FBI agents walk outside the home of the former White House national security adviser John Bolton as it is searched by FBI, in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., August 22, 2025. REUTERS/Tasos Katopodis
President Donald Trump's desperate attempt to re-litigate the 2020 election and his long-ago debunked fraud claims are backfiring. A new report reveals the president's renewed effort in Wisconsin is less about uncovering new evidence than it is about bringing old conspiracy theories, targeting election workers and laying the groundwork for future "fraud" claims by Trump and the GOP.
The New Republic cited a Votebeat report from Monday stating that the FBI is now using its authority to speak with some of the conspiracy theorists from the 2020 Wisconsin election.
According to a 2020 poll worker, David Bolter, the FBI showed up at his door with questions about local officials and their handling of the election. Bolter joined Trump's failed 2020 lawsuit at the time, trying to overturn the loss.
In his sworn affidavit, Bolter said that someone in Milwaukee's absentee ballot county facility had announced around midnight that "huge truckload of ballots" was about to be delivered. There was no other evidence of the claim, but it became the basis for conspiracy theories.
Christine, who was too fearful to give her full name, told Votebeat that she witnessed someone who was still counting votes after it was announced that counting had finished.
“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she told Votebeat. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”
Some FBI agents visited election workers in Milwaukee in May, The Washington Post reported at the time.
There was a non-partisan audit of the election in 2020 and everything was determined to be "safe and secure." It prompted TNR to question what the FBI was hoping to find.
“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research told Votebeat. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”
Voter fraud was discovered in Wisconsin in 2020. Fraudulent electors in the state issued a public statement as a result of a settlement in a lawsuit. In the statement, they acknowledged that their electoral votes, cast at the urging of the Trump campaign and the Republican Party of Wisconsin, were used in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disrupt the peaceful transition of presidential power.
