When President Donald Trump delivered his primetime address about election fraud Thursday, Dana Barrett was watching and ready to take notes.
But Barrett, a Fulton County commissioner, did not hear much worth writing down.
The Democratic commissioner represents a county that Trump has repeatedly blamed for his 2020 election loss.
Last winter, the FBI raided the Fulton election warehouse and seized ballots.
Then, in early July, came reports that the FBI had plans to “surge” 260 analysts and specialists to Fulton for what a government memo described as a “priority” investigation.
The memo gave the analysts until July 17 to check 708 records, the Associated Press reported after obtaining a copy.
So, Barrett figured Trump’s decision to schedule his speech on July 16 must have been related to that deadline and that he would be revealing big news about Fulton.
Then, Trump went live with his speech — and he did not mention the county.
Barrett said that was a telling omission. “There was really nothing that Trump said in that speech that was significant,” she added.
Along with Trump’s speech came his declassification of documents related to investigations of election meddling. Despite the president’s past claims that Georgia had been a hotbed of voter fraud, the Peach State was mentioned only a handful of times in those 58 documents, which the public can download from the White House website.
None of those references contained clear evidence of fraud.
One document points to a 2017 television news report about an FBI investigation of a data breach at Kennesaw State University while the university was involved in maintaining the state’s voter registration database.
Another refers to a 2021 federal lawsuit against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that included a report from an expert who said barcodes, like the QR codes used by Georgia’s voting machines, were vulnerable to hackers.
Many of the declassified documents were heavily redacted, including one that mentions Georgia and other states along with the government of China. So much of that document is blacked out that it is not possible to summarize its contents, but it mentions the personal information of millions of Americans in voter registration databases. Other documents say China vacuumed up such information, much or all of it publicly available.
Finally, one of the documents notes that Trump alerted leaders in 15 states, Georgia among them, that their voter registration rolls had been “compromised” by China.
Yet, a 2020 memo by the National Intelligence Council says the country’s elections would be difficult to undermine.
The newly declassified document says voting locations are not connected to the internet or to each other, so they can only be manipulated in person. It could still be done in enough states to influence a presidential election, the memo says, but it would be difficult and, the authors concluded, “postelection audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.”
That memo, which says vote tabulation systems in the United States “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” was written during Trump’s first term.
Another declassified memo also mentions Georgia. It offers a narrative seemingly at odds with the president’s claims that the state runs unreliable elections.
Trump has been unsparing in his criticism of Raffensperger, who oversaw the 2020 election when Trump lost, as well as the 2024 election when he won.
More than a quarter million noncitizens are illegally registered to vote in four states, the new Department of Homeland Security memo says. But as of late June, it says, 10 states had “conscientious” leaders who had successfully used the agency’s services to scour their rolls for such noncitizen voters.
Georgia is listed among these “proactive” states.
