|
 |
On Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant on the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Operation Center. The Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) reported that the activity was “apparently connected to the Trump administration’s long-held and disproven belief that Fulton’s handling of the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud.”
The New York Times put it like this, “The move harnesses the investigative power of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. behind baseless claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from him. State and local officials and election experts have repeatedly refuted those assertions.”
The Fulton County clerk told reporters, “federal agents were retrieving boxes of ballots from the warehouse where they were being stored.”
The most important question in 2026 is whether the midterm elections will be free and fair. And these developments go to the heart of that. If Trump gets away with seizing Fulton County’s ballots from the 2020 election, there is no reason to believe it will stop there. He will try to do it everywhere he thinks it might benefit him. For him, it’s not about the will of the voters; it’s about what he wants. Subscribe to Civil Discourse, be part of a community that’s committed to preserving democracy, and stay informed.
Last night, after news that the FBI was executing the search warrant broke, Donald Trump posted this on Truth Social:
 |
Stolen Election. Obama. Cash to Iran. Hacked voting machines. Flipping votes from Trump to Biden. China. The Big Lie is back on—just in time for the midterm elections.
Trump signposted his intentions in Davos a week earlier, when he said that the people who were involved in the “rigged 2020 election“ were going to be prosecuted soon.
The search warrant authorized agents to search for and seize all “physical ballots from the 2020 general election” as well as ballot images produced by scanning ballots, voter rolls from that year, and tabulator tapes.
 |
It also identified the crimes agents are looking for evidence of: Title 52 USC 20701 and Title 52 USC 20511. The first charge is a misdemeanor records retention crime. The second charge is the more serious one, a multi-component felony, the pertinent part of which is most likely the section that makes it a crime if:
“A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office-
(2) knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by-
(A) the procurement or submission of voter registration applications that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held; or
(B) the procurement, casting, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.”
The maximum penalty is five years in custody.
But it’s highly unlikely the investigation will turn up any vote count fraud connected to the 2020 election results in Fulton County. Those results, as well as results elsewhere, have been, as Marc Elias puts it, “recounted, audited, and litigated to death already.” Or at least that would be the case in our former world, the one where DOJ focused on the law and the facts, pursuing cases without fear or favor. That’s not how DOJ is operating in cases adjacent to a variety of Trump’s interests.
If DOJ does come up with a case based on the evidence it seized, it will be legitimate to raise concerns about the integrity of the ballots and other documents after they were seized and came into the custody of the Justice Department. That would have been unthinkable, regardless of which party was in the White House, just a few years ago. But the Trump administration has amassed quite a record for lying to and deceiving courts and not following their orders. It would be irresponsible to avoid hard questions about their work product, given what has taken place during the last year.
The search in Fulton County happened a month after DOJ filed a civil case that sought essentially the same items identified in the search warrant: old ballots from the 2020 election. That case was dismissed because Trump’s lawyers filed it in the wrong district, a relatively easy problem to fix by filing in the correct district, which the administration did. But now they’ve ramped up with the criminal case, perhaps because a search warrant happens more quickly than civil discovery, although the reasons aren’t entirely clear.
A careful read of the search warrant posed an additional question: It’s signed by a magistrate judge in the Northern District of George, where the search took place, but was obtained by the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, Thomas Albus.
Usually, federal prosecutors in one district who need a search warrant in another will ask the local office for assistance. Those prosecutors know the judges and are familiar with local court procedure, which can vary from district to district. It’s unusual to bypass the U.S. Attorney in the district where the search will be executed.
The answer to why Albus applied for the warrant became clear Thursday afternoon when Bloomberg Law reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi specially appointed Albus to probe the 2020 election on a nationwide basis. Fulton County, although it’s the current epicenter, may be just the tip of the iceberg.
What’s happening in Fulton County tells us a lot about how and why Trump’s personal law firm, formerly known as the Justice Department, is operating in anticipation of the midterm elections. It hints at why, more than five years after Trump lost the 2020 election, he’s back at the Big Lie again. Fulton County leans heavily Democratic, and its vote is very important in purple-ish Georgia.
The New York Times shared this anecdote from the day the search warrant was executed:
“Republican Election Board member [Salleigh] Grubbs was spotted inside the elections building with Janice Johnston, another Republican member of the State Election Board. The pair were complaining to Fulton County officials that they could not reach the area where the search was happening. ‘But it’s our subpoena!’ Ms. Johnston repeatedly said.”
“Our subpoena.” Why would state Republicans have such a strong interest in a DOJ search warrant? The AJC is reporting that “Meanwhile, the faction of the State Election Board aligned closely with President Donald Trump weigh the possibility of taking over elections in Georgia’s most populous — and heavily Democratic — county ahead of crucial midterm elections.” Trump is famous for caring only about the investigation and not what comes of it. Here, an investigation, no matter its lack of merit, might be seized upon as justification for the state to divest the county of control of its elections. During a Thursday press conference held by leaders in heavily Democratic Fulton County, Election Chair Robb Pitts said: “We will not give one inch to those who seek to take control of our elections.”
That’s the fear