Graham Platner won the Democratic primary for the Senate, despite troubling allegations by women who questioned his treatment of them. When a woman he had dated said last Monday that he had forced her to have sex without her consent, it was all over for Platner. He was accused of having raped the girlfriend. He denied it, but the air was out of his balloon.
Tonight Platner denied the allegations, blamed the “establishment” for derailing his campaign, but announced that he was suspending his campaign.
The Maine Democratic Party will hold a convention and pick a new candidate.
This is the best outcome. In retrospect, the most damning evidence against Platner came from his wife, who told a campaign leader that her husband had been sexting with other women after they were married. Why would he do that? That’s a career destroyer.
Last night at 10:20 pm, the Post published a vile, disgusting story about Platner that never should have seen the light of day, in my view..
In that article, Lyndsey Fifield, the conservative woman who worked for the Heritage Foundation and was part of a group supporting Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, made a lewd accusation against Platner that could not be verified or corroborated. She said that when she had sex with Platner, he took off his condom without her consent, even though he knew she did not use birth control. Apparently this happened more than once. She dated him over a three-year period and said he “repeatedly” engaged in sex without a condom.
It started like this:
“An ex-girlfriend of embattled Senate candidate Graham Platner told The Washington Post that he repeatedly removed protection without her consent when they were having sex. “Lyndsey Fifield, who said she dated Platner from 2013 to 2015 in D.C. and has previously accused him of physical abuse, said that she told Platner on multiple occasions that he had to wear condoms during sex because she was not on birth control. “He would pull condoms off,” she said in an interview. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.” “In a statement in response to questions about Fifield’s allegation, Platner’s campaign called the claim “categorically false and politically motivated.” The statement noted Fifield supported now-Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault before his confirmation, an allegation he denied.”
Most of the comments–at least the first 100 or so–attacked Fifield’s credibility and motives. One asked why she didn’t use birth control. Another asked why she continued to have intercourse with him.
My reaction was that the charges should never have been published because a) there was no way to verify her allegations; b) how he had sex with a female friend is irrelevant to his character or fitness for office. Having unprotected sex is dangerous, because it might produce an unwanted pregnancy. But, to my knowledge, it is not criminal.
Rape and sexual assault are criminal acts. They do reflect on one’s fitness for office. We should have learned from Trump’s adjudicated behavior not to trust men who abuse women.
The story was disgusting. The Washington Post should be ashamed to have published this slime.
I’m glad Platner stepped aside. I’m sorry all the allegations about him did not come out long ago.
I hope the Maine Democratic Party picks a strong candidate who can unite the party and beat Susan Collins.
Trump is the master of using the courts to win his battles, but lately he’s been on a losing streak.
The U.S. Supreme Court denied his request to excuse him from paying E. Jean Carroll $5 million, which was awarded by a jury in New York. With the interest it has accrued, Trump now owes her $5.8 million.
An appeals court on Wednesday denied President Trump’s bid to pause the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center while he challenges a lower court ruling.
A three-judge panel determined the administration’s lawyers did not prove the president or the performing arts center would suffer irreparable harm if his name was removed from the venue as ordered.
“First, they argue that removal of President Trump’s name will inflict irreparable harm in terms of expense and time ‘squander[ed][.]’ Since that removal has already occurred, stay would not avert those harms (even assuming they would qualify as irreparable),” the judges wrote in their order.
“Second, Appellants allege financial harm to the Kennedy Center if they are not permitted to reinstate President Trump’s name. They argue that removal of President Trump’s name ‘threatens to impede the Center’s fundraising efforts and [will] contribute to the financial decline of the Center.’ Appellants, however, have failed to support this assertion with any specific facts or evidence,” they added.
Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Judges Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, both Obama appointees, denied the Trump administration’s motion for a stay pending appeal.
Donald Trump dropped down in Ankara, Türkiye, for the big NATO summit, and wasted no time confirming every European leader’s worst instincts about whether or not the United States is any longer their friend.
