Is Trump about to rig the midterm elections?

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast. I just want to find 11 ,780 votes, which is one more that we have. That's the infamous phone call of Donald Trump trying to bully an election official in a state that he lost in November of 2020. Why is it back in the news? Because the FBI have just raided the offices to try and overturn that result nearly six years on. Is this really about the election of 2020 or about the midterm elections of 2026? Might there never be a free and fair election in the United States again? Welcome to the News Agents.

0:55The News Agents. It's Lewis. It's Emily. And yesterday morning, the FBI burst into the election office in Fulton County. They had a search warrant and they demanded the records that related to that 2020 election. In other words, an election that was fought nearly six years ago. Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election. Georgia is naturally a Republican state. It is most often won by Republican candidates. It goes red quite often. But in 2020, it went blue and Donald Trump, frankly, couldn't get over it. And he made claims about voter fraud in Fulton County, home to Atlanta. And these were pretty central to his efforts to try to overturn the whole election.

1:47You remember that election narrative that the election had been stolen from him by Joe Biden, which led to that attempted insurrection on the Capitol on the 6th of January of the following year, 2021. So yesterday morning, the FBI turned up at these offices and essentially started removing these archived ballots. We're going to hear a little bit more about that in a moment, what happened in detail from the Fulton County Commissioner there, Mo Ivory. But there were all these false claims that election workers had pulled ballots out of suitcases after the county had ended, or that they hadn't counted some of the ballots, or that they'd misplaced other ballots.

2:33And so the FBI agents essentially raided these offices to try and remove the literal, physical pieces of paper that American voters had put their mark on nearly six years ago. I think the way to think about this is that this is just a very unusually aggressive move. I mean, the FBI warrant allows agents to seize everything from this county's 2020 election. And as Emily said, it sounds small, one county, but if you remember back to that election, Fulton County was basically the epicentre of Donald Trump's election denialism. And the political pressure, which you just heard entirely explicitly, on those election officials, Republican elected election officials, who to their enormous credit resisted Donald Trump's overtures.

3:21And it is only because of their bravery and their integrity and other election officials like them that that election was fair and it was free and it was upheld. If it had been up to Donald Trump and his more fevered acolytes, it would have been different. It's worth saying that it is signed by a federal magistrate. So it is not just a Trump whim. But ultimately, this is further evidence, I think, of the weaponisation and politicisation of the FBI. And it comes after just weeks, as somebody saying the Trump administration has tried and failed to get these ballots through a civil lawsuit. It is now a criminal probe years after multiple investigations, multiple recounts and multiple courts have said that the result stood.

4:09So the big picture here is that it looks like the FBI is using the Justice Department much more forcefully to relitigate the 2020 election. And why would they be doing that? Because clearly it doesn't matter to Trump right now, who is president again. The reason that so many people will be worried is, as we were saying at the start, that this is about a signal. It is about a signal to election officials up and down the country that when the midterms come, and make no mistake, it could well be that the control of the House of Representatives, which will of course have the power to impeach and the power to investigate, could be decided by one, two, three, a handful of districts in very hotly contested contests across the country, that Trump is sending a message to those election officials that you better do what we want.

4:55Otherwise, we're coming after you. Yeah, I mean, I think there's an immediate point here and then there's a longer term point here. The immediate point is that perhaps Fulton County becomes the blueprint. Perhaps it becomes a test case to see who you can push around, who you can bend to your will, if you can seize roles, if you can send in the FBI, if you can somehow terrorise other counties or somehow fudge other counties into a place that makes it easier for Trump to win or distort the results of any future midterm election. I think the longer point takes us back to a sort of bigger cultural issue that's been going on steadily over the last year.

5:37And that is the dismantling of the repository of truth, that things that you thought could not be relitigated, that things that you thought were fact, whether it is the numbers that come out of the Bureau of Labour statistics, whether it's the independence of the Fed, Jerome Powell, and the rate at which he cuts interest rates, whether it is part of the fact of American history in the way the Kennedy Center has represented them for years, for decades, that are now slowly being dismantled, unthreaded, pulled apart so that Americans, rather in the way that happens in Putin's Russia, no longer quite know what to trust.

