The attorney general will testify after the FBI executed a search warrant at an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, that sought material related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, including physical ballots.
Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were at the site of the search, and Gabbard’s involvement has raised concerns from Democrats. A spokesperson for Gabbard said Mr. Trump and Bondi asked Gabbard to be present for the search.
A FBI affidavit filed with a U.S. magistrate judge to justify the warrant to search the Fulton County elections office revealed that the criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, who works in the White House. Olsen, a lawyer, worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Olsen spoke multiple times with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met to reaffirm President Biden’s win in the 2020 race, according to a House select committee that investigated the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged” and called for prosecutions stemming from that election.
The Justice Department has taken several actions focused on elections since Mr. Trump returned to the White House. Last year, it began seeking complete voter registration lists from nearly all 50 states, which includes birth dates, addresses and partial Social Security numbers.
At least 11 states have turned over the voter rolls or said they plan to. The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 24 states and Washington, D.C., for refusing to hand over their voter registration lists. Suits against California, Oregon and Michigan have since been dismissed.
The FBI, which is a component of the Justice Department, is leading the federal investigation into the Jan. 24 fatal shooting of 37-year-old Alex Pretti by federal law enforcement offices in Minneapolis. Blanche, the deputy attorney general, also said earlier this month that lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would be participating in the investigation.
Top Democrats on the Judiciary panel asked Bondi last month to turn over records related to Pretti’s killing. They also sought documents about the Justice Department’s decision to forgo an investigation into immigration agents for civil rights violations related to the fatal shooting of Good on Jan. 7.
Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle and survivors of Epstein’s crimes have criticized the Justice Department for the scope of redactions in the millions of pages of documents made public in the past few weeks and the time it took to release the material.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to publish its Epstein-related records by Dec. 19. While some of the files were released by the deadline set by the law, additional tranches of documents were disclosed after Dec. 19.
The Justice Department released an additional 3 million pages of files at the end of January and said it had fulfilled its obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
But survivors said that the Justice Department failed to redact the identities of at least 31 people who were victimized as children.
Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told federal judges last week that it was working to identify, review and redact potential victim-identifying information.
But Reps. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, also said the Justice Department improperly redacted the names and emails of others who had ties to Epstein, including the names of six men who could be incriminated by their inclusion in the files.
Massie and Khanna co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act. They went to the Justice Department on Monday to view unredacted versions of the documents.
