadly worded, including offenses “related to election integrity or security” from January 2020 to December 2021.
Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.
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