They’re Putting The Band Back Together

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Ed Martin, the former acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia,  failed-up  to the Justice Department last year when it became clear that  he could not be confirmed  to his position by the Senate. He serves today as  Donald Trump ’s  pardon attorney , but Martin also  dabbles in other projects  for the president, who reportedly speaks to him frequently on the phone. Martin made a little news on Thursday  when he wrote  “Good Morning, America, How are ya?”on X above a photo of himself with  Sidney Powell , the notorious election denier who  pled guilty  in 2023 to six misdemeanors of election interference. The significance of the troll was clear: MAGA’s “Big Lie” has returned.

In a  now-infamous White House meeting  in December 2020, Powell — along with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn — attempted to convince Trump to name her as special counsel to investigate voter fraud. Lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office frantically tried to prevent such a move, along with another of Powell’s proposals: to declare a national security emergency and seize voting machines due to what she alleged had been  mass foreign interference . (In January, Trump  told  the New York Times that he regretted not doing so.) 

In his Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president said that prosecutions were coming. Since there is no degree of separation between him and his personal law firm — the Justice Department — people should have known that something was afoot.

In the end, the president did not take such action. But Trump has never stopped falsely accusing  Joe Biden  and Democrats of stealing the 2020 presidential election from him, so it’s been easy to just chalk up his more recent whining to yet another silly obsession along the lines of low-flow showers and windmills. But in his Jan. 21  speech  at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president said that prosecutions were coming. Since there is no degree of separation between him and his personal law firm — the  Justice Department  — people should have known that something was afoot. On Wednesday it became clear what that was: The FBI  raided the elections office  in Fulton County, Georgia, and reportedly seized all the 2020 ballots.

The state’s election board, which has been  packed with MAGA loyalists , had also been trying to obtain the ballots and other documents, and they appealed to the Justice Department for assistance. The objective seems to be to  take over the election system  from the county and install GOP apparatchiks to take charge of the voting system. Presumably the mere fact of an FBI “investigation” could be the pretext for such a move. Republicans are eager to topple Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is  up for reelection  in 2026 — a race that could decide control of the Senate and the fate of the remainder of Trump’s second term. They aren’t taking any chances.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has been  filing lawsuits  against states Trump lost in 2020 for refusing to provide the federal government with voter rolls, which they are not required to do. Attorney General  Pam Bondi  even  tried to extort the list  from Minnesota by suggesting that the administration might call off Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s  occupation of Minneapolis  if they agreed to turn it over. 

Sidney Powell’s symbolic reemergence could also help explain why Director of National Intelligence  Tulsi Gabbard  was spotted  lurking about  the Fulton County election office during the FBI raid. At first glance, it would seem odd; her job is to coordinate intelligence between a variety of government agencies. But according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump has tasked her with leading “an administration-wide effort to hunt for proof of tampering” in the 2020 election. 

Gabbard has been completely absent from all public discussion of Venezuela, Iran, Ukraine and Greenland, but she did come up with a  supposed bombshell  last July: She alleged that former President Barack Obama  staged a “treasonous conspiracy”  by claiming that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election. (Bondi has actually  assigned a special prosecutor , located in the Southern District of Florida, to investigate those outlandish claims.) Gabbard’s involvement indicates that they may be looking at Powell’s inane foreign interference charges that have been floating around the Dominion and Smartmatic voting machine lawsuits for years, which falsely claimed that the two corporations were in fact secret Venezuelan companies. 

One of the main  conspiracy theories  circulating in the right-wing fever swamps is that former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is ready to spill the beans about his country’s interference in the election. As Benny Johnson, a MAGA provocateur with close ties to the White House,  put it , “This is why you see the globalists around the world bricking in their pants — they’re terrified because Venezuela was ground zero for election theft.” If there’s anyone in the Trump administration willing to run with that, it’s Tulsi Gabbard. At this point, it appears to be her only responsibility. 

Donald Trump is surely the sorest loser in world history — and that is not hyperbole. Considering the power he wields, it is literally true. Even if he actually believed that he won, any normal human would let it go and simply revel in the fact that he got the last laugh when he beat his nemeses — Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats, the mainstream media — in the next election and returned to the White House in triumph from his Mar-a-Lago exile. But no, he is a malignant narcissist who cannot stand the fact that he lost something and is driven to “prove” that he was right all along, which is impossible to do since he was wrong. 

So now he’s got Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel on the case, and with the guiding spirit of Sidney Powell, they are on a mission to “find” those 11,000 votes that he so notoriously  begged  Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find for him back in 2020. No one should be surprised if they magically turn up now that they are in the hands of Patel and Bondi’s FBI. 

Trump, no doubt, would be happy to pardon Maduro if he were willing to testify that he somehow facilitated Biden’s victory in 2020. It doesn’t have to make sense, and there doesn’t need to be any believable proof. If Bondi and Patel can bring some cases that actually result in a real trial, then all the better.

But this is not just an ego-soothing exercise for the president. The Republican Party is attempting to use its power and Trump’s Big Lie to build a voting system in Georgia and other states that will give the GOP a permanent electoral advantage. 

Sidney Powell had reason to smile in her picture with Martin. Events are going her way. And with the Supreme Court finally poised to fulfill Chief Justice John Roberts’ fondest dream of  overturning the Voting Rights Act , they will have gone a long way toward achieving that. It’s their holy grail and they’ve never been closer to getting it.

Update   — Since I wrote that piece, the Atlantic ( gift link ) published this about the raid with a lot of new details:

David Laufman once oversaw counterintelligence investigations for the Justice Department and held senior positions in the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. On Wednesday, he watched images of FBI agents searching an election-office warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, confiscating ballots and other materials in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s five-year quest to prove, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. The episode felt particularly ominous to Laufman—a crossing of a sacred line, and an indication that the administration won’t stay within the guardrails that have kept American voting systems free of political interference.

“There could be few more well-trod hallmarks of authoritarianism than control over electoral processes to get the results that the ruler wants,” he told us.

The agents in Fulton County loaded hundreds of boxes of sealed records onto waiting semitrucks. Nationwide, election officials who are busy preparing for the midterm vote in November, and for primaries much sooner, told us they felt alarmed about what the search signaled, and feared possible federal efforts to skew the 2026 results. Some compared it to a hostile takeover, or an occupation, or a scene that they thought they would only ever see in foreign countries.

Salon