Fulton County again turns Harmeet Dhillon’s comments against DOJ in ballot seizure case

Harmeet Dhillon’s media habits may, again, be undermining the Department of Justice’s effort to defend the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia.

In a court filing Monday, Fulton County attorneys pointed to a March interview with right-wing commentator John Solomon, in which the Civil Rights Division chief appeared to describe — in plain terms — the very escalation of events the county says were improper.

“My jurisdiction, statutorily, is civil in nature. And so my colleagues, after we’ve tried to go through the front door and get these materials voluntarily, if they’re not complying — to help us help them do their jobs correctly — then it may become criminal in nature,” Dhillon said. “The FBI is doing their investigative work to see what they find and then ultimately they may come back to some component of DOJ to bring charges.” 

The county is challenging the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election ballots, arguing the search warrant was “pretextual” — essentially a workaround to obtain records the government had already been trying to get through slow-moving civil litigation.

Dhillon’s latest comments may help reinforce that theory. And it’s not the first time her comments have made their way into the case.

In earlier filings, Fulton County cited one of Dhillon’s social media posts to suggest a connection between DOJ’s civil lawsuit and the subsequent search warrant.

Now, the county is back with more — this time pointing to interviews in which Dhillon herself described the department’s progression from voluntary requests, to civil litigation, to potential criminal enforcement.

The filing also cites a separate February interview in which Dhillon described a similar sequence, saying DOJ first sought the records through letters, then filed a lawsuit and, “while that case has been pending,” other DOJ officials “believed they had probable cause to obtain a search warrant.” 

Together, the statements emphasize a pattern within the department that is increasingly harder to ignore.

Dhillon, a longtime Trump ally with a very active media presence, has taken an unusually public approach to her government role — frequently discussing department activity in interviews and on social media.

That approach has already created headaches for the department, including instances where her posts appeared to reveal unusually candid details about ongoing investigations and undermined other cases.

Fulton County has continued to use Dhillon’s own words to argue that the FBI-executed criminal search warrant was tied to DOJ’s stalled civil effort to obtain the same records. And for a department trying to defend the independence and timing of the raid, that may not be so helpful.

Her March interview also went well beyond Fulton County. Dhillon boasted that DOJ had obtained voter rolls from several states, sued several more and claimed the department was finding “thousands” of dead people and noncitizens on voter rolls.

Maya Bodinson contributed to this reporting.