During his Wednesday, January 21 speech at the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, U.S. President Donald Trump repeated his debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and promised that "people will soon be prosecuted for what they did."

"It was a rigged election," Trump told Davos attendees. "We can't have rigged elections."

European reporters were quick to fact-check Trump, noting that one recount after another confirmed that 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden won the election fair and square.

But a week later in Georgia, on Wednesday, January 28, FBI agents searched an elections center looking for 2020 election records. Georgia was among the swing states that Trump lost in 2020 but won in 2016 and 2024.

In some January 29 posts on X, formerly Twitter, Nevada Independent CEO Jon Ralston stressed that the search is about much more than Georgia and much more than 2020.

Ralston said of the FBI search, "Outrageous and frightening. No basis to do this, all court cases Trump filed came to naught in 2020. And don't forget this from Trump in '22: 'Clark County, Nevada, has a corrupt voting system...' Does anyone think he'll stop w/[Georgia]? And still: The silence of the GOP lambs."

Referencing the 2026 midterms in a separate tweet, Ralston posted, "This has little to do with 2020. With the likelihood of the GOP losing the House in November and the Senate perhaps in play, this is all about what Trump is planning for this year's election. Calling an election corrupt so you can corrupt an election is quite the trick."

Fox News digital is reporting that the FBI staged a raid on an elections office in Georgia on Wednesday.

According to the report, "agents were seen entering the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center ... Fox News Digital is told the probe is related to the 2020 election."

FBI Atlanta told The Georgia Record it is "executing a court authorized law enforcement action" at the facility Fox News says "state officials opened in 2023."

"[The facility] was designed to streamline election processes," Fox News reports.

"Our investigation into this matter is ongoing so there are no details that I can provide at the moment," a spokesperson told the Georgia Record.

As the report notes, "The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division sued Fulton County recently over election records from the 2020 election."

"I’m at the site of a Fulton County elections office where FBI officials confirmed they are conducting 'court authorized activity' but declined further comment for now. Trump has repeatedly threatened to open an investigation into his 2020 defeat in Georgia," Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein wrote on X.

Legal analysts on social media are demanding to see the warrant that was approved by a federal judge.

The chairman of a special Senate committee set up to probe the Fulton County prosecution of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss has turned his attention to former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, whose ties to a voter registration nonprofit recently resulted in one of the largest campaign ethics fines levied by the state.

Athens Republican Sen. Bill Cowsert on Friday filed Senate Resolution 292, which would allow the Senate Special Committee on Investigations to open a probe into Abrams’ founded New Georgia Project following a Jan. 15 settlement in the long-running campaign ethics case. Last month, the group and affiliated New Georgia Project Action Fund signed an settlement agreement in a 2019 case alleging illegal campaign contributions to Abrams’ 2018 gubernatorial campaign and other Democrats running for statewide office that year.

The New Georgia Project agreed to pay a $300,000 fine as part of a state ethics commission settlement agreement for committing 16 campaign finance violations, including failing to register as an independent committee and not disclosing about $4.2 million in contributions and $3.2 million in expenditures.

The Senate resolution says the special committee will examine whether current state laws on campaign finance and nonprofits fail to address the “legal and fiscal issues raised by the alleged and admitted conduct of multiple organizations with connections to Stacey Abrams.”

Abrams created the New Georgia Project to focus on registering more Black and other non-white Georgians to vote, earning her national recognition for her work for growing the state’s electorate and boosting engagement among disaffected voters. She has not been affiliated with New Georgia Project since shortly before her 2018 campaign, when she narrowly lost to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Abrams lost by a wider margin in a 2022 rematch with Kemp.

The Senate resolution would also allow the committee to investigate a $2 billion grant awarded in 2024 to an environmental organization “with ties to Abrams.”

In a PolitiFact post published Wednesday, the Poynter Institute disputed allegations on social media that Abrams committed fraud during the awarding of the Environmental Protection Agency grant allocated for energy-efficient housing across the country.

