Fulton County asks court to stop DOJ subpoena of 2020 election workers’ personal information
By Kaanita Iyer, CNN
(CNN) — The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections in Georgia wants to block the Justice Department from gaining access to the personal information of thousands of 2020 election workers.
In a motion filed on Monday, the board requested that DOJ’s April 20 subpoena of election workers’ names, addresses and phone numbers be “quashed,” arguing that this is the department’s “latest effort to target and harass (President Donald Trump)’s perceived political enemies.”
It went on to say that the subpoena threatens the First Amendment rights of election workers “and will chill their participation in elections,” adding that it also “unreasonably interferes with Georgia’s sovereign authority to administer elections.”
Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts said in a statement provided to CNN that the subpoena is an act of “outrageous federal overreach.”
CNN has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
The board’s motion comes after the FBI opened a criminal investigation into what the Justice Department has described as irregularities in how Fulton County, which is home to Atlanta, carried out the 2020 election. Trump has falsely claimed the election was rigged in Georgia.
As part of the investigation, the agency searched the Fulton County elections office in January and seized election materials, which the county has filed a lawsuit to retrieve. That search was based on a warrant application that leaned on previously debunked theories of election fraud.
In the 2020 election, Joe Biden defeated Trump in part by winning the state of Georgia, which Trump had won four years earlier. In Fulton County, Biden won with over 70% of the vote.
After his loss, Trump claimed the election was rigged in the state and demanded that local election officials “find” votes to overturn the results, setting up a clash with the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Raffensperger is currently running for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in the state against a Trump-backed candidate.
Monday’s motion raised doubts that a grand jury was even seeking the election worker information sought by the subpoena. The county noted in the filing that DOJ was requesting to have the records submitted to a prosecutor working in the office of an out-of-district US attorney rather than a grand jury.
That US attorney, Dan Bishop, in the middle district of North Carolina, was recently selected by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead election-related investigations nationwide.
“[T]here is no indication from the face of the Subpoena that the grand jury is even aware of this investigation, that the records will be returned to the grand jury, or that the grand jury would knowingly participate in a politicized abuse of its subpoena process given, among other things, that the statute of limitations has lapsed on any purported 2020 election ‘crime,’” the filing said.
The board also highlighted several of Trump’s social media posts to argue that the subpoena is intended to “intimidate and harass poll workers.”
In one November 2025 Truth Social post on a Georgia prosecutor dropping a racketeering case against the president and others over attempting to overturn the 2020 election, Trump wrote, “THE 2020 ELECTION WAS RIGGED AND STOLEN.”
Trump “has made it clear that he seeks retribution against those who refuse to indulge his baseless claims,” lawyers for Fulton County’s board wrote in the filing.
Since returning to office, Trump in many cases has appeared to retaliate against a wide swath of critics and perceived political enemies through executive orders and Justice Department investigations.
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CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Aleena Fayaz contributed to this report.
