Judge quashes DOJ subpoena for Fulton County election workers’ data

A federal judge on Tuesday quashed a Justice Department subpoena for the names, addresses, phone numbers, emails and other personal information of Fulton County election workers, saying the government had moved too late to support a viable criminal case.

U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump appointee, called the request “staggering,” “unreasonable” and an “arbitrary fishing expedition.” He said the probable statute of limitations for crimes tied to the 2020 election was about five years and had largely expired, making any prosecution questionable at best and, in his view, not viable.

The subpoena reached deep into the county’s election workforce, seeking identifying details for essentially everyone who helped run the 2020 vote in Fulton County, Georgia, including people involved in mail-in ballot review, mobile voting locations, result transfers and ballot transport. Ray said that scope would chill future poll-worker recruitment, a warning that puts the timing issue at the center of the dispute: if the government waits years to reopen a contested election, it risks running out the clock and scaring off the very workers needed to run the next one.

Fulton County is Georgia’s most populous county and includes Atlanta, which has remained a focus of Donald Trump’s repeated, unsupported claims that widespread fraud there cost him the 2020 election and the presidency. The ruling undercuts the administration’s latest effort to revisit that fight through federal criminal inquiry, after months of renewed attention to Fulton County election records and procedures.

The case intensified in January, when FBI agents seized 700 boxes of ballots and other materials from the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center under a search warrant. In May, another federal judge allowed the Justice Department to keep the election records taken in that raid. Ray’s ruling now draws a sharper line around what the government can still demand from a county that has already faced years of scrutiny.

The Justice Department said the decision conflicts with Supreme Court holdings on grand jury investigative powers and said it was weighing its options to challenge the ruling. Fulton County officials had argued the subpoena was meant to target, harass and punish the president’s perceived political opponents and was grossly overbroad. For now, the court has signaled that the passage of time, not just the breadth of the request, may be the hardest barrier to reopening election-related criminal inquiries years after the fact.