The clean grant was awarded to Power Forward Communities, a coalition of groups like United Way, Habitat for Humanity International and Rewiring America, a national electrification nonprofit that Abrams served as senior counsel for from March 2023 until the end of 2024.

An executive of Power Forward told Politico that Abrams never received any payments related to the grant.

Abrams is the second prominent Georgia Democratic Black woman targeted since the special committee was established last year to investigate alleged misconduct by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. In January, the Senate voted along party lines to reinstate the committee’s investigation into Willis’ handling of the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

Senate Minority Leader Democrat Harold Jones said Friday that he is concerned that SR 292 is another example of GOP Senate leadership wading into legal matters that have been handled in more appropriate venues.

“The thing that stands out is that neither one is within our purview,” Jones said. “There’s no real authority to do this, quite frankly, and it’s really a first that has been done. The president actually said people ought to stop actually engaging in this type of behavior. And yet, here we are, with their party still engaging in behavior that is trying to use a quasi-court system to gain a political advantage.”

Willis is requesting that the Georgia Supreme Court consider her challenge after the state’s appellate court disqualified her from prosecuting the Trump case because of misconduct related to a previously undisclosed romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she hired to lead the case.

Willis also continues to wage court battles seeking to block Senate committee subpoenas requesting her to testify and turn over a trove of documents.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com.

Five years after losing to Democrat Joe Biden, Donald Trump continues to claim that the United States' 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. That claim has been repeatedly debunked, yet Trump is calling for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to launch new 2020 investigations.

In an article published on November 11, Washington Post reporters Isaac Arnsdorf, Patrick Marley and Perry Stein describe the conflict between MAGA Republicans who remain obsessed with that election and Republicans who wish Trump would move on and abandon his "renewed focus on 2020."

"President Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election, raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections," the Post reporters explain. "In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts, Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted. He recently hired at the White House a lawyer who worked on contesting the 2020 results."

Arnsdorf, Marley and Stein add, "Administration officials and allies have asked to inspect voting equipment in Colorado and Missouri. Others are seeking mail ballots from Atlanta in 2020, when Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to lose Georgia since 1992."

Rob Pitts, chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners in Georgia, believes that revisiting 2020 is a waste of time for Trump and his allies.

Pitts told the Post, "It makes no sense to me to continue to look at the 2020 elections,” Audit after audit, review after review, where does it end? One more time? Two more times?"

Read the full Washington Post article at this link (subscription required).

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Thursday insisted that the “best days are ahead of us,” just hours after a sharply critical report charged that some “House Republican women are in open revolt” against him.

Speaking from inside the U.S. Capitol, Johnson on Thursday told reporters, “steady at the wheel, everybody,” and, “it’s going to be fine. Our best days are ahead of us. Americans are going to be feeling a lot better in the early part of next year,” according to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman.

“Speaker Mike Johnson is staring down a revolt from House Republican women,” NBC News reported, adding: “a number of high-profile Republican women are fleeing the House for other opportunities, weighing retirement or quitting Congress early, fueling some concern that GOP women’s ranks could be depleted in the next Congress.”

Politico this week described Johnson’s House of Representatives as “spinning out of control.”

Suggesting that House Republicans “can’t stand each other,” NOTUS added that “rank-and-file Republicans are increasingly frustrated with their leadership — and much of that frustration is spilling out into the open.”

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), whose resignation from Congress shocked the political sphere, told NOTUS, “My bills which reflect many of President Trump’s executive orders … just sit collecting dust. That’s how it is for most members of Congress’s bills, the Speaker never brings them to the floor for a vote.”

NBC News cited action taken by U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), filing a discharge petition on banning congressional stock trading, as an effort to “go around Johnson and force a floor vote.”

Publicly, Luna expressed that she is “frustrated” and “pissed” — while also calling Johnson “a good guy.”

Apart from Greene’s broadsides against Johnson, perhaps the most publicly extreme attack on Johnson has been from a member of his own leadership team.

“Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the chair of House Republican Leadership, not only signed on to Luna’s petition but also publicly unloaded on Johnson over an unrelated issue in the national defense bill, suggesting in a series of social media posts that Johnson lied about the matter,” NBC noted.

Stefanik’s feud with Johnson was so damaging that President Donald Trump on Tuesday night had to intervene.

“After a productive discussion I had last night with President Trump and Speaker Johnson, the provision requiring Congressional disclosure when the FBI opens counterintelligence investigations into presidential and federal candidates seeking office will be included in the IAA/NDAA bill on the floor,” Stefanik declared on Wednesday. “This is a significant legislative win delivered against the illegal weaponization of the deep state.”

Stefanik reportedly had threatened to tank the must-pass national defense bill.

Politico’s Jason Beeferman reported on Wednesday that Stefanik’s “victory (and sudden peace) in her public fight” with the House Speaker “comes after she told me last night that Johnson ‘has catastrophic, plummeting support among Republican voters.’”

Axios reported that “Stefanik’s stance sets up another test of Johnson’s ability to hold together his razor-thin majority.”

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), “has told people she is so frustrated” with Johnson, “and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress,” The New York Times reported. Mace, who is running for governor, adamantly denied she is considering retiring from Congress early.

According to NBC, two House Republican women “said that they feel they have been passed over for opportunities, that their priorities don’t always get taken as seriously under Johnson’s leadership and that they believe that could be driving some of the exits and public fights with him.”

“We aren’t taken seriously,” one of the women said. “You have women who are very accomplished, very successful, who have earned the merit, who aren’t given the time of the day.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) gave an opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee hearing to question former special counsel Jack Smith where he brought all of the evidence uncovered by Smith's investigation.

Smith’s appearance marks a significant moment in ongoing congressional scrutiny of the Justice Department's handling of cases related to Trump.

Smith's tenure as special counsel was marked by high-profile investigations into Trump's theft of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago residence and Trump's ongoing refusal to return them.

The classified documents investigation resulted in charges against Trump, his aide, Walt Nauta, and the Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira. His office secured an indictment in the classified documents case in Florida, though the case faced legal challenges and was eventually dismissed.

However, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July 2023, ruling that Smith's appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional—a decision that shaped the trajectory of federal prosecution efforts against the former president.

The other probe dealt with events surrounding January 6, 2021.

Smith's January 6 investigation led to charges against numerous Capitol riot participants but faced complications regarding potential charges against Trump himself.

Following Trump's election victory in November 2024, Smith resigned from his position, leaving behind a two-part report.

The following is a rush transcript and may not be in its final form.

"I'm glad that the committee has finally granted you the same chance to report your findings to the American people that every other special counsel investigating an American president has had. The good chairman started by saying it's all about politics. Well, maybe for them, but for us, it's all about the rule of law.

"And who's going to stand by the rule of law and who's going to oppose it? Now, Mr. Smith, you're one of America's great prosecutors. For nearly three decades, you worked for justice under both Republicans and Democrats — in the Manhattan D.A. office, where you prosecuted sex crimes and domestic violence cases; in the Eastern District of New York, where you prosecuted murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals; and leading the public integrity section at the Department of Justice.

"You brought prosecutions against corrupt public officials across the political spectrum. When you went to The Hague as chief prosecutor in the Kosovo trial, you prosecuted war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against thousands of innocent victims. While others may have devoted their lives to corrupt self-enrichment, you have devoted your life to the rule of law and to public service.

"You've never been prosecuted for anything. You've never been convicted of anything. As far as I can tell, you've never even been the subject of a disciplinary proceeding over the course of your multi-decade career. But Donald Trump says you're a criminal and you belong in prison — not because you did anything wrong, mind you, but because you did everything right. You pursued the facts. You followed the law. You stuck with extreme caution to every rule of professional responsibility. You had the audacity to do your job.

