The Department of Justice is seeking the names of every individual who worked during the 2020 election in Georgia's Fulton County, where President Donald Trump has long claimed voter fraud robbed him of a win, but a legal expert said those efforts to intimidate election workers are doomed to fail.
Lawyers for the county filed a motion Monday to quash a grand jury subpoena asking for their names and personal information, and a former attorney in the voting section of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division explained to Legal AF podcaster Adam Klasfeld the investigation appeared to be a farce.
"First of all, it's rather desperate and pathetic," Becker said. "This is clearly a fishing expedition. They have no idea what they're looking for. This DOJ has already been called out by courts, the voting section in of the DOJ has already been called out by courts for engaging in fishing expeditions as they've been denied effort efforts to seize sensitive voter data on millions of American voters here."
The grand jury subpoena came to light this week after the county moved to block the DOJ from gaining access to the workers' names and information, and Becker said that indicates the relative weakness of the government's case.
"Remember, they served almost exactly a little more than three months ago a warrant and seized those Fulton County ballots, as you mentioned earlier, and that warrant is one of the most severe evidence-gathering methods that the that the government has available to you," Becker added. "They show up by themselves in court, the other side is not there. They get to seize the evidence immediately. That is at the top of the evidence-gathering tool set that the federal government has. But here it's just a grand jury subpoena."
"A grand jury subpoena is a big step down, and we're seeing that work here in Georgia where they served this subpoena, it looks like maybe a couple of weeks ago, and the we're only learning of it now because Fulton County is challenging that because they haven't had to give anything up yet – nothing has been seized."
That indicates the government is engaging in a broad fishing expedition, according to Becker, but he said the investigation was also an alarming development as election workers have already started preparing for November's midterms.
"This is clearly designed to intimidate and bully the ordinary Americans, the public servants who run our elections as county election officials or even volunteer poll workers," Becker said. "This subpoena sought not only the names of these thousands of people, our neighbors who volunteered to work long days. My son has been a poll worker in our county – not only the names of these individuals but also the addresses, the telephone numbers, the email addresses of these individuals. This kind of excessive fishing expedition evidence gathering exercise is clearly not legal, but it may very well be designed to intimidate."
"Fulton County and Georgia need these people to do their work," he added. "They're in the middle of running an election right now. They need to be able to recruit more poll workers, and maybe this is designed to cause chaos and diminish the ultimate security of the elections in Georgia, which have been run very well and have been scrutinized excessively."
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