6:25There will be plenty of people who listen to what is happening with the FBI and Trump and say, oh, well, it was always a problem, wasn't it? It was always litigated. It was always unclear who won. No, it wasn't. It was only unclear in Trump's mind. It was only unclear when he started trying to bully officials. But all you have to do is sow the seeds in enough people's mind that they think there is a more complicated picture of the truth than there ever was for you to get away with doing it next time. And lots of Democrats, but also Republicans and independent experts in America are increasingly worried because they see the federal government under Trump getting more and more involved in so-called election security.

7:09Elections, of course, which are largely the responsibility in terms of their organisation of the states, not the federal government. And what did we see as part of this? But Tulsi Gabbard, no less, the director, the conspiracy theorist and now director of national intelligence in the Trump administration in Fulton County itself, wearing these looking rather sinister, wearing these sunglasses, sort of photos of her sort of peeking around the corner, sort of comical in one sense. But what on earth is the director of national intelligence, who is someone who is supposed to be, you know, dealing with intelligence regarding geopolitical threats, Russia, China and the rest doing in this what should be pretty much entirely unknown election office in Georgia.

7:47And of course, there's a longer history to this as well, which obviously makes people feel uncomfortable, which is, you know, Fulton County again, you know, a largely non-white black district, part of the United States, which has long had in the Jim Crow era a long history of voter suppression. And we're also seeing, I mean, you know, to go back to our Minnesota coverage, which is part of a piece where we're seeing the Trump administration being more and more aggressive, basically trying to bully states into handing over responsibility to them over elections. So what did we see? We saw a couple of days ago, the Attorney General Pam Bondi in a letter to the governor, Tim Waltz, suggesting that the administration would reduce the number of ICE agents in Minnesota if the state turned over its complete and unredacted voter rolls to the department.

8:32So like they're saying, OK, the situation in Minnesota is terrible with all these illegals and it's awful, but we'll reduce the number of ICE agents if you give us all your voter rolls. Trump has been tweeting about this in the last few hours. It won't surprise you that he is now subtweeting himself and saying, Quicked election, Trump won big. Let's step back a second. We're talking about what we used to call the largest democracy, the most powerful democracy in the world. This was the place, the shining light on the hill. It was the place that was meant to be instrumental to every other country.

9:08The example for the rest of the world. The example, the exemplar of how to live, of how to have free and fair elections, about how to make every single citizen matter. And the fact that these election processes are so rigorously overseen, rigorously overseen, and yet somehow just shunted away by the big bully that's now sitting at the top of the tree is an extraordinary moment. And I think the trouble with us is because we cover it incrementally, you know, we see this stuff every single day. So it is not normal to put masked vigilantes on the streets of Minneapolis. If you took their uniform away, they would basically be the Ku Klux Klan.

9:50They would basically be a private army. They would basically be vigilante thugs. But we call them ICE agents as if they are actually enforcing immigration at the moment. You go through every single one of these acts and somehow we've normalized it. somehow we've allowed ourselves to think, well, maybe there was something in the deportation rights. Maybe there was something in the change of the name of the Kennedy Centre. Maybe there is something in the questioning of the 2020 election. Maybe the Jan 6th insurrectionists did have a point. They were just expressing their free speech, their right to ask questions.

10:24This is not normal. This is not normal. This is the overturning of truth. And the problem is that it almost happens so much that it becomes almost glib to say that it's not normal. It's like, you know, but you can't at the same time. And this is one that we've talked about before. It's one of the challenges of covering covering Trump. But I suppose there are different orders of things like, yes, it's not normal to have a president so crass and so boorish and who says such sort of psychopathic things. But I think you can sort of say that on a structural level, this is these are the moments to really remind ourselves that not only is this not normal, but this is corrosive and potentially completely destructive to American democracy.

10:56Right. I mean, we already right at that line in 2020 and 2021. As I say, it was only thanks to the real integrity of election officials around the country. And indeed, you know, I suppose Mike Pence as well as vice president, that there were enough kind of political elites who still wanted to make it work, that it still just about worked. If it had been up to Donald Trump, it wouldn't have worked. I don't know where we would have ended up because he would presumably have refused to leave the White House and the Biden administration. would have been certified. Do you remember the conversation at the time was, are you feeling very pessimistic about what's happened on January the 6th of 2021?