You see, the stupid senile bitch Trump still thinks that part of the NATO deal is that the other members should jump up to help every time Benjamin Netanyahu tricks him into starting a war no other American president was stupid enough to start. He thinks they owe that to him. He thinks that’s part of Article 5. He’s the stupidest, most useless brain of any human who’s ever taken up space on God’s green earth.
So he arrived in Ankara and, during a press availability with Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, immediately started in babbling about his Greenland shit again.
“Greenland doesn’t help Denmark, Denmark doesn’t spend money to really help Greenland, but it’s an important part for the United States,” the president continued.
Greenland “should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark,” he concluded.
Sorry about all this yet again, Europe.
Notably, it was reported this weekend that France has had to prepare for the very real possibility of a “shooting war” with the US over Greenland. Now here comes Trump to start running his fucking mouth about that again, and Danish PM Mette Fredriksen is having to reiterateat NATO that she will defend Greenland, and that it’s “not for sale.”
Trump also continued yesterday to make threats to remove troops from Europe, said hopeful words about a peace deal for his father Putin in Russia and Ukraine (despite how his opinion on the matter is less than irrelevant), and said Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a “nice person,” while whining some more that she wouldn’t help him bomb Iran at Netanyahu’s request. This, despite how just this weekend, he was still fanning the flames of the stupid feud he started with her by telling pathetic, unbelievable lies about her wanting to be in the same room with him.
He also recommenced his bitching that if it hadn’t been for the foul fucking dictator he was meeting with at the time, for whom he’s always had a little Trumpy boner, he might not have even come to the NATO summit:
“I was very disappointed with NATO, and frankly, if it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended. I felt I had to attend because of the fact that, you know, I know he’s gone all out.”
Did y’all hear about trashball Erdoğan’s latest stunt, denying a gay cruise ship permission to dock in Istanbul because of the homosexual lifestyle? Motherfucker does not belong in a community of respected nations like NATO, but we understand why they might keep him there as a means of controlling him. (It’s good that Turkey’s bid for European Union membership is forever stalled.)
Of course, the same could probably be said for the United States these days.
Anyway, back to Trump’s humiliation of himself and of the United States!
Here is Trump today in a press conference with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, HEREBY DEMANDING an end to all trade with Spain, including tourism!
“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain, please. […] Cut off all trade with Spain, please! Including visits, OK? We don’t want anything to do, watch them come running back …”
Can Trump actually do that unilaterally? Of course not, but he’s too stupid to understand that. And of course only 4.9 percent of Spain’s exports — 18 billion euros worth — head to the United States, whereas 23 billion euros worth of goods come from the US to Spain. Trump knows nothing about trade, but that’s called a trade surplus.
As for the tourism, does Trump think Spaniards are flocking to American shores? Or is he going to try to ban Americans from visiting Spain, AKA the second-most-visited tourism destination in the world?
Just curious how the dumb bitch is planning to humiliate himself here.
Spain has not committed to Trump’s THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER demands to kick its defense spending up to five percent of its annual budget by 2035. And Pedro Sánchez is always mean to him, and he does it while looking handsome and in Castilian Spanish, so it’s a humiliation for Trump on all fronts and that’s why he’s mad.
Trump finished that clip above by whining that Spain also mistreats Mark Rutte, Trump’s special boy who always stays in character pretending he respects Trump, and Trump buys it, because Trump is stupid and easily flattered.
In response to Trump’s comments, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s office said that Spain “maintains an excellent social, cultural, and economic relationship with the US, and we have no intention of seeing that change.”
The spokesperson said the Spanish government regarded such statements “as a matter of routine.”
The spokesperson referenced the U.S.’ trade surplus with Spain, and the fact that the European Union handles trade for the bloc’s 27 member countries.
How do you say “Yeah we hear that old bitch running his mouth” in Spanish? (Something like Sí, oímos a ese viejo cabrón parloteando sin parar, maybe.)
