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This is One Thing, I'm David Reind, and what does election prep look like under Trump 2.0?

Oh, yeah, we got to prepare for what if there's three feet of snow on election day? And also, what if the president sends troops to the polls?

Stick around.

As I said that night and since, every time it comes up, I saw nothing that caused me to be concerned that something was going on because had I done so, I would have stopped it dead in its tracks. I'm not gonna have anything or anybody blemish the great image and reputation of Fulton County, Georgia.

Georgia elections officials like Rob Pitts have been through a lot. He's the chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. This county, which includes Atlanta, was the epicenter of baseless election lies spread by President Donald Trump and his allies after he lost the state and the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump personally pressured the Secretary of State to fine more votes.

I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state and flipping the state.

Election workers were threatened with violence, had their names dragged through the mud. No one there was eager to relive any of that.

We're following breaking news out of Fulton County, Georgia. That's where the FBI says it is serving a warrant at an elections office.

Well, if you thought the 2020 election was settled fact, last Wednesday we were reminded that Trump is still convinced his version of the story is the right one.

Source tells CNN that this is part of an effort by the Justice Department to seize election records and pursue allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election.

I was working and it was about 11 o'clock and I got a text from our county manager that there was a raid at the elections hub.

What was going through your mind when you got the call?

I immediately thought here we go.

Mo Ivory is a Fulton County commissioner. She was on scene last Wednesday watching as the FBI loaded up box after box filled with ballots from the 2020 election.

'Yesterday I sat with our Clerk of Superior Court for just a little catch-up meeting and got the exact number. It's 656 boxes on 24 pallets.

656, wow. This was a stunning move. We haven't really seen anything like this before. And in a day's sense, we've learned more about just how involved President Trump was in all this. More on that in a bit. But for Chairman Pitts, this is about way more than 2020.

Those ballots have been counted over and over again. They've been audited. They've reviewed. They've even been counted by hand. In every instance, we come up clean. So if that's the case, what is this all about? First thing comes to mind, elections in 2026 and 2028. Third thing that comes to my mind, is this a distraction to get us to take our eyes off the ball while they are. Contemplating trying to figure out how they can take over the elections here in Fulton County, and I would suspect counties that may be similar to Fultone County nationwide.

The Trump administration says they aren't trying to intimidate voters. They say these ongoing efforts are about securing the elections and rooting out alleged fraud. But Ivory says many of her constituents don't buy that.

So many people have written like, what can I do? How can I help you? Whatever, you know,

What do you tell them?

Yeah, I tell them that the most important thing you can do is to secure your vote. To make sure that you go to the Secretary of State's website and check your registration. Make sure that that you haven't been purged from the polls. Check all of your family members, your neighbors. Begin to think about a plan. Our elections are not far away, May 19th. May 19 is our primaries. We will wake up and it will be May 19. Do not be intimidated by. Donald Trump. This is what he loves to do. This is his life's work to make other people feel smaller than he is. So they will be afraid to take action and we cannot fall victim to that. We need to stand up for our rights. We need, to protect the constitution and we need to go vote in 2026.

So are these concerns about Trump meddling in the democratic process overblown or a very real concern for the midterms and beyond? And what does the nation's spy chief have to do with all this? Let's break this down with CNN senior reporter Marshall Cohen. Okay, Marshall, so it's been nearly a week since the FBI served this search warrant at a Fulton County elections office in Georgia. It took away pallets of boxes containing ballots. Do we know any more about what exactly they're looking for here?

Yeah, David, according to our reporting, they are looking for something that has already been disproven and debunked over and over. They're looking for evidence of mass voter fraud in 2020, which now is six years ago, right? The 2020 election, which will never die.

It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out.

It's Trump's number one fixation and obsession trying to prove that he didn't really lose that year.

People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election.

And David, if you look at the court filings that we have seen so far, they are investigating, the FBI and the DOJ are apparently investigating potential violations of a federal law that requires counties to hold on to election records for a certain number of years after the election. So that was the specific statute that they say they are criminally investigating. But we all know it's so much bigger than whether or not they did proper records retention. We all know. This is about 2020.

Questions that a lot of people had after this was why was Tulsi Gabbard there? She is the Director of National Intelligence. She was spotted at this search kind of on the phone standing off in the corner. Are domestic election voter fraud allegations part of her review.

