Fulton county leaders said they would fire back in court on Monday, intent on limiting the scope of a federal warrant that led the FBI to seize 2020 elections documents last week.
County attorneys intend to file a motion in federal court asking for an order mandating the return of property that was unlawfully seized or retained, said the Fulton county commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr.
The FBI needs to explain why they took original documents including ballots, instead of the copies that a previous ruling in a related civil case had entitled them to, Arrington said.
“The judge in that case told them that they could not get the records, and so instead of them complying with that order, they did an end run and circumvented the judge’s order,” Arrington said. “I can’t imagine that Judge [Thomas W] Thrash will be happy about the fact that they did this after he said no.”
The Department of Justice had been pursuing a civil case in tandem with Georgia’s Trump-aligned state board of elections, looking to re-investigate repeatedly debunked claims of election fraud in Georgia.
But last week, FBI agents descended on Fulton county’s elections offices to seize about 700 boxes of 2020 election documents, citing a criminal warrant obtained by the St Louis-based US attorney Thomas Albus, whom the administration has designated as its point-person on election integrity cases.
The special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, Paul Brown, resigned from his post roughly a week before agents served the warrant. No public explanation has been given.
A criminal investigation related to the 2020 election blindsided and confused Fulton county officials. “The two statutes that are listed in their warrant are misdemeanor statutes, and the statute of limitations has expired on those statutes,” Arrington said. “So they couldn’t even bring charges on those charges if they wanted to.”
Elections experts say the way agents seized the documents will create more questions than it answers about the 2020 election.
“By removing ballots and other election materials from their secure, locally controlled environment, the chain of custody is broken, rendering any future claims from those materials unreliable,” said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a non-profit that advocates for election security and the use of paper ballots.
“Fulton county’s voters are relying on their election officials to prepare – without disruption – for a new election that is just around the corner,” Smith said. “At the behest of the administration, which has no role in the conduct of elections, this raid is manufacturing chaos, intimidating election workers, and sowing distrust ahead of the state’s primaries, this year’s midterms, and the 2028 presidential election.”
The New York Times reported on Monday that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took a phone call with Donald Trump and FBI agents shortly after the raid concluded, with the president congratulating agents on their success. Gabbard was also spotted at the county elections hub as the raid occurred.
Last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump again said that the 2020 US presidential election was compromised. “It was a rigged election,” he said. “Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That’s probably breaking news.”
