FBI agents visited the homes of current and former election officials in Wisconsin as part of an investigation into debunked election conspiracy theories peddled by President Donald Trump.
The FBI has spent months trying to seize ballots, gain access to personal information about poll workers, and interview election officials in swing states in response to Trump’s baseless claims that he beat Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
After raiding an election hub in Georgia, seizing images of ballots and other election data in Arizona, and demanding ballots in Michigan, Kash Patel’s FBI has expanded its probe to include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area, The Washington Post reported.
Sometime in the past few weeks, agents spoke to the state’s deputy election director, and then showed up at the private homes of former elections officials, sources told the Post.
The visits—which critics say is a way to intimidate the president’s perceived enemies—came after agents also appeared unannounced at the home of Milwaukee County’s elections director, Michelle Hawley, instead of contacting her office directly, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
In their interviews with the former officials, the FBI agents honed in on two topics that have fueled discredited claims of voter fraud in Wisconsin.
They asked about a flash drive with absentee ballot results, and a bizarre claim about a secret backroom in an election office where an unnamed man from Illinois supposedly printed ballots for Biden, sources told the Post.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the FBI for comment.
In 2020, poll workers finished tabulating absentee ballots in Milwaukee at about 3 a.m.
The city’s then-election director Claire Woodall then gathered about a dozen flash drives from the ballot tabulators and brought them under police escort to a county office where the absentee votes were added to the other results.
When Woodall got to the county office, she realized she had forgotten a flash drive, which another election worker then gave to a police officer to bring to the county office.
The flash drive quickly became a focal point of conspiracy theories, even though election observers from both parties watched how the situation was handled, and Milwaukee’s election results were confirmed in a recount, court battles, and a review by a conservative legal group.
The secret backroom theory originated with a public records lawsuit filed by a convicted felon named Peter Bernegger who took it upon himself to challenge Trump’s election loss in court, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported at the time.
A judge later threw out the suit.
In addition to the former officials, FBI agents also planned to interview police officers who were present at Milwaukee’s central count location and polling sites throughout the city, local ABC affiliate WISN-TV reported last week.
Local officials worry that the FBI will also try to seize the state’s absentee ballots, which thanks to a quirk in Wisconsin’s voting rules can be traced to individual voters.
That would mean that federal agents could match voters to their preferred candidate, eliminating the ballots’ secrecy.
Recounts, court cases, and independent reviews have repeatedly shown that Biden beat Trump by more than 7 million votes nationwide, winning 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Patel has nevertheless demanded access to a wide range of state election information, including demanding the names and addresses of 2020 election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, where Biden won more than two-thirds of the 517,000 votes cast for president, CNN reported.
The county has opposed to the move in court, saying the request is a “fishing expedition” meant to “target and harass” the president’s perceived political enemies.