11:28And the response to that was, no, I'm feeling optimistic because right was done. Yes, exactly. That democracy has continued, that the fake narrative was shoved away and actually Donald Trump is now being, he's going to be prosecuted for this. That was what we all thought. The special counsel, Jack Smith, who incidentally was giving testimony to Congress just 10 days ago for the first time. It's the first time we actually heard his voice since that. He was trying to bring about the prosecution of Donald Trump for election interference. And now how it's all turned upside down. You know, he is now the one who is struggling, struggling not to be, quite frankly, prosecuted himself.

12:12Well, exactly. And Trump is overturned. And I think this is why this moment is so much more vulnerable, even than 2020-21, which is that precisely for, as you say, Emily, is because everybody saw the attempt at reinforcing the system and the system fighting back. And in fact, what happened is Trump won. And so what has happened again in another one of those moments that we're all like, oh, we've just normalized. What happened to a lot of those election officials who had the integrity to uphold the result? They got death threats. They got security now. Trump unleashed the full power of the mob, many of whom he has now, of course, since released because they were in prison after January the 6th.

12:46Right. So this is all part of I mean, if you if you connect it all and you sort of say, well, look, Trump is clearly sending a signal that these people ought to do what he says. We've seen what's happened in Minnesota, where it seems so credible to imagine that ICE agents are going to be deployed in the run up to the midterm elections in certain places and certain democratic cities to try and suppress the vote. They've had the dress rehearsal. It feels unless the Democrats were able to win by such a margin, It almost became impossible, impossible to overturn the results or attempt to overturn the results.

13:19It just feels so unlikely that we're going to get to November and we're going to get to the other side where there at least is not some significant attempt at interference. And that is a poison that Trump has injected into the system. And part of it, I think, as well. Why is he doing this now? He feels vulnerable. He feels vulnerable. He called it wrong in Minnesota, as we've been reporting and talking about for the last two weeks. He's misread the politics and his numbers are on the slide. And what the populists do... And he didn't even get Greenland. And he didn't get Greenland. Yeah, he's had a bad run of it.

13:48And what the populists do when their numbers are down and they know they're not popular. They pretend the numbers aren't real and they double down. Because the whole point of a populist is to say, I uniquely represent the public and the people and you don't. And they know that they are in a uniquely difficult position when they know that they're no longer doing so. So what they do is they start to lie. And for Trump, what does he do when he's in a corner? He goes back to the greatest hits. And he thinks that lying about the election worked for him before. And now he's doing it again, but this time with a full force and power of the politicized FBI at his disposal.

14:19Yeah, well, the state of Georgia has two Democrat senators and this is one of them, John Ossoff. This should have people across the country absolutely shook. This is a huge deal. This is an FBI raid on the Fulton County Elections Office. his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election have been based in Georgia from the very start. Georgia is where he called the secretary of state and said, find me the votes that he needed to win in a state he had lost. So much of the big lie that led to the January 6th sacking of the United States Capitol that had a mob seeking the Speaker of the House and the Vice President to lynch them originated in his lies about the state of Georgia.

15:05And here he has the FBI, which there are so many hardworking, diligent public servants in FBI field offices all across the country, but its headquarters now in the thrall of these political appointees, Kash Patel and Bongino and this guy from Missouri. It is a question, isn't it, about the institutions of America now, as you referred to. What is it like being in the FBI? you know which had that sort of cartoonish sense of the good guys of America what is it like being told to raid election officers now what is it like being part of a police force essentially that shoots citizens at point blank range if you're ice what is it like being part of the armed services America where you might just get told to kidnap a head of state in Venezuela and I think this is the moment where you're sort of waiting, aren't you?

