It seemed a bizarre comment for President Donald Trump to make in Davos, Switzerland, last week as he was talking to world leaders about whether or not the United States would invade Greenland and seize it from Denmark.
“It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that,” Trump said of the United States’ 2020 elections in the middle of his remarks. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
“People will soon be prosecuted.” On Wednesday night in Georgia, we learned what the president was foreshadowing, as a caravan of FBI investigators arrived in Union City to execute a search warrant at the massive Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center.
The hub houses all of Fulton County’s election data and equipment, and on Wednesday night, Commissioner Robb Pitts said 700 boxes of 2020 election ballots were among the materials that federal agents seized. Those are the same ballots that were counted, recounted, hand-counted, debated, litigated and fought over following Trump’s 2020 election loss in Georgia. Despite every attempt by the president and his legal team to prove the election had been stolen from him at the time, every road led back to the same result — Trump lost and Joe Biden won.
Now the president is back again, this time with new Department of Justice lawsuits and a court-ordered warrant for reams of election information, which agents packed into a fleet of Enterprise Rent-a-Trucks before driving away.
Although the records they took were from the election five years ago, it’s important to understand that the raid in Fulton County is not really about the 2020 elections at all, which have long since come and gone. Instead, the raid is about the next elections — who will control them in Fulton County in 2026 and who will run them in Georgia two years after that when the 2028 presidential election takes place.
The first question at hand is who will oversee Fulton County elections in 2026. At the moment, those elections are run by the Fulton County Election Board.
As the most populous and sprawling county in the state, Fulton has often been tagged by Republicans as the bad egg among elections offices for its past record of long lines, late returns and sloppy bookkeeping. But in 2020, the president went further, claiming that Fulton County was a hotbed of so much nefarious activity and rampant fraud that it cost him the election, all accusations that his White House staff dismissed and multiple courts in Georgia threw out.
The next year, Republicans in the General Assembly passed a massive new voting law that included language giving the Georgia State Election Board the power to replace any “underperforming” county election board, including Fulton County’s, with an interim leader of their choosing.
Replacement could only happen after an audit or investigation, and the state board left Fulton’s elections in the hands of county officials in 2023 after it said the county had made “substantial improvements” to its processes during a performance review.
But the current majority on the State Election Board now includes three Republican members whom Trump infamously singled out in 2024 as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory,” two of whom were with the FBI in Union City.
If this week’s raid produces enough of a pretext for the board to act in the future, the 2026 elections in Fulton County could be overseen by someone picked by the pro-Trump State Board, not by elected Fulton commissioners themselves.
And that brings us to the 2026 elections, when few people outside of Georgia have more of a vested interest in the outcome of our midterm elections than Trump himself.
Along with the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, every one of Georgia’s top statewide offices will be up for grabs with open seats later this year. That includes the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
Looking back at the aftermath of the 2020 elections, Trump ran into unexpected roadblocks in all four of those offices when Gov. Brian Kemp, then-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all Republicans at the time, refused to defy court orders or flout state laws to help him overturn the election results in his favor. Now each of those offices is up for grabs, and the winners will run the state and oversee elections in 2028.
Incredibly, the 2026 elections now feature Duncan, Raffensperger and Carr all running against each other to replace Kemp, along with Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has already won Trump’s endorsement for governor and said on Wednesday, “Fulton County Elections couldn’t run a bake sale.”
Watch how each 2026 candidate responds to the FBI raid this week and you’ll know how they’ll likely react in office in 2028 if Trump is back in Georgia again, maybe running for the third term he likes to joke about or to push for his vice president to be president — or maybe one of his sons.
Watch also for the possibility that Trump could be building his cases against the men in Georgia who defied him in 2020 and could be derailed in 2026 by federal charges against them from a Trump Department of Justice.
The raid Wednesday night wasn’t about recounting the 2020 election results yet again. It was about planning ahead for who will be in charge when the next elections come around.
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