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This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

The FBI agents arrived at David Bolter’s Milwaukee home on a cool, cloudy Wednesday morning in late May. They were armed with a list of questions for the 2020 poll worker, who had raised concerns about the way local officials handled the 2020 election, Bolter told Votebeat.

President Donald Trump relied on Bolter’s claims in an unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit that sought to throw out more than 220,000 votes. That would have been more than enough to move Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes from Democrat Joe Biden, who won the state, to Trump. Though courts, several election reviews and many audits rejected Trump’s claims, the Republican never stopped believing that he was cheated out of the presidency in 2020.

That appears to be why, last month, the FBI sent agents back to Milwaukee to question Bolter as part of an expanding national effort by the second Trump administration to investigate long-debunked claims of fraud in the 2020 election.

The investigation into the 2020 election appears to be relying on already disproven allegations from people like Bolter. Bolter declined to divulge more about his conversation with the FBI, which has not been previously reported, but allegations from Bolter’s 2020 affidavit were central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. For example, he alleged that somebody in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered — an accusation for which there has so far appeared to be no additional evidence.

Around the same time Bolter says he talked to 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, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Christine, to give her the freedom to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Christine had also submitted an affidavit about the 2020 election, saying election workers had been told that all votes were counted, but she then saw workers continuing to count ballots around midnight. That affidavit was the focus of the agents’ questions, Christine told Votebeat.

“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, she added, an agent showed her a photograph of Claire Woodall, the former Milwaukee election chief, asking her if she recognized the former election official who has been central to false allegations about the 2020 election. She identified her by name. Woodall didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Caroline Clancy, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Milwaukee office, declined to comment.

While investigators seem mainly focused on the 2020 vote, some elections experts believe the Trump administration’s wide-ranging probe is actually designed to create more doubts among Americans about future elections, as Republicans face strong political headwinds that could cost them control of Congress later this year.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

Wisconsin is the latest known target of the Trump administration’s 2020 investigation. The FBI is looking to interview elections officials and Milwaukee police officers in what some worry could be a precursor to an effort to seize ballots from the 2020 presidential race, as it already has in Georgia.

The Trump administration is revisiting allegations of election fraud that have been repeatedly scrutinized

In January, federal investigators seized 600 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. The heavily Democratic county, home to Atlanta, was key to Biden’s narrow 2020 victory in the state.

As in Wisconsin, the FBI in Georgia has built its investigation on allegations that have already been repeatedly scrutinized by audits, investigations, and courts without unearthing any evidence of fraud or tampering that could have overturned the results.

The Georgia search represented an unprecedented intervention by the federal government into local administration. Even more unusually, Tulsi Gabbard, who will step down at end of this month as director of national intelligence, personally oversaw the seizure and arranged for Trump to speak directly to the FBI agents via cell phone after they carried out the operation.

The Trump administration investigations stretch from Arizona, where federal officials subpoenaed computerized records of a partisan review state lawmakers conducted of Maricopa County’s 2020 election, to Puerto Rico, where the Office of the Director of National Intelligence procured voting machines to examine for potential security risks.

The administration’s investigations aren’t entirely limited to 2020. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter in April to Wayne County, Michigan — home to Detroit — demanding all ballots cast in the 2024 election, which Trump won. But even in that case, to support the request, the Justice Department 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 doesn’t have possession of them.

What do the 2020 elections mean for 2026?

The FBI faces challenges in pursuing cases tied to the 2020 election since the five-year statute of limitations that applies to most of the likely charges expired last year. Law enforcement veterans said it is possible that the Justice Department could pursue broader conspiracy charges in the case, but 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 that has not yet occurred. 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 appeared 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 don’t go their way, he said.

Injecting federal law enforcement officials into an ongoing election is a more extreme and serious action than investigating a past one, and it could face stiffer opposition. But it’s clear, at least, that the administration is scrutinizing current elections closely.

Trump last week blasted California’s long vote counting process in its primary election and asserted that Democrats were trying to steal the election and federal authorities were investigating. Last month, Trump also said he was ordering the Justice Department to investigate an error that led to some voters in Maryland receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primary. State officials in both cases have explained the true causes of the issues and that nothing nefarious was behind them.

Any effort to seize ballots in an ongoing election would create unprecedented new issues, such as a breach in the chain of custody over cast ballots, that could prevent election officials from declaring a winner and throw 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 2020 election questions should have been resolved “in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 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, however, Trump’s claims of voter fraud were addressed in the wake of the 2020 election. Time and again, courts, state investigations, and even the Justice Department concluded that there was no evidence of problems or fraud that would have changed the results.