So her team would say yes, because in their view, it's not just domestic voter fraud allegations. If you remember some of the conspiracies from 2020, David, was that there were maybe a foreign element to this. A lot of those conspiracies said that there was software from Venezuela or satellites in Italy and China. But I wanna just read for you what. Gabbard's office says, because this gives their perspective on why she was there. And then I'll explain why most people are scoffing at that. Her office. So she's the director of national intelligence. She's the number one highest ranking intelligence official in the United States. And they say her office said, quote, President Trump's directive to secure our elections was clear and the director. National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities to support ensuring the integrity of our elections. So that is what they're saying. And it is true that her office does play a role in elections with regards to foreign interference during the Obama administration. It was the DNI that publicly announced for the first time on October 7th, 2016 that Russia was meddling in our elections Uh, under the Trump administration, Trump won. It was the Trump appointed DNI that said in fall of 2020 that Russia again was meddling in our elections and so was China and Iran in their view. Some were against Trump, some were for Trump. Uh, and that's, that's the role of the DNI. What's not the role the DNIs to get involved in what you said, the domestic stuff. If ... Some folks in Atlanta surreptitiously moved some ballots or stuffed some ballots, which there is no evidence that they did in a systematic way or in a serious way, but if they did, that's for the Justice Department to figure out, that's the FBI to figure it out, that might be for state prosecutors to figure, that is not for the Director of National Intelligence.

And then it went even a little further with Gabbard's involvement reporting from CNN, first reported by the New York Times, that Gabbord met with some of these agents that participated in the search and put President Trump on the phone to give a little pep talk as it's being described to these agents and also that Trump personally sent Gabbird to kind of watch over all this. It does kind of speak to how granarily involved Trump. Is willing to be in this issue that, like we said, has been litigated time and again.

Yeah, I mean, we have gone so far beyond what is part of the traditional American principles of separating politics from law enforcement in recent decades. Usually the president of the United States doesn't even talk to the attorney general. Think about this, David. The president usually won't talk to the AG, so at the highest level, telling them what to do about XYZ investigation or directing their behaviors on a specific probe. And if it's very sensitive, they won't even discuss it at all, right? Joe Biden said he never spoke to Garland about the Trump probe. He never spoke Garland about the Hunter Biden probe. What we saw here with Trump was, forget about AG to presidential level, we're now going. To the literal FBI agents in the FBI jackets who carried the boxes are then on the phone with the President of the United States saying, attaboy, great job, great move.

Yeah, and Gabbard's office said that Trump did not ask any questions, nor did he or Gabbart issue any directives to these agents on the call.

Right, but let me just throw this in. Even if Trump just said, hey, great job, I'm very proud of you, or you're a real patriot, thanks for serving your country, whatever he said, imagine that you're Fulton County. You're gonna be in court trying to invalidate this search, you're gonna going to court trying to, you know, if criminal charges do come from this, you're going to challenge those charges, or you gonna try to sue to get your stuff back. Those FBI agents are now Witnesses in the sense that you could try to depose them and get testimony for them What did the president say to you that could be relevant that could undermine the case? You're not supposed to you know if he said oh, we're gonna. We're gonna catch these we're going to catch these criminals Well that could that could taint things. That's why people don't do it

All right, we got to take a break. When we come back, what this could mean for upcoming elections in your backyard. Stick around.

OK, Marshall, so set aside whatever, you know, legal case may or may not come out of this Fulton County search. I'm wondering what all this means for the midterms. And even beyond that, 2028, if President Trump is willing to get so involved at this kind of granular level to fight what he says is election fraud, which, again, we have no proof of. I mean, how does this play out on the state level beyond Georgia?

Well, there's a lot of fear out there. There are a lot of concerns. I spent a few days last week talking to secretaries of state. There was a conference here in D.C., Democrats, Republicans, secretary of state from most of the 50 states. Of course, those are the top election officials in the states. States run elections. People sometimes forget that, but state governments and local governments run our elections. This is how it's set up in the constitution. There is some federal oversight, but it's run by the states and that's why state officials gather to compare best practices, come up with strategies and try to run a nice, clean, fair election. And they were buzzing on the democratic side at this conference last week. What is Trump gonna do? How far is he gonna go to try to interfere with the election, intrude into the role of states and try to bring the federal government into that traditional state role? And what might he do to rig the vote? Not necessarily in terms of flipping numbers. No one's talking about that. What some of the stuff I heard, David, from some of these secretaries was, well, what if there are really, really long lines and ICE shows up walking up and down, patrolling the lines in a heavily Latino district? Or what if they just say the day before election day, we are gonna be there, ICE is gonna be here, be careful, they don't even have to show the threat. Could disenfranchise people.

And I imagine the argument from the Trump administration in that case would be, hey, we're just doing immigration enforcement. It just happens to be election day and those two things collide and you really get a mess. It would be very messy.

'And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't point out, nobody wants non-citizens to vote in elections where they're not allowed to vote, right? They are allowed to in some local elections, but for president or for the midterms, the Senate, et cetera, only citizens get to vote. And this is not a massive problem. There have been studies on this. And it is it is absolutely absolutely. Microscopic. But what we've heard from a lot of the secretaries of state on the democratic side is that they are strategizing more aggressively than ever. They're meeting with their democratic counterparts. They are doing tabletop exercises, planning for worst case scenarios. They are bringing in new partners and stakeholders to try to like challenge themselves creatively for scenarios that they might not have ever prepared for before. I wanna, this really jumped out to me and I wanna read this for you. We interviewed the Secretary of State for Minnesota, which obviously is ground zero for so much of this. Steve Simon, he's a Democrat. He told our colleague, Frederica Scoughton, that, quote, potential federal government intervention in state elections, quote is now a category like a weather event or a bomb threat or a power outage, quote, that his office prepares for. So if you think like. Oh yeah, we gotta prepare for what if there's three feet of snow on election day? And also, what if the president sends troops to the polls? You never had to prep for that before, Trump. Now they do.

