A Justice Department subpoena seeking the names, addresses and contact information for hundreds of election workers and volunteers in Georgia was quashed.
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A federal judge on Tuesday blocked a Justice Department demand for the names, addresses and contact information for hundreds of 2020 election workers and volunteers in Georgia’s most populous county.
The Justice Department’s subpoena, served on Fulton County in April, is part of DOJ’s broad investigation of President Donald Trump’s 2020 loss in the state. But U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II called the breadth of the department’s request “staggering” and concluded that it served no valid investigative purpose.
Trump has repeatedly made false assertions that his 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia and other key states that year was a result of fraud. But the judge said the standard five-year statute of limitations on almost any crime the department might wish to charge expired last year.
Ray, a Trump appointee, credited arguments by the county’s lawyers who maintained that the subpoena served no purpose other than to harass election workers ahead of this year’s midterm vote and to fan baseless speculation about the 2020 campaign.
“Everyone, whether you support the President or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 Election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the Grand Jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose,” Ray wrote.
The judge acknowledged that the law gives prosecutors wide latitude to seek information through the grand jury process. But, he added, “that does not give DOJ the right to use the grand jury to do whatever the DOJ wants.”
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Trump lost the 2020 race in Georgia to Biden by about 12,000 votes. He has continued to insist the election was stolen despite findings to the contrary by dozens of audits, recounts, court rulings, independent reviews and an assessment by Trump’s former attorney general, William P. Barr.
Since his return to the White House last year, Trump has deployed several federal agencies to find evidence to support his claims, and he has demanded that Republicans in Congress pass an array of reforms aimed at shoring up election security based on his discredited assertions.
The Justice Department has said it is investigating “irregularities that occurred during the 2020 presidential election” in Fulton County, home to Atlanta and a locale that has become an epicenter for conspiracy theories about the 2020 vote.
Earlier this year, the FBI seized more than 600 boxes of voting material from the county as part of that probe. The application that agents submitted to obtain a search warrant for that raid was largely based on well-worn and previously debunked conspiracy theories.
The subpoena for the election workers’ personal information was issued in April by the office of Dan Bishop, a former Republican member of Congress who was named the interim U.S. attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina last year. In March, he was appointed by former attorney general Pam Bondi to oversee election integrity investigations across the country.
In defending the subpoena, prosecutors said questions over whether any potential charges were time-barred were premature. They maintained that the point of the request was to locate election workers who might have relevant information to their inquiry so they could determine what, if any, charges might be filed.
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This is a developing story and will be updated.
