Attorneys who represented Georgia Republicans now handling DOJ voting cases

The two U.S. Justice Department attorneys suing to get Fulton County’s 2020 election records and the state’s unredacted voter rolls have a history of representing Republican activists in Georgia election disputes.

Before joining the Justice Department’s voting section, attorney Christopher Gardner, then in private practice, represented the Fulton County Republican Party in 2024. Years earlier, he was part of the legal team that advised Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 election to cast electoral votes for then-candidate Donald Trump.

In 2024, Brittany Bennett represented the Georgia Republican Party by filing a brief in support of a lawsuit challenging the certification of the state’s voting machines.

“We’ve got a Department of Justice that appears to view its role more as lawyers for the Trump campaign than for the American people,” said former Justice Department attorney David Becker, who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, which works with election officials to build voter confidence.

As Bennett and Gardner pursue Georgia for the DOJ, their past work provides a glimpse of the experience they bring to the department.

In 2024, Gardner represented the Fulton County Republican Party in a suit filed by Republican Fulton County Election Board member Julie Adams after she refused to certify the results of that year’s primary. In that lawsuit, Gardner argued the county election director prevented Adams from performing her duties to prevent “fraud, deceit, or abuse in elections.”

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit argued that certification of an election was discretionary, but a Fulton County Superior Court judge ruled certification is mandatory.

While working at a private law firm in Warner Robins, Bennett represented the Georgia Republican Party by filing a legal brief in support of a 2024 lawsuit challenging the state’s use of Dominion Voting System voting machines. The lawsuit alleged the state’s voting system didn’t meet federal standards and asked a judge to order Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to meet those standards.

A Fulton Superior Court judge tossed out the suit and ruled that Raffensperger complied with state law when he certified the machines.

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment seeking information about when the two voting section attorneys joined the department.

With Trump back in the White House, the two attorneys, whose past work for the Republican Party was first reported by the left-leaning Democracy Docket, are suing Fulton County for access to ballots and other records from the 2020 election and suing Raffensperger for not handing over unredacted voter roll information.

Bennett and Gardner’s work in private practice for Republican officials was largely unsuccessful. Their lawsuits filed in their new roles face challenges as well.

A federal court judge questioned whether the department lodged the suit in the proper jurisdiction. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Macon, but the secretary of state’s office is located in Atlanta.

A hearing concerning the matter is scheduled for late this month.

Georgia officials have told the Justice Department that they shared all publicly available information about the voter rolls, but the state is barred by state law from sharing all information, such as driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers. Attorneys with the Justice Department have targeted more than 20 mostly Democratic-led states to obtain access to their voter information.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University Law School and voting rights expert, said the case’s arguments are unlikely to stand up in court.

“The Department of Justice has really overshot its authority,” Levitt said. “I think that Georgia, like dozens of other states, is absolutely right to recognize that it has to follow state law if the federal government doesn’t have authority to override state law.”

Trump and his supporters have made claims for years that widespread voter fraud cost him the 2020 election. The Justice Department’s case seeking to inspect ballots that have been kept under seal marks a dramatic escalation to reexamine Fulton’s highly scrutinized election more than five years later.

In a recent post on X, Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump administration’s top civil rights lawyer, claimed Fulton has been running a “four-corners defense” against producing 2020 ballots.

Levitt, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, said the statute cited by the DOJ in legal briefs to obtain Fulton’s 2020 ballots isn’t likely to hold up in court. The Justice Department can demand election records within 22 months of an election, but not past that window, he said.

“The last I checked, the 2020 election was more than 22 months ago,” Levitt said.

In a December letter, more than 200 former Justice Department employees criticized what they called the “destruction” of the Civil Rights Division, saying the Trump administration has abandoned the agency’s mission.