Democracy & Elections

The Lawfare Podcast: Anna Bower Critiques the Georgia Bureau of Investigation

Benjamin Wittes, Anna Bower, Jen Patja
Friday, December 1, 2023, 8:00 AM
What is missing from the GBI's report on Coffee County?

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Anna Bower is a Legal Fellow at Lawfare and our Fulton County Correspondent, and has been digging into the weird events in Coffee County in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Her latest tome on the subject is entitled “What the GBI Missed in Coffee County,” and is about the Georgia state investigation, the report on which clocks in at almost 400 pages but is a great deal less impressive than it may seem at first glance.

Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes sat down with Anna to talk about the GBI's investigation of the Coffee County caper. What did the GBI do? What didn't they do? Did they add any new information? They actually did—but they also left out a whole lot that any reasonable investigator would want to look at.

A video version of this conversation is available on Lawfare's YouTube channel here.


Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
Anna Bower is Lawfare’s Legal Fellow and Courts Correspondent. Anna holds a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Cambridge and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School. She joined Lawfare as a recipient of Harvard’s Sumner M. Redstone Fellowship in Public Service. Prior to law school, Anna worked as a judicial assistant for a Superior Court judge in the Northeastern Judicial Circuit of Georgia. She also previously worked as a Fulbright Fellow at Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Turkey. A native of Georgia, Anna is based in Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Jen Patja is the editor and producer of The Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.

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