FBI investigates – Federal investigators have returned to Wisconsin to question a 2020 poll worker whose claims helped fuel a failed Trump effort to overturn results. Across the country, the second Trump administration is revisiting repeatedly debunked allegations—from ballot se
On a cool. cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home with a list of questions for a man who had already spent years fighting his own version of the 2020 election. Bolter had raised concerns about how local officials handled the vote. he told Votebeat. and now the federal agents were back to press him again.
Bolter’s earlier claims did not change the outcome in Wisconsin. In 2020. President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s assertions in an unsuccessful lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220. 000 votes—enough. the case argued. to shift Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden. who won the state. to Trump. Courts, several election reviews, and many audits rejected the allegations.
But the belief never went away. That is part of why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee as part of an expanding national effort in the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
The interviews are drawing new scrutiny because they appear to build on allegations that had already been rejected. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported. Still, allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In that affidavit. he alleged that someone in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered—a claim for which. so far. there has been no additional evidence.
Around the same time Bolter says he spoke with the FBI. two plainclothes agents with FBI badges showed up at the apartment of a former Milwaukee resident and 2020 poll worker about an affidavit she submitted. according to the former poll worker. She asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, because she wanted to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Christine had submitted her own affidavit about the 2020 election. She said election workers were told that all votes were counted. but that she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. “I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she said. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”.
During the interview, Christine said, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, and asked if she recognized the former election official. Christine identified Woodall by name. Woodall did not respond to a request for comment.
Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.
For some election experts, the question isn’t whether the investigation targets 2020. It’s what the federal government is doing with those claims—and what it could be trying to shape next. David Becker. executive director of the nonpartisan. nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. said the effort is not mainly about the 2020 vote itself.
“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” Becker said. He described the effort as intimidation aimed at election officials and “a stream of disinformation” meant to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose.
Becker said the strategy is destabilizing, and that it is designed to satisfy “unrealistic expectations” from a president who, in his view, still cannot comprehend that he lost an election he “definitely lost.”
Wisconsin, at least, is part of a broader map. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers, which some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race—an approach the federal government has already used in Georgia.
In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. Fulton County is heavily Democratic and home to Atlanta, and it was a key part of Biden’s narrow victory in the state.
As in Wisconsin. the FBI in Georgia built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits. investigations. and courts without unearthing evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned results. The Georgia search was described as an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration.
Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard—who will step down at the end of this month as director of national intelligence—personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.
The administration’s investigations stretch far beyond Georgia and Wisconsin. In Arizona, federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election. In Puerto Rico, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine potential security risks.
The effort also includes attention to elections beyond 2020. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to Wayne County. Michigan—home to Detroit—demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election. which Trump won. But the letter cited accusations of fraud made after the 2020 election. including a lawsuit that was quickly dismissed after a judge wrote that “plaintiffs’ interpretation of events is incorrect and not credible.” Wayne County never handed over the ballots. because it does not have possession of them.
What does all of this mean for 2026?. The ability to pursue criminal charges tied to the 2020 election is constrained by time. The five-year statute of limitations that applies to most likely charges expired last year, according to law enforcement veterans. They said it is possible the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case. though the prospect remains unclear.
FBI Director Kash Patel suggested in April that the Justice Department would soon announce arrests related to the 2020 election, but no arrests have occurred yet. Officials with the FBI and Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
John Keller. a former acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section who resigned in 2025 after refusing the Trump administration’s demands to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. said the administration appears to be trying to normalize federal investigations of state elections to pave the way for future intervention.
“They are using enforcement directed at the 2020 election as a test run for what they can get away with on Election Day this year, or after, to try and delay certification or invalidate an election” if the results do not go their way, Keller said.
Injecting federal law enforcement into an ongoing election, Keller and others warn, is different from investigating the past. That could also draw stronger legal resistance.
Still, the scrutiny is widening. Last week. Trump blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election while federal authorities were investigating. Last month. he said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led some voters in Maryland to receive ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary.
State officials in both cases said there was no nefarious cause behind the problems and explained the true reasons.
The stakes rise sharply if federal officials ever move from investigating a prior election to seizing ballots during an election in progress. Any effort to seize ballots would create “unprecedented new issues. ” including a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots. election experts warn. potentially preventing election officials from declaring a winner and throwing results into uncertainty.
Catherine Engelbrecht, co-founder of the Texas-based conservative group True the Vote, which has promoted debunked theories about the 2020 election, said she understands Trump’s intentions but believes the questions about 2020 “should have been resolved” in the immediate aftermath of the election.
“This is not necessarily the way I would have recommended that it would be handled,” she said. “The fact that it wasn’t addressed has left this lingering void.”
In most cases, she said, Trump’s voter fraud claims were answered after the 2020 election, as courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.
Engelbrecht said the administration’s ongoing investigations are instead digging into long-standing concerns about the voting process the White House wants to address for future elections.
“The past is prologue,” she said. “If we don’t understand what happened, we are doomed to repeat it.”
Back in Milwaukee, the questions continue. And for people like Bolter and Christine—ordinary poll workers who said they raised concerns in 2020 and now find federal agents again in their orbit—the investigation is less about abstract policy debate than about the weight of being pulled back into a fight they thought was already decided.
MISRYOUM
Trump FBI Wisconsin Milwaukee 2020 election fraud investigation Bolter Christine Woodall Claire Woodall Fulton County Georgia ballot seizure 600 boxes Tulsi Gabbard Maricopa County Arizona subpoenas Puerto Rico voting machines Wayne County Michigan DOJ letter 2024 ballots Kash Patel statute of limitations 2026 2028 election certification
So they’re just going after a poll worker now? Wild.
I don’t get why they keep revisiting 2020 like it’s brand new. If courts already said no, what’s left? Sounds like they’re trying to make something stick.
Wait, the FBI is back because of the 220,000 votes thing? But didn’t Wisconsin already vote Biden anyway, so how would questioning him change anything now? Seems pointless unless they think he did something illegal after the fact.
This is why people are never gonna trust elections. They’re like, “oh we debunked it,” then FBI shows up at his house years later. Also wasn’t this about tampering or machines or whatever, I swear I read different versions of it online… now they’re back in Milwaukee and it feels like the story’s being retold.