Trump-backed Georgia election official suing to refuse election results has ties to prominent election denial group
Julie Adams worked for Cleta Mitchell's Election Integrity Network, an organization at the heart of the 2020 Stop the Steal movement.
The Fulton County election board member suing for the discretion to arbitrarily refuse to certify election results with the backing of Donald Trump’s think tank worked for the country’s most prominent election denial organization, American Doom has found in collaboration with Rolling Stone.
Julie Adams was — or is; she did not respond to our questions — a regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network (EIN), an organization led by Cleta Mitchell, who worked directly with the Trump campaign in its efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts continue into 2024, as Trump and the Republican National Committee prepare to file lawsuits across the country challenging election results based on bogus allegations of widespread voter fraud. Adams’ lawsuit is just a small part of that larger game plan, which will be carried out in the months ahead, and marks an important first shot Trump’s attempts to call November’s election into question. That it was filed in Adams’ native Fulton County — a focal point of election conspiracies in 2020 and a majority Democrat area whose votes Trump will seek to throw out as he tries to win the swing state of Georgia — is no coincidence.
Adams’ role with Mitchell’s EIN has not been previously reported. She did not respond to a detailed list of questions about her role with EIN, how much she was paid, or whether she is still active with the organization.
Instead, Adams forwarded American Doom’s questions to Mike Berry, an official at AFPI, who said the organization began speaking with Adams about the issues at the heart of the lawsuit in April — at least a month before it was filed. This appears to show that Adams had an intention to sue with the help of Trump-backed AFPI well before she asked for the materials that she was denied, a denial she claims prompted her refusal to certify results of the primary election.
The Adams-AFPI lawsuit is a harbinger of things to come. Across the country, Trump and the RNC appear to have focused almost all of their efforts on challenging election results instead of engaging in traditional campaigning, Axios reported over the weekend.
In Georgia, Adams’ complaint comes amid a never-ending onslaught of election denial activity that includes continued pressure from pro-Trump activists on friendly members of the State Election Board, mass voter challenges being conducted off-the-books and handed to sympathetic county election officials throughout the state, according to American Doom’s sources, and suspect voter challenges being made with the help of Eagle AI, the election-denier backed software created with funding from Mitchell’s EIN that briefly came under scrutiny before being lost in the deluge of election news in recent months.
“Julie Adams, a newly appointed member of the Fulton County Board of Elections, is not even one step removed from MAGA 'stop the steal' ringleader Cleta Mitchell and her conspiracy-fueled mass voter challenge operation, and the EagleAI tool being used by partisan activists to remove voters across Georgia,” Democratic Party of Georgia director Tolulope Kevin Olasanoye said in a statement. “As we said last week when Adams attempted to obstruct certifying votes in Fulton County — to set the stage to do so again in November — the DPG will continue to combat MAGA Republicans and Trump allies’ efforts to undermine our democracy and ensure local elections are certified, which is required by law.”
Marilyn Marks, a left-leaning plaintiff with the Coalition for Good Government (CGG), said that while Adams’ lawsuit is clearly based in election denialism, she supports any effort at transparency in Georgia’s election system. Marks and the CGG have been suing the state in the long-running Curling vs. Raffensberger lawsuit that seeks to force Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to release information about Georgia’s voting machines, among other demands.
“This knee-jerk reaction by Dems can be suicidal in Nov. Voters really should not want board members to be prevented from having basic canvassing materials,” Marks said of Adams’ request for materials related to the May 21 primary that she refused to certify. Marks criticized my earlier post on Adams and said that as long as election deniers like Adams “are working with public records and we demand full transparency, the press can oversee what they are doing, and call b.s. on their failure to certify.”
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P.S. Things are moving pretty quickly now. Election denial maneuvers are heating up in Georgia and elsewhere. These legal efforts, continued interference by local election denial officials like the ones in Mississippi and Arkansas that we’ve reported on exclusively at American Doom, and the looming specter of political violence will be the story over the next few months. To support our efforts to expose election deniers, far-right extremists and other threats to democracy, please consider a paid subscription to American Doom for as little as $5 a month. As always, thanks for reading.
We are fast approaching the dissolution of the United States. I doubt we can do this without all of us being drawn into a hot civil war. Americans are undoing 2000 years of political and social progress and evolution. Reminds me of a quote from the book "Parable of the Tribes", if there are 12 tribes and 11 tribes want peace but 1 tribe wants war, all 12 tribes will have war.