16:00You're waiting for a wave of resistance. You're waiting for people to say, we can't do this, or we won't do this, or we don't feel great about doing this. Maybe that is going on, but those aren't voices that are coming to the fore at the moment. You know, if it is this difficult for the Democrats to find a way of pushing back onto basically the upending of their country's democratic constitution, then what about the guys in the middle? What about the guys who are just at the end of the orders? Like, what are they doing now? What are they thinking now? And is anyone going to say no? I suppose for the Democrats, their greatest asset is, if they can take advantage of it politically, is to say, this is a guy who is simply not interested in anything that you're interested in and is still relitigating an election from six years ago which at best seems eccentric and the slovakian prime minister fico robert fico who was in a room with trump about 10 days ago and passed on to his eu counterparts that he thought he sounded psychologically damaged what fico said that yeah catch up rob where have you been all these years catch up but well done for saying it out loud yeah right and that's somebody who's actually on his side he's quite a sort of MAGA-friendly guy.

17:22And the thing is about Trump, with regards to this, is I think it's fair to say, maybe at some point he didn't believe it, but I mean, I think he clearly does believe it, that he was right. I mean, he brings it up. He doesn't. Do you think so? Well, it's so hard to know. I think he does, yeah, because I think he brings it up so often. He brings it up with foreign leaders. He brings it up with Keir Starmer. He brings it up. It's just, maybe he didn't believe it once, but I think, you know, so hard to see through the Malfoy of lies that is his head. But yeah, I think probably at this point now, he does convince himself of his own bullshit yeah it is hard isn't it because i feel like you know we sit here every day and there is a danger of sounding like a cracked record where you're saying can you believe what's just happened i know can you believe what's really hard but actually it is both incremental and i would say this is a major step change if he manages to convince ordinary americans that he won an election he lost and sometimes we get people say oh you're focusing too much on what's going on in the US and the democratic breakdown there.

18:21And I can kind of understand that. But at the same time, as you say, Emily, this is not just kind of like he's mad. This is the potential of the world's most important democracy not being a democracy anymore. And for us in the democratic world, well, there's two things. First of all, I just don't know what that does, certainly to the Western alliance, such as it still exists, number one. And number two, if it can happen in the US, it can happen in other places. It can happen here. So it is worth talking about and thinking about as we see it happen.

19:16www.lbc.com LBC leading Britain's conversation.

19:27The News Agents. Well, joining us now is Mo Ivory. She serves as Fulton County Commissioner for District 4. In other words, she is right at the centre of this FBI warrant storm. And Mo, would you just take us through what you have seen in the county in the last 24 hours? Sure. Thank you so much for having me. Yes, around 11 o 'clock yesterday, I got word that the FBI was at our elections hub, which is in the southern part of Fulton County. That particular area is not my district, but bumps right up to my district. And I went immediately to see what was happening. And there were a lot of FBI agents there.

20:09And I went inside and got the information that a warrant had, a criminal warrant had been served to remove all of the 2020 ballots and accompanying documents, which, by the way, have been in the archive for years. We're talking about six years ago this election happened. So we waited for, there was a little bit of a procedural issue with the first warrant. It was served on the wrong entity. They went back and fixed that and came back with the correct warrant. And then they proceeded to start loading pallets of ballots onto their trucks. So they have taken these ballot boxes away now that still contain the votes from nearly six years ago.

20:47Yes. And what happens now? Do you get to do you send anyone with them? Is there anyone keeping an eye over what happens now? No, that is not allowed. We could not have somebody get on the FBI truck with the ballots to take them away. We tried to get an inventory. Imagine that an election is over, everything has been certified, all the legal requirements are met, and now the records are going to be retained, right? So they go into an archive. So they are packed away very carefully, sealed in boxes and placed on pallets. So there's boxes that are on the interior of a pallet, and then there are the boxes that are on the outside of the pallet.

21:28They would not allow us to undo the pallet to inventory each individual of the 700 boxes that they were taking. They took whole pallets and just took them away. So we don't know really like the order of which of the boxes. Now, of course, we have our boxes labeled and all of that. But on each individual pallet, we could not inventory each that they were taking away each box or, you know, they took the originals. So we don't have copies of the originals. So that's what normally when someone asks for, and actually what is in a civil court right now, whether they can look at the ballots and make copies of them, that's actually in a court case that is about to come up in about a week and a half from now.

22:17And they just wouldn't wait for that court case, which likely would have allowed them to see these records, but make copies of them, not take the originals. What President Trump did is said, I'm not waiting for that case. I want those documents now. I'm sending in the FBI. And they came and took the original documents. They have taken away the actual vote and vote slips from the people of Georgia six years ago. Do you have confidence that these won't be tampered with now? No, no confidence. We're talking about an election that was over six years ago. This is his obsession with having lost an election.

