Georgia's forever election
January 30.2026
The Ice Fan (2022)
Trump’s ominous obsession with the ballots of Fulton County
I remember, as a kid in the early 1960s, watching Stanley Kramer’s slapstick comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. It’s a zany film with an all-star cast of comedians. There was Jimmy Durante and Phyllis Diller, but also Milton Berle, Ethel Merman, Sid Caeser and Jonathan Winters, among several others. They were all on the trail of a hidden suitcase, filled with lots of money. Their only clue to finding the cash-swollen luggage was to locate the mysterious “Big W,” which turned out to be four palm trees with the two in the middle leaning into each other to make the W.
The movie’s two-plus hours of slapstick and gags came to mind yesterday morning in the hours after I opened an email from Marc Elias, a highly successful Democratic lawyer who closely monitors elections and frequently fights (and almost always wins) with lawsuits to protect voting rights. He’s a true American hero, and thus utterly despised by our president.
Elias’s email wasn’t funny at all. It described a raid, Wednesday, by the FBI and Trump Justice Department on the sprawling election center in Fulton County, Georgia—a county that encompasses downtown Atlanta.
Elias connected the raid to one of Trump’s seemingly random comments during his disastrous speech in Davos, Switzerland last week. It was such a bizarre speech, with Trump spewing gripes in all directions, like the way Mardi Gras royalty in New Orleans toss aluminum doubloons to the crowds.
Our 47th president was berating the Europeans for not being grateful enough to the U.S. when he said this: “The war with Ukraine is an example. We are thousands of miles away, separated by a giant ocean. It’s a war that should have never started, and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It’s probably breaking news, but it should be (sic). It’s a rigged election. Can’t have rigged elections.”
“He (Trump) was right,” Elias wrote. “Trump’s false and dangerous remarks should have been breaking news, but the legacy media failed to treat them as such. Nor were they particularly alarmed by yesterday’s search warrant.”
In defense of the legacy media, they did remarkable work catching up today. This morning’s New York Times highlights a dispatch by five of its reporters, under the headline: F.B.I. Search in Georgia Shows Trump’s Willingness to Pursue 2020 Grievances.
This afternoon both MS NOW and The Guardian are reporting that Paul Brown, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, was dismissed after he expressed concerns about the FBI pursuing an investigation into the president’s persisting allegations of Fulton County voter fraud in the 2020 election “and for refusing to carry out the searches and seizures of records tied to the 2020 election.”
The Times’s story picked up and framed Elias’s concerns about the breadth, timing, and lack of evidence for Trump’s charges of election fraud in his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden. Here it’s worth noting that the target of Trump’s grievances was Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger who is now running for governor in the state.
This is how Raffensperger defended the Georgia vote count in a statement his office released on December 29, 2020:
“The Secretary of State’s office has always been focused on calling balls and strikes in elections and, in this case, three strikes against the voter fraud claims and they’re out. We conducted a statewide hand recount that reaffirmed the initial tally, and a machine recount at the request of the Trump campaign that also reaffirmed the original tally. This audit disproves the only credible allegations the Trump campaign had against the strength of Georgia’s signature match processes.”
The irony, of course, is that a tape recording exists of an hour-long phone call on January 2nd between Trump and Raffensperger. During the often heated conversation, Trump implores Raffensperger to simply find or nullify 11,780 votes in order to swing the Georgia count to him: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
In other words, the best evidence we have of attempted voter fraud in Georgia comes from Trump and his unscrupulous lawyers.
Trump escaped both federal and state prosecution for conspiring to alter vote counts and prevent the certification of the 2020 election, but his high-profile attorney—former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani— was disbarred and heavily sanctioned for defaming Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. Another Trump attorney, Sidney Powell, pled guilty to misdemeanor charges for election interference in connection with her repeated accusations of fraud in the Georgia vote count.
Of course, none of this has deterred Trump from continuing to claim that the Georgia/Fulton County vote was rigged against him.
That brings us to another character whom few could have imagined would have shown up in Atlanta on Wednesday—former Democratic Congresswoman, now Trump administration Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbarb. Gabbard was photographed Wednesday along with FBI agents as they reportedly carted away approximately 700 boxes of records at the Fulton County vote center.
Here’s the rub. On paper, at least, the Director of National Intelligence is supposed to head up the National Intelligence Program and be the principal advisor to the president and the National Security Council. It’s an important distinction because there are U.S. laws—e.g. the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978—that prohibit the CIA and other intelligence services that Gabbard leads, from spying on U.S. citizens in the U.S.
Gabbard’s presence had several prominent critics, including Elias, crying foul.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has no domestic responsibilities,” said David Becker a former Justice Department trial attorney. “There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site. She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site. And so it’s incredibly troubling to see something like that.”
So what was Tulsi Gabbard doing watching over the FBI raid on the Georgia voting center? According to The Hill, a reporter tried to ask that question of Todd Blanche, the former Trump lawyer who is second-in-command at the Trump Justice Department. This is how that went.
“It was reported that…” she began.
(Blanche cutting her off)—“..that she happened be present in Atlanta? I mean, yes, I saw the same photos you did,” Blanche said, adding that Gabbard does not work for the DOJ or the FBI.
“This administration coordinates everything we do as a group, and so I think her presence shouldn’t be questioned. Of course, that’s a big part of her, of her job. And so the fact that she was present in Atlanta that day, you know, it’s something that shouldn’t surprise anybody,” Blanche continued.
Pressed on whether he meant Gabbard being in the state was unrelated to DOJ actions, Blanche pushed back.
“No, I did not say that. I said exactly the opposite. I said this administration works closely together in all kinds of different areas, and so I’m not sure if they’re surprised that the administration is working together on things like election integrity,” he said.
In other words, nothing to see here, we’re just all one happy family gathering to help out at the document seizure.
That didn’t play well with Sen. Mark Warner, the lead Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County?” he wrote in a social media post.
“There are only two explanations for why the Director of National Intelligence would show up at a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election. Either (she) believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns or she is once against demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Please support this project with a paid subscription to The Daily Rhubarb at the link above… tjc
Former CNN anchorman Don Lemon & award-winning Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort
As I was preparing today’s dispatch we learned that federal officers arrested two journalists—former CNN anchorman Don Lemon and Minneapolis-based independent journalist Georgia Fort. They are being charged, along with seven demonstrators, with conspiracy and interfering with religious services at a St. Paul Church at which the pastor also serves as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement )ICE) official. The federal charges were brought after the same charges were rejected, last week, by a local magistrate.
Suffice to say their arrests provoked outrage both in Minneapolis from those protesting ICE’s presence, and nationwide from journalists who believe the First Amendment protects reporters from harassment and arrest when they are reporting on illegal activities. I would be one of those journalists. Trump has repeatedly scorned journalists and filed lawsuits against purveyors of journalism. He tries to brand us, collectively as “the enemy of the people.”
We beg to differ.
Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are remarkable people and journalists. I’m with them, in spirit.
—tjc
