The FBI raid on the Fulton county election office Wednesday was an aggressive new front in Donald Trump’s effort to use his 2020 election loss to continue to sow doubt about American elections ahead of the 2026 midterms.
As Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election, false claims of malfeasance during ballot-counting in Atlanta became a key part of the big lie about a stolen election. Misleading surveillance video showing ballots being retrieved from suitcases became the basis for a myth that fraudulent ballots were included in the tally. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and a close ally at the time, was ordered to pay $148.1m to the election workers as part of a libel suit for spreading lies about them. He later settled.
Two recounts confirmed Joe Biden won Georgia and state investigators debunked Trump’s false claims. Nonetheless, Trump and allies in the state have worked to keep that myth alive. Some activists who have spent years spreading false claims about elections in the state went to the site of the raid on Wednesday and posed with crime scene tape.
“This has been litigated 800 times,” said Helen Butler, a longtime voting activist in the state who leads the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, adding it was clear there was no fraud. “I think it’s undermining confidence in the election process.”
FBI agents descended on the Fulton county election office Wednesday afternoon to execute a search warrant authorizing them to seize all ballots from the 2020 election in the county, tabulator tapes, ballot images, and voter rolls, according to a copy of the document seen by the Guardian. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was spotted on site on Wednesday evening amid the raid, prompting widespread outrage about why an intelligence chief was involved.
“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus – in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns,” said Mark Warner, a Virginia Democratic senator, in a statement. “Or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that Gabbard is leading the Trump administration’s effort to investigate voter fraud nationwide.
“Director Gabbard recognizes that election security is essential for the integrity of our republic and our nation’s security,” said spokesperson Olivia Coleman. “As DNI [the director of national intelligence], she has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation. We know through intelligence and public reporting that electronic voting systems have been and are vulnerable to exploitation. President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear, and DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”
The raid in Fulton county comes as the Trump administration has made a nationwide push to obtain voter rolls with sensitive information from nearly every US state, including Georgia. Experts see little legal basis for the move – three of the justice department’s nearly two dozen lawsuits have already been dismissed by courts – but say it is part of an effort to weaken confidence in election results.
“I think there’s some concern that in the near future and ongoing through the 2026 and perhaps 2028 election cycles, the administration is going to use some of its actions to fuel false claims of fraud, to spread disinformation, to encourage distrust of our election system, particularly when elections yield results the president doesn’t like,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
The FBI raid in Georgia came as the state board of elections, which has a Trump-aligned majority, has been trying to relitigate the 2020 election results in Georgia at the urging of Trump and rightwing election denialists. The board issued a subpoena for 2020 elections records that the county took to court to quash.
Robert McBurney, a Fulton county superior court judge, issued a ruling in the state board’s favor in December, ordering the county to turn over records. But McBurney also acknowledged the administrative burden the record exchange represented. Nadine Williams, the Fulton county elections director, estimated a cost of $376,800 to produce the volumes of documents in court filings.
“February 9 was the date that we were scheduled to go and talk about how everything would be transferred over,” said Sherry Allen, chairwoman of the Fulton county board of registration and elections. “We wanted to make sure that we had transferred everything.”
As the county fought the subpoena, the voting section of the US Department of Justice – which has been reconfigured by the Trump administration as a mechanism to attack longstanding norms for voting rights – also began seeking 2020 election records from Fulton county late last year, citing the refusal of Che Alexander, Fulton county’s clerk of courts, to comply with the state board’s subpoena.
But that dispute was beginning to resolve, said Rob Pitts, chairman of the Fulton county board of commissioners.
“One of the strangest things about this case is that these records were the subject of active litigation,” he said. “Quite frankly, they were likely to be unsealed and turned over in a matter of weeks. All he had to do was to ask the judge to do so, but albeit in a much more orderly manner.”
Seizing the records without warning created a chaotic handover, Pitts said. “Now we do not know where our elections have been taken or what will happen to them now that they are out of our control,” Pitts said. “While they were here, they were safe and they were secure … I don’t know what they’re doing with them. We can no longer be held responsible for those ballots and other data that was seized yesterday. But what I’m hoping is that we will stand together to ensure that no data is ever weaponized.”
The federal case, until now, had been challenged in civil court. But the search warrant cited criminal statutes, suggesting that the Trump administration could pursue charges against public officials.
“I am told that I am personally a target,” Pitts said, referring to his outspoken public defenses of the county during the tumult following the 2020 election, and not of a potential criminal investigation. “I’m a big boy now.” Pitts said he had no idea who the target of a federal criminal case might be.
Last week, a three-judge panel of the 11th circuit federal appeals court ruled that a Georgia law passed in the wake of the 2020 election allowing the state board of elections to take over the administration of local elections offices, was constitutional.
Pitts suggested that the document seizure augurs an attempt by the state board to do just that ahead of coming elections, using the case as a pretext.
“While we have grown accustomed to name-calling and rhetoric, we will not give one inch to those who seek to take control of our elections,” Pitts said. “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. We’re going to fight this in court with every resource that we have.”
