FBI raid in Fulton County relied on previously investigated 2020 election claims

A federal court has released an affidavit used by the FBI to justify a January raid on Fulton County’s election warehouse, raising new questions about the investigation.  The document, which was under seal until Tuesday, cited irregularities in the 2020 election that federal authorities claim necessitated the seizure of the documents, though critics say the […]

Fulton County Police officers stand by outside county election headquarters while FBI agents seize documents related to the 2020 election. Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder

A federal court has released an affidavit used by the FBI to justify a January raid on Fulton County’s election warehouse, raising new questions about the investigation. 

The document, which was under seal until Tuesday, cited irregularities in the 2020 election that federal authorities claim necessitated the seizure of the documents, though critics say the claims have already been adjudicated or debunked in the six years since the election took place.

The 19-page document alleges that Fulton County election officials violated two federal election laws. The FBI claimed that Fulton County “knowingly and willfully deprive(d)” voters of a fair election process by failing to account for discrepancies between separate recounts that resulted in different ballot totals.

The document also cited a number of witnesses — whose names were redacted before the affidavit was released — who made allegations of missing ballot images, duplicated ballots and irregularities with tabulator tapes, among other issues. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no evidence of intentional misconduct was found during previous investigations by the state.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed his 2020 loss on unfounded accusations of rampant voting fraud, even though two recounts affirmed former President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. In a January speech before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump once again claimed that the 2020 election was rigged and said that the individuals involved “will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”

FBI agent Hugh Raymond Evans, who authored the affidavit, wrote that the FBI’s “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”

Olsen is a former Trump campaign lawyer who played a central role in Trump’s attempts to undermine the results of the 2020 election, according to reporting from POLITICO. 

The release of the search warrant comes less than a week after Fulton County filed a lawsuit seeking an unsealed copy of the affidavit used to authorize the FBI’s raid on the Fulton County election warehouse. The lawsuit also seeks the return of the roughly 700 boxes of election records seized during the raid.

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Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said the release of the unsealed affidavit confirms that the Trump administration is not following “normal procedures,” accusing federal officials of “disregarding the Constitution altogether,” during a press conference Tuesday.

“Fulton County’s 2020 elections have been examined,” Pitt said. “They have been re-examined. They’ve been audited. There have been hand counts under a microscope, and in every instance, we come up clean, and any honest review going forward will also be clean,” Pitt said. “These accusations have already been debunked, but here we go again on a merry-go-round.”

Sara Tindall Ghazal, the sole Democratic appointee to the Georgia State Election Board, said during a Tuesday press conference hosted by voting rights group Fair Fight that every allegation before the board has been investigated and is already public information, adding that a “clear explanation” has been provided in every case. 

In the missing ballot images cases, Ghazal said that investigators “very clearly said to the board that it appeared that some of the files had overwritten previous files because they used the same batch names, and naming protocols were a problem all the way through.”

“In other words, there was a clear explanation,” Ghazal said. “It was given to the board. It is in the transcripts from those meetings, but it appears nowhere in this.” 

In a statement, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who resisted pressure from Trump to overturn Georgia’s election results in his favor, criticized the FBI’s investigation.

“As Secretary of State, I’ve made Georgia the safest and most secure place to vote,” said Raffensperger, who is also currently running for governor. “Instead of wasting time and tax dollars trying to change the past with baseless and repackaged claims, let’s focus our efforts on building a safer, more affordable future for all hardworking Georgians.”

During Fair Fight’s press conference following the unsealing, legal experts said that the affidavit lacked probable cause and vital information to justify a search warrant. Former Assistant U. S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann said he could not think of another warrant where information about sources of information was not included, such as background about the person’s expertise on the subject and information on potential bias.

“The thing that you stress when you’re a supervisor, whether you’re an attorney or whether you’re an agent, is your obligation to the court to make sure they’re aware of that information, because there is no one else to do that,” Weissmann said. “And that, to me, is the thing that is sort of most surprising here is that it does not look normal.”

Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, called the process “fundamentally deficient,” saying that she expected a judge to have questions about the investigation’s credibility.

“This is not a search warrant that would have made it off of either one of our desks, and how it made it out of that office and through the U.S. Attorney’s Office is still an open question,” she said.

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