Engelbrecht said she views the Trump administration’s ongoing investigations as an effort to dig into long-standing concerns about the voting process it 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.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Alexander at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The Trump administration’s multiple investigations of the 2020 election may have more to do with 2026 is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

The FBI has opened an investigation into Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. 

President Donald Trump has frequently singled out Wisconsin’s election administration since he began attacking the 2020 election results following his loss to Joe Biden. In the years since, Wisconsin has become a hotbed of election conspiracy theories as well as a source of the mechanisms that led to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

Numerous reviews, investigations and lawsuits have affirmed that Wisconsin’s 2020 election was conducted without fraud, malfeasance or abuse.

Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has often worked to relitigate Trump’s 2020 election complaints, including efforts to obtain large amounts of voter data from the state. Other swing states that saw significant election denial after 2020 have been similarly targeted. 

The Journal-Sentinel reported that the FBI has begun a preliminary investigation of the election, which so far has largely included a reassessment of previous complaints. The newspaper also reported that the agency interviewed Wisconsin Elections Commission official Robert Kehoe about how the state’s elections work.

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Clark County Judge Lyndsey Brunette announced Thursday she’s getting into the 2027 race for Wisconsin Supreme Court. 

Brunette previously served as the Clark County district attorney, after she was elected as a Democrat, serving in that office from 2012 to 2018. Her announcement comes just days after liberal-leaning Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor stormed to a 20 point victory over conservative Judge Maria Lazar in this year’s Supreme Court race. 

Brunette was elected to the circuit court in 2018 and ran unopposed for reelection in 2024. She said in a statement that she was running for the Supreme Court to protect Wisconsinites’ freedoms. 

“I’m running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court because it has never been more important to have state courts dedicated to protecting fundamental rights and freedoms and holding people, and the government, accountable when they break the law,” Brunette said. “Every person who enters a courtroom is seeking the same thing: fairness, justice, a system they can trust. That’s the kind of court I want to protect for every Wisconsinite, and for my own family. Whether it’s protecting personal healthcare rights, safeguarding voting rights, or supporting public safety, we need to protect a majority on our state Supreme Court who will fairly and impartially uphold our laws.”

Her message closely matches the argument Taylor worked to make on the campaign trail over the last year. 

Brunette is running for the seat currently held by conservative Justice Annette Ziegler, who has already announced she’s not running. A victory would mean that Justice Brian Hagedorn, who has occasionally sided with the Court’s liberals, is the only conservative left on the seven-member Court. 

Before being elected as the first woman to serve as Clark County district attorney, Brunette was the county’s corporation counsel and worked in the Hennepin County attorney’s office in Minneapolis. She got her bachelor’s degree from UW-Eau Claire and her law degree from William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. She lives with her five children and husband in Neillsville.

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In the only debate between the Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, Appeals Court judges Maria Lazar and Chris Taylor each painted a picture of their opponent as an extreme figure who is unfit for the state’s high court.

The hour-long debate Thursday night, hosted by WISN in Milwaukee, arrived just five days ahead of Election Day on April 7. Lazar and Taylor are running for a 10-year term to replace conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who did not run for reelection. 

While there is no court majority on the line in 2026, a win by either candidate will still affect the court’s future. A Lazar victory would maintain the court’s 4-3 liberal majority. A Taylor win would grow the liberal bloc to five justices. 

The evening was peppered with attacks from Lazar that Taylor was “a radical, extreme legislator” and from Taylor that Lazar has brought an “extreme, right-wing political agenda to the bench.”

One of the more intense exchanges came during debate on abortion. Taylor criticized Lazar’s past comments about the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Lazar said she supported returning the decision to state governments. Taylor said it was “tragic” for a candidate to celebrate the case. 

“It’s not been very wise for victims of rape and incest who now live in states where abortion has been outlawed,” Taylor said. “It’s not very wise for women who have lost their lives in states because they couldn’t get help when a pregnancy went wrong.” 

Lazar appeared to grow angry, shook her head and rolled her eyes. 

“That’s absolutely ridiculous,” Lazar said. “This is exactly what we’ve been doing in this campaign. It’s the same old political playbook. If you don’t have anything truthful to say about your opponent, then just lie and mislead. I have never wanted women injured, ever, ever, ever. I have always said that the health and life of the mother is the most important thing.” 

The back-and-forth during the debate reflected the 2026 campaign and the opposing judicial philosophies and backgrounds of the candidates. 

Lazar and Taylor are both Appeals Court judges, but represent opposing judicial philosophies and each took starkly different paths to the bench.

Lazar is a member of the conservative Federalist Society, served as an assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice under Republican Attorney General JB Van Hollen and was elected to the Waukesha Circuit Court in 2015 and 2021 prior to her 2022 election to the 2nd District Court of Appeals. 