22:58There's nothing that he wants to do except so a crisis, manufacture a crisis that does not exist. What he is doing is trying to disturb this election. He's trying to make people in Fulton County feel that Fulton County doesn't administer elections correctly. Therefore, they cannot rely on their vote being truthfully tallied. So that is to make people not go to the polls now. So this is a crisis in order to make people afraid to go to the polls in 2026. Because what he knows is that if Fulton, a majority Democratic county, shows up in great numbers to vote in 2026, our votes will affect the outcome of Georgia, which will affect the outcome of what happens in the nation.

23:54And this is what he knows. And that's why he's trying to disturb it. Commissioner, do you think this is a blueprint for other counties and other places in the United States as well? We are just the first. We are just the first. This is the plan. This is the strategy to cause chaos, make the polls unsafe, bring in the military and militarize our voting. That is the plan. And what is the response that you feel you have in your grasp? The response is to see how plainly illegal and immoral what he is doing to Americans. This is really not a partisan issue. This is not should not be about Democrats and Republicans.

24:39This is about your right to vote. This is about your every county has a county administration, an operation to make sure that fair and free elections are administered. This is what's under attack, not who you vote for. You still can go to the polls and vote for whoever you want to vote for. This is about breaking down the system of how you vote in order to manipulate the vote. That's what this is about. So what can you do? What can people do? They could decide that they will not allow their vote to be manipulated. And they show up. How? By showing up and voting. By making sure that their registration is accurate.

25:20That they are on the rolls, that they haven't been purged from the rolls. That's how people can fight back. Commissioner, do you think that the president has any intention of allowing the midterms to go ahead in a free and fair fashion? Not that they won't take place, but that they will be interfered with. No. None whatsoever. He's interfered already. I mean, look what happened on January 6th when we tried to certify an election. That he still believes in 2026 he won. Let's even say that, I mean, we all know it's been numerous court cases that have shown that he did not win that election. Have you been given any information, Commissioner, as to exactly what it is that the FBI is looking for?

26:06No, there is a, we know that it was a criminal warrant that was issued for criminal election fraud. And we don't have the accompanying affidavit. It's under seal right now. So we're moving to try to get that unsealed so that we can see exactly the basis for this. but the warrant only says criminal investigation into illegal election fraud. I've already explained why he's doing it. It's being done in order to create distrust of Fulton County elections so that people will then stay home and not vote. That is what he's doing. Can I ask you, there is a lot of responsibility now, I guess, on Brian Kemp's shoulders, the governor, who has, I think, to be fair, stood up to Trump in the past.

26:50Yes. Have we heard from him? Do we know what his plan of action is? No, I have not heard from Governor Kemp. I don't know what he will be doing. But again, this is not really a partisan issue about the governor or even Brad Raffensperger, who is our secretary of state, who also is Republican, who has said many times that 2020 was a fair election in Georgia. There was no fraud. There was no mishandling of any ballots in Fulton County. He has said this over and over. I'm just wondering what the move now is for the state of Georgia if you do not want to see this replicated everywhere else. I mean, presumably you couldn't have stopped the FBI taking those ballots boxes away.

27:39Is there a physical or a practical move now that the governor or any other official can take? Yeah, I can't speak for what the governor is doing, but I do have the confidence that he wants elections to happen free and fair. He is a person who has also employed voter suppression tactics in the past. So I can only speak to what has been said about the 2020 elections, which is that it was a fair election and there was no fraudulent activity done by Fulton County. But, you know, Governor Kemp is also a person who was the secretary of state over his own election. So, you know, that's sort of like another conversation to have.

28:18But I do think that we at Fulton County are looking at all of our legal options. There's groups of advocates working right now to figure out what our next move is to get those documents back, to get them sealed back where they should be. So we are not, again, wasting taxpayer dollars adjudicating something that already has been found not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, many times found to be that the elections were fair and there was no fraudulent activity. This is a president who's obsessed with winning. This is a president who cannot sleep at night unless he is causing chaos in our country.