So anyway, that’s been what the beginning of the NATO summit has looked like. And Rutte had such high hopes for there being a united NATO front against Vladimir Putin! Too bad the ass he’s got his tongue up is that of a stupid orange Hitler wannabe who thinks he’s impressive because he (allegedly) passes dementia tests.
If you have not read that incredible Wall Street Journal article from this weekend about all the ways European leaders work together to make Trump their useful idiot, how they scheme to manage that dumbfuck, all as they strategize on how to get out of their now-abusive relationship with Trump’s America, now would be a good time.
American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office.
It begins with an account of the secret meeting European leaders had at the beginning of this year on exactly how to break up with America. It discusses how Meloni thought Trump could be reasoned with at that meeting, but now no longer does. It talks about how they literally all craft their text messages to make the illiterate idiot feel safe:
When texting Trump, Rutte would echo the president’s own syntax and hyperbole, keeping his messages congratulatory, with staccato sentences. He immersed himself in the role so thoroughly some heads of government who worked with him began describing him as an actor who never broke character.
Soon, European leaders were following his lead. Finland’s president and Norway’s prime minister started workshopping their text messages to Trump, talking about which words they should render in capital letters. Sometimes, the Norwegian leader preferred his Finnish counterpart to send a message. Nordic officials worried that the mere mention of Norway, home of the Nobel Peace Prize, could reopen a sore wound.
The American president, that’s who they are talking about.
How they talk to him about advocating for a ceasefire in Ukraine, when he starts taking Putin’s side? They use his words: “Stop the killing,” because those are the simple words Trump understands. “Trump lectured top EU official Ursula von der Leyen for advocating sanctions on Russia, so she started referring to economic pressure as tariffs.”
If you want the senile dumbass to do anything, call it a tariff! Wow.
And then there’s:
Weeks into Trump’s second term, Macron visited to discuss NATO and Ukraine. The two spent hours together, and the U.S. president seemed open to his ideas. They used a tablet to dial into a video call led by Justin Trudeau. But as the Canadian prime minister was talking, Trump, frustrated with a technical issue that prevented him from chiming in, lobbed the device over the Resolute Desk and onto the floor, an official present said.
Like a toddler cat with dementia.
Does Trump bring foreign leaders into a room off the Oval Office full of MAGA hats and — no shit — Florsheim shoes, and tell them to pick whatever they’d like? He does. Apparently he thinks their wives (???) might like to relist the swag he gives them on Facebook Marketplace, or take it on Antiques Roadshow?
During their chat, Trump told [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz he had something to show him, and walked the chancellor of Germany into a small study off the Oval Office. It was, Trump announced, “the Lewinsky room” and he had filled it with MAGA memorabilia, including red hats and boxes of Florsheim dress shoes. “Just grab whatever you want,” a congenial Trump told his German guests, adding that their wives could sell the swag for “thousands of dollars.”
“That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever heard about Trump” has now happened more than once in this article.
If you want to see something really embarrassing, just watch the full presser with Rutte. You’ll be able to envision Trump throwing things off desks like a fucking baby quite easily.
There’s a second part of the report out now, on how Canadian PM Mark Carney has been at the forefront of the effort to get Europe thinking and acting as its own superpower in a world where it can’t rely on the USA, hammering to them the message that “the old America isn’t coming back.”
You’ll want to read that one while you, too, grapple with the world’s growing embrace of Carney’s thesis.
Scott Dworkin runs a Democratic activist’s blog, raising money for candidates and exposing Trump scandals and grifts. I subscribe and encourage you to do the same.
A paper trail of federal money keeps showing up right behind the Trump name. Don Jr. joined drone maker Unusual Machines’ advisory board in November 2024—and within a year, one of the company’s largest orders ever was placed by the US Army.
Last August, Don Jr.’s firm, 1789 Capital, bought into a startup called Vulcan Elements; three months later it landed a $620 million loan, the biggest in the Pentagon’s lending office history. ProPublica found the loan was initiated by senior White House official Peter Navarro—a friend of Don Jr.’s—and pushed through in a matter of weeks, sending Vulcan’s value skyrocketing from $200 million toward $2 billion.
