Local officials in Georgia demanding that the FBI return hundreds of thousands of ballots from the 2020 presidential election contend that the seizure took place with “callous disregard” for the constitutional rights of voters and county officials, according to court filings unsealed Saturday.
Judge J.P. Boulee, a Trump appointee, has been assigned to rule on a motion Fulton County, Georgia, officials filed last week challenging the Jan. 28 seizure of 24 pallets containing about 700 boxes of ballots and other records from a warehouse outside Atlanta.
In addition to unsealing the Democratic-run county’s legal arguments, Boulee issued an order Saturday giving the Justice Department until 5 p.m. Tuesday to file publicly the arguments federal prosecutors put forward to persuade Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas to issue the search warrant authorizing the seizure of all of the physical ballots from the 2020 election, along with ballot images, tabulator tapes and voter rolls.
Boulee said unsealing the affidavit was appropriate due to “the importance of the public’s access to judicial proceedings,” but he said he will allow Justice Department lawyers to redact the names of “non-governmental witnesses” from the version that is made public.
The precise focus of the investigation that led to the seizure of the ballots has remained mysterious in recent days. The search warrant, which is available even as the underlying affidavit is not, cites two federal statutes: one making it a crime to engage in voting fraud in connection with a federal election and another requiring that ballots in federal elections be preserved for 22 months after Election Day.
Without providing evidence, President Donald Trump has long complained that fraud led to his loss in Georgia in 2020. In a phone call shortly after the election, he famously but unsuccessfully implored state officials to “find” about 11,800 ballots so that he could be declared the winner.
More recently, Republicans have complained that Fulton County computer files are missing images corresponding to thousands of physical ballots, but county officials have countered that recounts and court challenges verified the vote tallies there and that the law at the time did not require keeping the computer scans.
“Claims that the 2020 election results were fraudulent or otherwise invalid have been exhaustively reviewed and, without exception, refuted,” Fulton County Attorney Y. Soo Jo wrote in the county’s motion demanding return of the seized ballots. “Eleven different post-election lawsuits, challenging various aspects of Georgia’s election process, failed to demonstrate fraud.”
Jo also argued that the federal investigation is fatally flawed because it is continuing “well beyond” the five-year statute of limitations for the criminal law prosecutors cited and the 22-month period for the retention requirement. She also noted that the Justice Department filed a civil suit against the county in December seeking many of the same records and a state lawsuit was also pending over the ballots.
“Use of the criminal warrant process to take immediate possession of the same records that are the subject of these lawsuits has the effect of circumventing civil judicial proceedings,” Jo wrote. “This use of criminal process to bypass the limitations and costs of civil discovery should not be permitted by the Court.”
The Justice Department does not appear to have responded to the county’s motion yet. Boulee has yet to set a hearing in the dispute.
Democratic senators attacked the Trump administration for the raid. In an interview Sunday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) decried the seizure of the 2020 ballots.
“This is alarming at every level,” Schiff said on ABC’s “This Week.” “First of all, why is the FBI conducting a raid five years after the fact when there were three recounts in Georgia? Why are they even there?”
Sen. Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia, told local TV station 11Alive he’d requested a meeting with Attorney General Pam Bondi on the matter and said the FBI’s actions were among “awful efforts at voter suppression.”
But FBI Director Kash Patel defended the bureau’s actions, telling Fox News’ Bret Baier last week: “What you saw play out last week was the execution of that search warrant, just like we would do anywhere else.”
"We did the same thing there we do in any criminal case or investigation,” Patel said. “We collected evidence, we presented that evidence to a federal magistrate judge, who made a finding of probable cause.”
POLITICO is among several news organizations that filed a motion Friday asking the court to unseal all the records related to the seizure of the Fulton County ballots.
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