Inside Trump's plot to fix the midterm elections

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U.S. President Donald Trump attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

We speak with Mother Jones voting rights correspondent Ari Berman about the shocking FBI raid on an elections hub in Fulton County, Georgia. Federal agents were seeking records related to the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won despite his loss to Joe Biden that year. During his efforts to overturn the election results, Trump pressured local officials to “find” him an additional 11,780 votes. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene Friday despite having no domestic law enforcement authority. The raid comes amid an ongoing federal probe into the 2020 election.

“The fact that they seized 700 boxes of ballots was incredibly disturbing and sets a chilling precedent for how Trump might try to interfere in the 2026 election,” says Berman, who ties the raid in Georgia to the administration’s pressure on Minnesota to hand over voter rolls. “This is now a multifront, concerted effort to try to interfere in the midterm elections.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We end today’s show with the FBI raid of an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County last week seeking computers and ballots related to the 2020 election. The raid came as President Trump continues to falsely claim his defeat in the 2020 election was a result of widespread voting fraud.

For more, we go to Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones magazine, his most recent piece headlined “From Minnesota to Georgia, Trump’s Plans to Interfere in the Midterms Are Becoming More Dangerous.”

Ari, talk about the significance of the Trump administration going after the Blackest county election office in Georgia, and then Pam Bondi saying maybe they’ll pull out the agents in Minnesota if they hand over voting rolls.

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, we’re seeing, Amy, a dramatic escalation of the administration’s tactics to try to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections. The FBI raid in Fulton County represented the full weaponization of Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. The fact that they seized 700 boxes of ballots was incredibly disturbing and sets a chilling precedent for how Trump might try to interfere in the 2026 election, to do similar kind of things to challenge election results he doesn’t like. If he’s challenging a result from six years ago, you can imagine how they’re going to try to challenge the result of the upcoming election, should Trump’s party lose.

And then, in Minnesota, you have ICE basically terrorizing a blue state and a blue city, and the attorney general of the United States essentially extorting that place to hand over voter rolls to the Department of Justice. So, what I really want your listeners to understand is that this is now a multifront, concerted effort to try to interfere in the midterm elections, that’s taking place in a number of different ways, from Georgia to Minnesota and beyond.

AMY GOODMAN: What happens to the computers and the data they took out of the Georgia election office?

ARI BERMAN: Well, that’s a very good question. It’s one of the many unanswered questions about this raid in Fulton County. The FBI now has it. Who are they going to share it with? What are they going to do? Who’s going to supervise this process? All of these records were under seal, and now they’re in the hands of the Trump administration.

And one of the biggest unanswered questions is why Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was there, because she is prohibited by law from participating in domestic law enforcement activity. So, that’s a giant red flag right there. Tulsi Gabbard shouldn’t have been anywhere near that operation, anywhere near those ballots.

And it seems to me like they’re setting up to do something crazy, like saying, “Now we have the proof. We have the ballots. Now we know Venezuela interfered in the election, or Iran interfered in the election.” And this is as much about, as I said, the 2020 election as it is about the next election. So, they’re going to lie — continue lying about the 2020 election, so then they can lie about the next election and try to interfere in a lot of different ways.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, can you talk about the voting rolls of Minnesota?

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, so, what the Justice Department is trying to do is they’re trying to get the voter rolls not just of Minnesota, but of 24 states overall. And they want this data so they can have the first-ever national database of all registered voters in the country. And that has a lot of problems with it. There’s privacy problems. You’re talking about sensitive information like driver’s license, Social Security numbers, party history. There’s security risks. It’s a lot easier to hack one —

AMY GOODMAN: Fifteen seconds, Ari.

ARI BERMAN: It’s a lot easier to hack a massive database. But ultimately, what they want to do is they want to lie about voter fraud, remove people from the rolls and challenge election outcomes. And the attempt to take voter rolls is just a larger part of Trump’s scheme to try to rig the midterms.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump supports states’ rights, except when it comes to voting rights. Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent —

ARI BERMAN: Yeah, exactly. He supports states’ rights, except when he’s trying to take over.

AMY GOODMAN: — for Mother Jones magazine. We’ll link to your article.

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