The sons swear their names have nothing to do with it, but the record says otherwise: roughly $3.7 billion in federal money went to at least ten companies tied to the brothers since the regime took power. That’s your April taxes, meant to defend the country, rerouted to whoever hired the right last name.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is now demanding the Pentagon’s inspector general investigate: “his sons are cashing in on defense contracts funded by hardworking taxpayers.”
They built this in the dark to work in secret, betting nobody would ever turn on the lights. The investigation just started, the receipts are already public, and every dollar gets traced. This fight is only beginning.
DOGE IS DEAD. THE DAMAGE ISN’T.
DOGE’s mandate expired July 4, the end date written into Trump’s own executive order. Elon Musk swore he’d cut $2 trillion. DOGE’s website claims $215 billion—a number they haven’t updated since January and that budget experts don’t buy. Even taking their figure at face value, that’s a dime in cuts for every dollar promised.
Molly Hardy was the National Endowment for the Humanities’ 2024 employee of the year. DOGE laid her off anyway. Then in March, the agency came crawling back, emailing to ask if she’d return. She turned them down—not bitter, just clear-eyed: “It didn’t feel good. It just felt really sad.”
She’s not alone, and that’s the part they didn’t see coming. All over the government, the wreckage is being reversed: HHS fired 10,000 workers and is now scrambling to hire 12,000. Agencies that bragged about the chainsaw are begging people to come back. Asked if shrinking the workforce was even still the goal, OPM chief Scott Kupor admitted: “I’m not hearing that.”
And when Congress asked what DOGE actually accomplished, budget director Russell Vought had nothing to show: “We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report.”
The people who took a chainsaw to our government don’t get to slink off without a full accounting. We’ll see to that.
Adam Kinzinger, former Republican member of Congress, writes an always interesting blog. He wrote yesterday that the Trump administration is harassing legal immigrants by failing to process their applications for green cards and work permits. The immigrants affected come from those countries on Trump’s restricted travel list. They have done nothing wrong. They are here legally. U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, Ohio, ordered the administration to resume processing their paper work.
Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restart green card and work permit applications it had frozen. The freeze targeted immigrants from countries on the President’s travel restriction list. These are people already living here, many of them for years.
The case was brought by 25 of them. A hospital pharmacist. A nurse doing cancer research on federal funding. College graduates with job offers in science and engineering. Young couples raising kids. They all followed the process, and they all watched their paperwork freeze with no end date.
The Judge wrote that the administration was treating a person’s home country as a “significant and negative factor” in whether their case moved at all. He even named the President and the Vice President, writing that both men have “publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants.”
This is the second time in a month a federal judge has thrown out these freezes. A court in Rhode Island did the same in June.
The ruling does not hand anyone a green card. It forces the government to make a decision instead of leaving people in the dark. And the administration could not tell the court how making a nurse who already lives here wait longer keeps a single American safer. Because it can’t.
Here’s what I know after spending more than a decade in Congress. The Republican talking point was always the same. We are not anti-immigrant, we are anti-illegal immigration. Come the right way. Get in line. Well, these people got in line. They did everything my old party claimed to want. And this administration is trying to get rid of them anyway. The talking point was never true. It was just cover. They never wanted any immigrants here at all.
In a stunning victory for the First Amendent’s guarantee of free speech, a federal appeals court overturned Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE” act. A district court judge had previously issued a preliminary injunction on the law, calling it “positively dystopian.”
The state contended that it paid the professors’ salaries and had the authority to tell them what to teach. The appeals court decision disagreed, by a 2-1 vote. The dissenting judge–Barbara Lagoa– was appointed by Trump.
The opinion said:
“Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the state’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry — classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth,”
The dissenting judge wrote:
“We need not agree or disagree with Florida that the viewpoints at issue here constitute racial discrimination,” Lagoa wrote. “We need only acknowledge that the state is allowed to decide what is endorsed by its professors in its own classrooms.”
