Fulton County Police officers stand outside the county elections headquarters as FBI agents seize documents related to the 2020 election. Recorder Ross Williams/Georgia
A federal judge released an affidavit used by the FBI to justify a January raid of a Fulton County election warehouse, raising modern questions about the investigation.
The document, which was sealed until Tuesday, cited irregularities in the 2020 election that federal authorities said necessitated seizure of documentsalthough critics say that in the six years since the election, these claims have already been settled or disproved.
The 19-page document alleges that Fulton County election officials violated two federal election laws. The FBI found that Fulton County “knowingly and willfully deprived(d)” voters of a fair election process by failing to account for discrepancies between separate recounts that resulted in different vote totals.
The document also cited several witnesses – whose names were redacted before the statement was released – who raised allegations of missing ballot images, duplicate ballots and tabulation tape irregularities, among other things. According to Atlanta Journal Constitutionprevious state investigations found no evidence of willful misconduct.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed his 2020 defeat on baseless accusations of rampant voting fraud, even though two stories confirmed former President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia. In a January speech before the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump once again he claimed that the 2020 election was fraudulent and said those involved “will soon be prosecuted for what they have done.”
FBI agent Hugh Raymond Evans, who authored the statement, wrote that “the FBI’s criminal investigation was initiated based on a referral from Kurt Olsen, the presidentially appointed director of election security and integrity.”
According to him, Olsen is a former Trump campaign lawyer who played a key role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. reporting from POLITICO.
The search warrant issuance comes less than a week after Fulton County filed a lawsuit seeks an unstamped copy of the affidavit used to authorize the FBI to raid a Fulton County election warehouse. The lawsuit also seeks the return of approximately 700 boxes of election records seized during the raid.
Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said the release of the unsealed statement confirms the Trump administration is not following “normal procedures,” accusing federal officials of “total disregard for the Constitution” during a news conference Tuesday.
“We analyzed the 2020 elections in Fulton County.” – Pitt said. “They have been re-examined. They have been audited. They have been manually counted under a microscope and in every case they have been found to be clean, and any honest assessment in the future will also be clean,” Pitt said. “These accusations have already been debunked, but we are on the merry-go-round again.”
Sara Tindall Ghazal, the sole Democratic candidate for the Georgia Board of Elections, said during a Tuesday news conference organized by the voting rights group Fair Fight that each of the allegations brought to the board had been investigated and are now public information, adding that a “clear explanation” had been provided in each case.
In the cases involving the missing ballot images, Ghazal said investigators “told the committee very clearly that it appeared that some of the files overwrote previous files because they used the same party names and naming protocols had been an issue throughout.”
“In other words, there was a clear explanation,” Ghazal said. “It was forwarded to the board. It’s in the minutes of those meetings, but it doesn’t appear anywhere in this one.”
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 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 and more affordable future for all hardworking Georgians.”
During Fair Fight’s press conference after the seal was unsealed, legal experts said the affidavit lacked probable cause and relevant information to support the search warrant. Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann said he couldn’t think of any other order that didn’t mention the sources of the information. such as an individual’s expertise on a given topic and information about potential bias.
“What you emphasize when you’re a supervisor, whether you’re a lawyer or an agent, is your obligation to the court to make sure the court knows this information because there’s no one else to do it,” Weissmann said. “And that’s the most surprising thing to me because it doesn’t look normal.”
Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, called the process “fundamentally flawed,” saying she expected the judge would have questions about the credibility of the investigation.
“This is not a search warrant that would have come from any of our desks, and how it came from that office to the U.S. attorney’s office is an open question,” she said.
This story was originally produced by Registrar from Georgiawhich is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network that includes the Ohio Capital Journal and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