"Everybody here knows what you did wrong in Donald Trump's eyes and why he says you belong in prison. You found, and I quote from your sworn testimony before the committee, 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.'

"When asked whether you believed the evidence was enough to obtain a criminal conviction against Donald Trump at trial, you had a one-word answer: yes. When asked if Donald Trump was responsible for the violence that took place at the Capitol on January 6th, you said your view of the evidence was that he caused it, that he exploited it, and that it was foreseeable to him.

"You found that Trump knew he had lost the election. How? Well, his own attorney general, William Barr, repeatedly told him so and described all of Trump's theories as 'BS.' Trump's top campaign advisers told him he lost the election. Vice President Pence told him he lost the election. More than 60 federal, state and court decisions, including eight rendered by judges he appointed to the bench, rejected every outlandish election fraud and corruption claim that he made. Trump himself even privately acknowledged it, gesturing to Joe Biden on TV and saying, 'Can you believe I lost to that effing guy?' He knew he lost, but he threw everything into his big lie — which some people, even in this room to this day, will stand by and swear by.

"Well, when the big lie wasn't enough to convince officials like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to commit election fraud and find Trump 11,780 votes; when it wasn't enough to convince Trump's DOJ to, quote, 'just call the election corrupt and leave the rest to me' in the House; when it wasn't enough to force Vice President Mike Pence to announce and then exercise lawless powers to reject electoral college votes and use counterfeit slates to anoint Trump the winner — that's when Trump incited massive violence on January 6th. While more than 140 officers were being brutally assaulted by Trump's mob, rioters beat them with flagpoles, sprayed them with chemical agents, and crushed them in doorways.

"And while they chanted 'Hang Mike Pence' and chased the vice president out of the Capitol, Trump and his team worked the phones — not calling the National Guard, which was under the direct unilateral control of Donald Trump, but calling members of Congress, urging them to delay certification and to nullify the election results. Special counsel Smith, you pursued the facts. You followed every applicable law, ethics rule, and DOJ regulation. Your decisions were reviewed by the public integrity section. You acted based solely on the facts — the opposite of Donald Trump, who now has purported to take over the Department of Justice.

"He's in charge of the whole thing under his unitary executive theory, and he acts openly, purely based on political vendetta and motives of personal revenge. And he doesn't deny it. His colleagues have complained about the special counsel's review of toll records, which are phone records like a phone bill showing only the timing and duration of calls and containing no content, no substance whatsoever from the calls. But those records were lawfully subpoenaed because Donald Trump made those members of Congress relevant to the investigation.

"It was Trump who chose to call them to advance his criminal scheme. As you testified, Mr. Smith, if Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic senators, we would have gotten toll records for them, too. I trust our colleagues get the point, because America certainly gets the point. There is much Mr. Smith still can't talk about, though we know he badly wants to. His investigation developed what he calls powerful evidence that Trump stole documents containing our country's most sensitive secrets, hoarded them in the ballrooms and bathrooms of his well-trafficked Mar-a-Lago social club. He showed them off to visitors, and then he obstructed a federal investigation by instructing his attorney to pluck out anything really bad before turning materials over to the FBI and having his staff delete incriminating security footage. But today, we're not going to hear a lot about that because you are gagged by an absurd judicial order rendered by Trump's most servile and sycophantic appointee to the federal bench, Judge Aileen Cannon.

"This order not only blocks the release of volume two of your report, which is unprecedented, about the classified documents matter. It also gags you from discussing the report or its contents with us, with America, so we don't know what's in it. But it must be pretty devastating because Donald Trump is desperate to keep Mr. Smith or any other DOJ official, for all time, from ever releasing it to Congress and to the American people.

"Now, Mr. Smith, if any of our colleagues foolishly choose to attack you and vilify you today — and I know that's not going to happen from some serious prosecutors over there like Mr. Knott and Mr. Schmidt, who understand what federal prosecutors do and what the rule of law means — but if anybody decides to attack you personally, they will only be revealing their own ignorance of what prosecutors do and their own indifference to what the rule of law requires in America. They will only be stroking the wounded ego of a lawless, twice-impeached, convicted felon president who not only unleashed a mob against Congress and his own vice president, but is now pardoned and released into our communities.

