The Daily Fuckup

Cobb and DeKalb counties came back to Fulton County Superior Court in late February 2021 with a different demand: pay the bill. On February 22 and 23, the counties asked the court to award attorneys’ fees against Donald Trump, his campaign, and Georgia Republican Party chair David Shafer after the campaign voluntarily dismissed its Georgia election contest on January 7, 2021.

The fee requests did not reopen the fight over the 2020 vote. They shifted the argument to cost. In their motions, the counties said they had been forced to respond to litigation that lacked a factual or legal basis and that local governments should not be left holding the bag for that work. The filings also made clear that the dispute was no longer about trying to change Georgia’s results. It was about whether the people who pushed the challenge should be required to pay for it.

The sequence matters. Trump’s team filed its election challenge, then abandoned it on January 7 after the case had already run into the wall of certification and failed fraud claims. Weeks later, Cobb and DeKalb sought reimbursement for the legal expenses tied to that challenge. The counties were not asking for a new ruling on the vote; they were asking a judge to treat the underlying case as costly litigation they should not have had to absorb.

That leaves the post-election record in a familiar place: not proof of the fraud narrative, but a paper trail of dismissed claims and a bill attached to them. The counties’ motions did not settle the politics of the 2020 election. They only put a price tag on one of its aftershocks.