'They Want to Watch': Trump Backs DOJ Poll Monitors for Fulton and Five Other Georgia Counties

President Trump says the Justice Department's poll watchers in Georgia have one job, and he isn't apologizing for it.

"Well, they want to watch. You know, in Fulton County, you know that disaster. They want to watch," Trump told Atlanta News First's Abby Kousouris in an exclusive interview Saturday, ahead of his rally in Perry, according to the station. "They're not going to do anything other than watch. And if they see something wrong, we want to all have honest elections. And the one thing we have to have is honest elections."

Six Georgia counties on the list

The Justice Department has notified Bibb, Cobb, Chatham, DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett counties that it plans to station monitors there on Election Day, Nov. 3, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The paper noted that each county has produced solid Democratic wins in recent elections, and that the letters have raised concerns among Democrats and some election officials about what the monitors might try to do.

In Savannah, the Savannah Business Journal reported that Chatham County's acting elections supervisor, Billy Wooten, was told in writing. The same day, U.S. Attorney Meg Heap's office for the Southern District of Georgia announced an election integrity plan with the department's Civil Rights Division, promising to "enforce federal election laws vigorously while protecting the right of every legal voter to cast their ballot without intimidation or interference."

What the monitors can and can't do

The department's own letters spell it out. "Our monitors only observe and take notes," reads the notice Colorado received this week, according to PBS News. A senior DOJ official told reporters the monitors, who include DOJ lawyers, will not be sent to early voting sites and will be guided by federal statutes.

Federal poll monitoring is nothing new. What is new is the scale. Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon has said the department will send about 1,000 monitors to all 50 states in what she called "the largest monitoring effort" in DOJ history, NPR reported. For comparison, a DOJ official confirmed to PBS that the Biden Justice Department sent 388 people to polling places in the 2022 midterms. UNGA News mapped the first wave of counties put on notice here, and Maine's Lewiston and Portland were added after videos of interpreters at early voting, as we reported.

Why Fulton

Trump's "that disaster" line points to a county already under a federal microscope. On Jan. 28, FBI agents executed a court-authorized search warrant at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center and loaded boxes of 2020 ballots into trucks, AP reported, with an FBI spokesperson confirming the boxes held ballots.

A later FBI affidavit filed in federal court sought every physical ballot from Fulton's 2020 general election. In a companion warrant application, the agent wrote that seizing the records "would corroborate the analysis that evinces that election records were destroyed and or the tabulation of votes included materially false votes, either through duplicated scanning of specific ballots, interjection of pristine ballots, or other methods." Those are the agent's allegations, and no charges have been filed over them.

The stakes

Georgia has two marquee races on the ballot. Trump spent Saturday night in Perry stumping for Rep. Mike Collins, who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, and for gubernatorial nominee Rick Jackson, who faces Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms, FOX 5 Atlanta reported. Early voting is underway and has drawn record interest, according to WSB-TV.

Monitors who simply watch and take notes shouldn't worry anyone who runs a clean election. Ten days out, the counties on the list know exactly who will be in the room.