The Department of Justice lawyer who authorized the FBI’s raid on a Georgia election office this week has a very specific background: he used to be second-in-command under an attorney general who tried to overturn the 2020 election.
Thomas Albus, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, proffered the sealed search warrant that sent federal agents into Fulton County’s election operations center on Wednesday. Before landing that gig, Albus worked as first assistant to then-Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt—who spent the weeks after the 2020 election actively trying to throw out votes from states Biden won.
THE DETAILS: Back in December 2020, when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed his infamous lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to toss election results from swing states, Schmitt’s office filed an amicus brief backing the effort and rallied 17 other Republican attorneys general to join. Schmitt rode that election-denial wave all the way to the U.S. Senate in 2022.
Now his former deputy is helping the federal government execute what looks a lot like Donald Trump’s revenge fantasy against Georgia—the state where he notoriously pressured officials to “find” him votes and has spent years baselessly claiming the election was stolen.
BUT BUT BUT: Local officials say they still don’t even know what’s going on. At a press conference Thursday, Fulton County officials said they hadn’t received a full copy of the search warrant and had no idea where the seized records were taken or why. According to Sherri Allen, chair of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections, the FBI walked off with 700 boxes of election-related records.
WHY IT MATTERS: The raid appears connected to a conspiracy theory popular in MAGA circles—and apparently within the Trump administration—that Venezuela somehow interfered in the 2020 election. That claim was debunked in a Delaware court in 2023. But the DOJ has been “investigating” it since November anyway.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was photographed at the raid, which raised immediate questions about why a foreign intelligence official would show up at a domestic election office. Democratic Senator Mark Warner didn’t mince words: Either Gabbard believes there’s a legitimate foreign intelligence angle and violated her legal obligation to inform Congress, or “she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office” by “injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community into a domestic political stunt.”
BOTTOM LINE: The Trump administration is using federal law enforcement—led by people with a documented history of election denial—to ransack a county election office based on debunked conspiracy theories. That’s not investigating fraud. That’s manufacturing legitimacy for lies.