WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump ramps up his interest in taking federal control of the November 2026 elections, he's tapped one of the lawyers who worked on his efforts to overturn the 2020 election to be his administration’s "director of election security and integrity."
That's Kurt Olsen, a conservative lawyer who has been hit with ethics complaints and a legal sanction for spreading "unequivocally false" claims about Trump’s 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden and Kari Lake's 2022 gubernatorial loss in Arizona.
Olsen, a 63-year-old former Navy SEAL, quietly joined the Trump White House in October as a special government employee. Since then, he's been working with law enforcement and intelligence officials to re-investigate Trump's debunked allegations about 2020, including that he lost Georgia because of voter fraud and that states used "COVID to cheat" via mail-in ballots.
Those claims were investigated and dismissed by courts and election authorities at the time. Trump lost 61 of 62 cases in court by the time his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to interrupt electoral count proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021.
In a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to change the official vote count in Georgia to give him its Electoral College results. Raffensperger...
Kurt Olsen spread false claims about President Donald Trump's 2020 loss for years. Critics are asking why he's now in charge of midterm security WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump ramps up his ...