The Georgia FBI Raid, and a Story Only Locals Could Get

If Minneapolis is the battleground for Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Georgia is poised to become the battleground for his administration’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of elections. No newsroom has pursued the story more extensively than The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “For us here in Atlanta, in Fulton County and in Georgia, 2020 has not gone away,” Shannon McCaffrey, the managing editor of politics at AJC told me. “We’ve been covering this story since then.”

So several days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered an election center, seizing roughly seven hundred boxes of Georgia voting records, McCaffrey’s team obtained exclusive body cam footage of the raid showing that local police and federal agents appeared confused about the search. “We’ve had reporters who have been covering these issues and this beat and these sources for such a long time now,” she told me. “Those are the kinds of the kinds of sources that don’t develop overnight. They’re not going to trust you parachuting in for a story like this.”