The American Civil Liberties Union announced:
TALLAHASSEE, FL – The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit today struck down the higher education provisions of the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, a classroom censorship law in Florida that severely restricted educators from teaching about race and gender in schools and workplaces. The court ruled the higher education provision of the law was unconstitutional, saying: “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”
The court goes on to say it does not matter if the State of Florida agrees or disagrees with the ideas. “Either way, in this context the First Amendment trusts students to figure it out for themselves.”
“This ruling sets a strong precedent that higher education cannot be limited to the whims of politicians,” said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. “All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about ideas without government control. Students can’t fight racial discrimination that they don’t see; training and instruction is key to empowering future leaders to pursue racial justice.”
The decision comes in Pernell v. Lamb, a 2022 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), and the law firm Ballard Spahr on behalf of a group of Florida professors at public universities whose teaching has been impacted by this law.
“We are thrilled the court has stopped the erasure of topics that have real implications for our students, allowing them to learn, discuss, and develop tools for combatting the complex issue of racism in our country without being gagged by those who would dictate that only state-approved thought may be promoted,” said LeRoy Pernell, a Florida A&M University College of Law professor and the named plaintiff in this lawsuit.
Championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, this overreaching law specifically targeted and placed vague restrictions on educators’ ability to teach concepts such as racism, sexism, privilege, and unconscious bias. It also imposed harsh penalties, including ineligibility for millions of dollars in performance funding from the state for colleges and universities and termination for educators who had been found to violate the law.
The court concluded, “[i]f the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”
“The Stop W.O.K.E Act is an egregious example of widespread efforts across the country, most notably in Florida, to force the public higher education system to adopt the viewpoints of those in power. Thankfully, we have a judicial system to protect First Amendment rights and ensure that professors have the academic freedom to foster the type of learning environment where all students can learn and thrive,” said Jin Hee Lee, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Legal Defense Fund. “It is no coincidence that this state law aimed to censor the perspectives of Black people and LGBTQ+ people, the very same people who are currently under attack. With this decision, the federal appeals court has made clear that Florida cannot actively erase their history of discrimination or their lived experiences without running afoul of our Constitution.”
This decision marked the first time an appellate court has considered the constitutionality of this censorship movement, and it will have implications for students and educators across the country who are subject to related laws. Since the Stop W.O.K.E Act went into effect, more than 30 states have moved to introduce and pass higher education classroom censorship bills. In May 2024, a federal court struck down a law in another ACLU lawsuit in New Hampshire, holding that the law’s vagueness violated the 14th Amendment. A similar higher education classroom censorship law was struck down in an ACLU lawsuit in Oklahoma, ruling that many of its provisions were so vague that it was difficult for teachers to know what they could and could not teach in the classroom.
“By upholding the district court’s ruling, the Eleventh Circuit ensured that our system of higher education is guided by the principle of free speech, not government censorship,” said Carrie McNamara, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. “Our classrooms are meant to be rooms of curiosity, creativity, and learning. When we stifle this kind of critical thinking, we risk losing our education system as we know it.”
“The recent legislative efforts to undermine academic freedom and limit the rights of marginalized communities are incredibly harmful,” said Emmy Parsons, a litigator at Ballard Spahr who was a member of the legal team. “We are proud to be part of this historic case and will keep fighting to protect the First Amendment rights of those teaching the next generation of leaders.”
At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Trump told the press that the ceasefire with Iran is over. He referred to the Iranian leaders as “scum.” Following his remarks, oil prices went up.
Iran has attacked ships attempting to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The US has bombed Iran. Iran has bombed American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait.
At the summit, Trump assailed our NATO allies for failing to help him in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. He also reopened his campaign to compel Denmark to give or sell Greenland to the U.S.
I strongly supported Graham Platner as the likeliest candidate to beat Senator Susan Collins in November. I was wrong, as were many others who took him at his word.
