Fulton County outage roils court system, keeping Trump docket offline

Fulton County, Georgia‘s government offices have been plagued by a widespread internet outage for nearly two weeks, and the judicial system in the state’s most populous county is among those that have been negatively affected as one of the nation’s most high-profile cases plays out in its court.

Fulton County Superior Court, where the case against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants is playing out, still does not have publicly accessible online records. Fulton County’s separate online record of high-profile cases, where the county has also stored publicly available documents from the Trump case, has not been updated since mid-January.

Robb Pitts, chairman of the county’s board of commissioners, attributed the outage to a possible cyberattack in a statement this week. He noted that while some services had been restored, including certain court filing activity, the recovery process could drag on.

Pitts said both state and federal law enforcement officials were investigating the attack and that he was limited in what he could disclose because of that investigation.

He emphasized that while computer and phone programs in tax offices, financial offices, public spaces such as libraries, and voter registration databases were among those that had been affected, “there is no evidence or reason to believe that this incident is related to the election process or other current events.”

County representatives did not respond to a request for comment, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that after an emergency meeting the commission held on the matter on Thursday, no one signaled that any new progress had been made.

The Trump case was upended last month after a co-defendant revealed Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the lead prosecutor in the case, had an undisclosed personal relationship with a private sector attorney she hired to help with the case.

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New developments related to the matter have occurred as recently as Friday, including a new filing, but they are not visible to the public because of the outages.

One of the filings, obtained by the Washington Examiner, contained new evidence of vacations that Willis went on with the prosecutor while she was using public funds to pay him for his work on the Trump case.

Kaelan Deese contributed to this story.

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