"Hundreds of extremists, insurrectionists, and cop-beating felons who have proceeded to commit dozens more crimes against the American people since they were pardoned. Mr. Smith, I understand you are a long-distance marathon runner. I read that you are a triathlete who has done more than 100 triathlons and nine Ironman competitions. You are in the fight for justice and the rule of law for the long distance, for the long haul. And I thank you for that. And we should all try to follow your example. America looks forward to your testimony today. I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman."

- YouTube youtu.be

The chairman of a Georgia Senate panel pledged on Friday that his committee will be on a fact finding mission during its investigation into whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis misappropriated taxpayer money as she pursued a sweeping felony racketeering case against Donald Trump and a number of his allies.

In its first meeting held on Friday, the Senate Special Committee on Investigations approved rules and provided insight into how the panel, which consists of six Republicans and three Democrats, will conduct its investigations into a Fulton district attorney, who admitted on Feb. 4 that she had a romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. Wade was appointed by Willis in November 2021 to assist in the prosecution of the 2020 election interference case against Trump and 18 other defendants.

Athens Republican Sen. Bill Cowsert said the special committee’s objective is to find the truth and not conduct partisan biased investigations into Willis’ decision to pursue a case against the former Republican president, several members of Trump’s inner circle and others in the historic racketeering case.

The special panel does not have the authority to remove Willis from the case or office but does have subpoena powers that could be used to try to get Willis, Wade or other potential witnesses to testify.

“It is not within our authority or our scope to disqualify counsel in any ongoing investigations. It is not part of our job to disbar anybody or to bring professional allegations of misconduct against anybody,” said Cowsert, an attorney who chairs the committee.

“It is not the charge of this committee to in any way interfere with any ongoing criminal prosecutions and that is not where this committee will go,” Cowsert said. “Our job is to investigate many of these troubling allegations that have come forward in these last few months, and determine what the true facts are.”

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has scheduled a court hearing on Thursday on defense motions seeking to remove Willis from the case on arguments that her relationship with Wade is a conflict of interest and misuse of taxpayer funds for personal gain.

Willis, who has rejected calls for her to be disqualified from the case, did not attend Friday’s hearing inside the state Capitol.

Senate Minority Leader Gloria Butler raised questions Friday about the committee’s ability to overcome partisan bias during its investigation into Willis, a Democrat elected in 2020 as Fulton’s top prosecutor.

“It is my hope that this committee conducts itself in a responsible fashion and pursues the truth, nothing but the truth,” said the Stone Mountain Democrat. “I think a political witch hunt or show trial would damage Georgians’ faith in both our political and legal system.”

Willis has said that she and Wade strictly had a professional relationship and were friends prior to Wade’s appointment to the case in November 2021. The relationship became romantic in 2022, said Willis, who accused defense lawyers of trying to manufacture a conflict of interest based on irrelevant allegations.

Wade has been paid more than $650,000 since being appointed by Willis as a lead prosecutor in the historic case against Trump and the former Republican president’s co-defendants.

In early January, an attorney for Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign official and one of Trump’s Fulton co-defendants, accused Willis and Wade of being romantically involved while financially profiting off their relationship. In a divorce filing, Wade’s estranged wife released credit card statements under Wade’s name showing roundtrip airline tickets purchased for himself and Willis to San Francisco and Miami in 2022 and 2023.

In a Feb. 7 online article published by Slate, Western Carolina University ethics professor J. Tom Morgan, the former district attorney for DeKalb County, said the details of Wade’s relationship with Willis don’t appear to violate the state’s ethics code for lawyers. Morgan said that there is no evidence that Willis or Wade engaged in improper financial kickbacks that would compromise the election interference case.

Georgia Recorder is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on Facebook and Twitter.