I didn’t care about his tattoo. He told us that he had gone through PTSD after four tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like many others, I forgave him his trespasses because he was a viable progressive candidate who had energized a large following in Maine. He held town halls all over the state, and his popularity grew. Bernie Sanders endorsed him, as did other prominent Democrats.
The latest allegation against him was the last straw. A woman he dated said he raped her. She had corroboration, from friends and her therapist. Rape is a bright red line.
Platner is finished. It’s over. He was not honest with the voters.
Susan Collins is running for her sixth term in the Senate. She has already served in the Senate for 30 years. She should have retired and let someone else take her place. It’s time for a change.
Collins should never be forgiven her endorsement of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. He told her he would never overturn Roe v. Wade. She believed him. He lied. Other Republicans would have voted no if she had voted no.
There are other well-qualified people ready to join the race. The Senate should not be a gerontocracy.
Maine Democrats must choose a replacement for Platner by July 27. Can they do it? Of course they can.
David Dayen, editor of The American Prospect, wrote previously about Platner’s character flaws and Collins’ corruption. He believes that Maine Democrats should hold a snap election. He calls it a “lighthouse primary.”
Good luck to Maine Democrats in picking someone who can defeat Collins and help create a Democratic majority in the Senate.
Trump has a new line of malarkey to peddle. He has decided that Democrats are not only “Dumbocrats,” they are Communists.
Trump does not know anything about bipartisanship. He knows nothing about the tradition of treating the other party with respect. He knows only how to dish out insults and ridicule.
He always has to stir up his base by having someone to hate. Communists are a good target.
When he spoke at Mount Rushmore on July 3, he warned about a “communist menace,” a threat posed by the election of two Democratic Socialists in New York City and one in Denver, Colorado.
He said, “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land.”
He added, “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”
He described communism as “a mortal threat to American liberty,” and argued that Americans must defend the country’s founding principles against it.
Again, at his late-night speech on July 4, he warned about the danger of the Communist threat.
Among his statements were:
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America.”
He added, “It’s like a cancer, you got to cut it out.”
He also declared that America “will never be a communist country“.
Democrats are not Communists.
Democratic Socialists are not Communists. They are Democratic Socialists like Senator Bernie Sanders and like the parties in Northern European nations such as Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. These are nations that spend generously for the health, education, and welfare of their citizens.
Does Trump know the distinction between Democratic Socialists and Communists? It’s hard to know since his knowledge is not expansive.
But he has his target. He will use smear tactics. He will fulminate about the “communist menace,” and about others who “don’t love America” as he allegedly does.
After all these years, we know who he is and we know he will lie without hesitation.
The FBI has assigned 200 agents to pore through the ballots cast in the Presidential election in Georgia in 2020. You may recall that in 2020, Georgia was controlled by Republicans. In January 2, 2021, Trump called Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger and asked him to find 11,780 votes, which was one more than Joe Biden had. Raffensberger wouldn’t do it. The Georgia votes were counted and recounted three times, once by hand. In all three recounts, Trump lost. But Trump is still searching for proof that he won.
What a sore loser!
The Associated Press reported:
ATLANTA (AP) — The FBI has asked its field offices across the country to dedicate more than 200 staffers to its investigation of the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County.
A memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press calls for the FBI to “surge” 260 investigative analysts and staff operations specialists to the effort, which it described as a “priority investigation.”
It said each of them is to conduct a check of an estimated 708 records by July 17. While the memo does not describe the investigation, people familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal decision-making confirmed the request was to help with the Georgia 2020 election investigation.
FBI agents in January seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election in Georgia’s most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of the city of Atlanta. A Fulton County spokesperson declined to comment citing a pending investigation. The contents of the memo were first reported by MS NOW.
President Donald Trump and his allies have made false claims that widespread election fraud cost him the 2020 election. Georgia’s votes in the 2020 presidential race were counted three times, including once by hand, and each count affirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s win.
The Justice Department has previously said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election in the County.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 