Taylor was the policy and political director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin for eight years prior to serving as a Democrat in the Assembly where she represented a Madison-focused district. Gov. Tony Evers appointed Taylor to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020 and she ran unopposed for the 4th District Court of Appeals in 2023. 

The debate was delayed a week after Taylor announced she had a kidney stone. More than 355,000 voters had already cast early ballots before Thursday. A Marquette Law School Poll released last week found 46% of likely voters said they hadn’t decided who to support.

Here’s what else you need to know about the debate. 

How the judges view recusal rules

In 2010, the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted rules that did not require a justice to recuse themself based on how much money a party in a case or an attorney spent supporting their campaign.

After the record-breaking 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky, a member of the court’s liberal majority, said she was committed to holding public hearings about establishing stricter recusal rules. 

Lazar and Taylor were both asked about whether they would support stricter recusal rules for Wisconsin Supreme Court justices. 

Lazar said recusal is “a difficult situation,” because judges have to consider whether they are biased and whether the parties in the case believe they are receiving a fair opportunity before the court. 

“The key thing that I think is important is recusal really is tied to the integrity of the judge or the justice,” Lazar said. “And I have spent the last 12 years as a judge showing that I have that integrity and that independence.” 

Taylor said the court system should consider stricter recusal rules and get public input. 

“It is so critically important that as judges, we have the confidence of the public,” she said. 

Limited responses on redistricting, abortion

Both Lazar and Taylor received multiple questions about how they would have ruled on certain cases or hypothetical situations that could come before the court. Both candidates mostly declined to answer, saying that, as judges, they could not comment on pending cases that could reach them at the Appeals Court or on the state Supreme Court. 

Lazar and Taylor were asked whether the current congressional maps are fair. One of two three-judge panels hearing legal complaints about Wisconsin’s congressional district maps this week dismissed a case brought by Democratic voters. 

While both candidates said they could not comment on the maps, Taylor said she was “committed to making sure that every eligible voter in the state of Wisconsin has the ability to pick their elected representatives.” Lazar said she believed every “eligible vote should count.” 

Lazar and Taylor were also asked about how they would rule on the case challenging the state’s 1849 abortion ban. In 2025, the court reached a 4-3 ruling that invalidated the law. The decision broke along ideological lines. 

Lazar declined comment on the 1849 abortion case but said that she would honor the state’s “20-week compromise,” an abortion restriction Republicans passed in 2015 without Democratic support.  Taylor, who voted against the 20-week ban in the Legislature, said she would have ruled with the majority in overturning the 1849 abortion ban.

Taylor also emphasized at various points what she called her “values,” including support for workers over millionaires and billionaires when asked about a pending court challenge to 2011 Act 10, the Republican law that stripped most public sector workers of union rights.

Lazar characterized Taylor’s support for those issues as “legislative” values, rather than judicial ones. 

“Values do not belong with the judge on the court,” Lazar said. “Values are not what’s supposed to be there. A good judge respects the law. An activist judge respects her causes.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court debate highlights sharp contrast between candidates on abortion, judicial philosophies is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, Farm Foundation hosted a Farm Foundation Forum to examine the agricultural platforms of the candidates for president of the United States. Held on September 9 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., the Forum was moderated by Kristina Peterson from the Wall Street Journal, with Kip Tom, co-lead of the Farmers and Ranchers for Trump Coalition, representing the Republican platform and Rod Snyder, former senior advisor for agriculture for EPA in the Biden-Harris Administration, representing the Democratic platform. 

The speakers touched on a variety of issues, including the farm bill, tax policy, environmental policy, nutrition, agricultural trade, farm labor and immigration, and biofuels. 

“In such a wonderful Farm Foundation-way, they engaged on some really difficult topics and different perspectives,” said Farm Foundation President and CEO Shari Rogge-Fidler, reflecting on the tenor of the conversation between the two speakers. While not official members of the campaigns, each speaker is closely connected with the campaigns but was careful to anchor their statements on past policies while clarifying where they thought each platform might go on policy in the future. 

The event marked Farm Foundation’s return to in-person Forums at the National Press Club since moving the Forums virtual at the start of the pandemic. It attracted 769 registrants from seven different countries, with 522 attending live either in person or via livestream.  

The two-hour discussion, including the audience question and answer session, was recorded and is archived on the Farm Foundation website.  

Farm Foundation plans to hold another Forum at the National Press Club in 2025 but will maintain its virtual strategy for the bulk of future Forums to preserve greater audience access and reach. Forums are free to watch or attend, due to the generous support from Farm Credit Council. 

The post Farm Foundation Forums Return to Washington D.C. to Discuss the Agricultural Platforms of the Candidates for President of the United States  appeared first on Farm Foundation.