Wow, that's really stark. And I imagine it gets even more stark with what we heard from him just the other day on Dan Bongino's podcast saying that Republicans should nationalize voting.

The Republicans should say, we want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. And we have states that are so crooked and they're counting votes. We have states and I won that show I didn't win. Now, you're going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order and the ballots. You're going see some interesting things come out.

A lot of legal experts are like, the Constitution says that's not a thing, that states are in control of the elections. But it just kind of speaks to what you're hearing from the secretaries of state, that the federal government is a possible threat in the elections, I mean, that's wild to think about.

'Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time last week with these officials, these election officials, trying to probe on like their fears. Is this just, you know, an element of what people call Trump Derangement Syndrome, right? Is this people that hate Donald Trump, assuming he's gonna do the worst thing ever? Or is this well-founded, well-grounded concern, right. I wanna figure that out. And then I come home, you know, this conference was last week, Thursday, Friday, then, you know, I'm home over the weekend, and then we're back in the office on Monday, the next business day. And I, Monday morning, Trump is on Bongino's podcast, like you said, and he says that he wants to nationalize elections, which is quite literally what these secretaries of state were, were strategizing around and being afraid of. So he proved the concerns are real by those comments. And this is just, I've covered elections long enough to know that this is like the craziest thing for any Republican to say, you know? I mean, this is so far from Republican orthodoxy. You've heard Democrats, David, talk about we should have national standards for vote by mail. We should have a national baseline for 15 days of early voting. And even stuff like that. Was met with, whoa, get the hell out of our elections, get the feds out of elections. Right. I'm ranting now, but I'm animated about this. I remember in 2016, 2016, one month before the election, the Obama administration announced that Russia was meddling in the elections and the Department of Homeland Security offered help to all 50 states. That our experts from DHS, our cyber people, our top people, we will offer to help you secure your equipment and your voting systems. And I reported at the time that some of the Republican secretaries of state said, hell no, this is a scam. This is a scheme. Obama's trying to send the feds to screw with our elections. Don't you dare get the fed's involved with our election. And look how far we've come in 10 years.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm trying to understand here is, is this just a continuation of 2020 for Trump, but with a different cast of characters who are more sympathetic to his cause, who won't throw up guardrails on some of his more extreme ideas? I mean we reported how Trump did draft two executive orders to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Nothing came of it. There was some pushback from, you know, folks that were kind of in his orbit, but What are the implications for our democracy going forward if those guard rails aren't there?

The implications could be very severe. I mean, there are a lot of the professionals that I speak to. So set aside the partisans, right? The professionals that don't care who wins or loses, but care deeply about the administration of a fair election. Those people are freaked out. They think that they believe in their life for the first time in their lifetimes, the question of whether we are going to have a free and fair election. Is in question, it's a jump ball. That being said, you're right, you're 100% right that the guard rails in the administration. It's not anything remotely like Trump's first term, which means that we have to look outside the administration, probably to the courts. And that would be probably the last line. And the most important line of defense, they played an enormous role in 2020, knocking down Trump's frivolous, often legal challenges to the count. So the courts played an enourmous role last time, and they're gonna play an enormous roll this time because. That's what these election officials told us last week, that they are prepped to the minute that Trump makes a move, whether it's sending ICE, whether it sending troops, whether it trying to seize machines, whatever it might be. You know, they will be prepared to try to go to court, get in a restraining order, get an injunction as quickly as possible. And like one thing, David, I do want to be totally fair here. I interviewed a bunch of Republican secretaries as well. They're not scared about this. They said, you know, other people have concerns in their states. Maybe that's just politics. Maybe that because they know that their state won't be targeted. But we did hear some Republicans say that they don't like the attacks against election officials because it hurts their offices and their staff. And I think we will see some Republican pushback to the idea of nationalizing elections. I do think we'll see some GOP pushback on.

Yeah, and we should say the White House had a statement about all this. Abigail Jackson's spokeswoman said Democrat conspiracies have no basis in reality and their claims shouldn't be amplified uncritically by the mainstream media. She went on to say ICE is focused on removing criminal illegal aliens from the country who should be nowhere near any polling places because it would be a crime for them to vote. And like you said, that does not really happen on any large scale at all. Well, Marshall, thank you so much for the perspective and reporting. I appreciate it. On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt claimed President Trump's call to nationalize the voting was referencing his support for a piece of congressional legislation that would institute a nationwide voter ID requirement. But then just hours later, in the Oval Office, Trump doubled down on his calls to nationalize the voting, saying states are agents of the federal government in elections. That's all for us today. We'll have another episode on Sunday. Make sure you're following the show so it'll pop in your feed right away. I'll talk to you later.