Biden's lawyer on the Georgia recount

Jacquelyn Lopez,  MS NEWS -   The moment the media declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, I was on a flight from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta — deployed in my role as counsel to the Biden campaign to defend the will of Georgia voters as the state ballot counting process unfolded. For most Americans, the election was over. But my work was just getting started.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes.

Under Georgia law, the close margin required election officials to carry out not only the regular counting process, but also a “risk limiting audit” — a hand recount of all five million ballots cast. Our legal team, and that of the Trump campaign, observed as each of Georgia’s 159 counties counted the ballots, certified the count and then counted them again by hand. After all of this, the Trump campaign demanded a third count in the form of a statewide machine recount. Georgia’s dedicated election workers counted every ballot a third time, often working overnight in shifts while contending with threats of violence and an unprecedented global pandemic. Watching it unfold, I was awed by the election staff’s dedication and their commitment to the integrity of the process.

After three counts, the results remained unchanged. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by nearly 12,000 votes. Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp certified the results despite intense pressure from then-President Donald Trump. Courts rejected every attempt by the Trump campaign and the president’s allies to overturn the results.

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Trump’s FBI seizes 2020 ballots in Fulton County

JANUARY 29, 2026 / 09:25

And yet, more than five years later, President Trump has taken his most extreme step to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. On Wednesday, a phalanx of FBI agents descended on the Fulton County election operations center and seized hundreds of boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, ballot images and other documents related to the 2020 vote.

Americans who believe in free and fair elections should be terrified. But not because the president and his cronies at the FBI and the Justice Department might find some “smoking gun” in those five-year-old boxes that finally validates years of lies and conspiracy theories. They won’t. It doesn’t exist. But Americans should be terrified because of what this portends for the 2026 midterms.