ATLANTA — The FBI relied on older claims of fraud about the 2020 presidential election when it sought a warrant to seize ballots and records from Fulton County, Georgia, according to an affidavit unsealed this week. The affidavit describes how the federal effort started with a referral from Kurt Olsen, who the document says advised President Donald Trump during the 2020 campaign and now serves as Trump’s “director of election security and integrity.” The affidavit also provides the first public explanation for why the bureau pursued a search last month involving the county many Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly treated as a focal point in Trump’s continuing claim that the election was stolen.
The search was carried out at Fulton County’s elections hub just south of Atlanta on Jan. 28, when agents spent hours at the location and then left with trucks loaded with hundreds of cartons of election materials, the affidavit says. The affidavit offered no mention of evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election, even though the possibility of such meddling has been a longstanding conspiracy theory among Trump supporters.
The federal affidavit says it relied on years-old assertions that had been investigated before and had not produced findings tied to widespread fraud. It characterizes the case as the first public justification for the FBI’s search and points to the FBI’s reliance on claims that had been “thoroughly investigated and found to have no connection to widespread fraud,” even as the affidavit cites the continuing belief among Trump allies that Fulton County should be scrutinized.
Among the specific facts the affidavit lays out is uncertainty about what the FBI could prove to meet a criminal standard. It says the FBI was examining possible “deficiencies or defects” in the Fulton County vote count, including the county’s admission that it did not have scanned images of all ballots counted during the original count or the recount. The affidavit also says Fulton County has confirmed that some ballots were scanned multiple times during the recount.
The affidavit argues that if such deficiencies were the result of intentional action, that would violate federal law, regardless of whether the failure to retain records or any deprivation of a fair tabulation of votes was outcome determinative for a particular election or race. It says the seizure was necessary to determine whether election records were destroyed and whether the tabulation could include materially false votes, and it cites potential violations including a misdemeanor election-record preservation and retention law and a felony related to depriving residents of a “fair and impartially conducted election process.”
At the same time, the affidavit expresses doubt about whether the alleged issues rise to crimes. It notes that elections in Fulton County have already been the subject of multiple reviews, and it describes what those investigations found. The document says an independent monitor hired after a disastrous 2020 primary election observed “sloppy processes” and “systemic disorganization” but found no evidence of illegality or fraud.
The affidavit further says a performance review initiated by Republican state lawmakers in 2021 concluded that Fulton County’s elections were marked by “disorganization and a lack of a sense of urgency in resolving issues,” while also finding improvement. That review, the affidavit says, stated: “we do not see any evidence of fraud, intentional misconduct, or large systematic issues that would have affected the result of the November 2020 election.”
The affidavit also describes how some of the central claims in the broader 2020 election dispute were previously addressed. It says one allegation involved the insertion of 17,852 “duplicate” ballot images into the Fulton County file, and it quotes a witness who said the potentially fake images were actually more pro-Trump than the confirmed Fulton County votes—an outcome that the affidavit says indicated the duplicate ballots were intended to make recount numbers match rather than affect the election outcome. It also says the Georgia Secretary of State’s office investigators concluded the error “not intentional misconduct.”
Another claim described in the affidavit involves “pristine” absentee ballots. It says an unnamed poll manager told the FBI she saw ballots during a hand count that were not folded as they would have been if placed in an envelope, felt different from other ballots, and were all filled in the same way. The affidavit says a former official with the secretary of state’s office told the FBI that unfolded absentee ballots occur in every election because they are generated by vote review panel members when they examine damaged ballots. The affidavit says investigators looked into the pristine-ballot allegations in 2021 by pulling boxes and batches identified by a woman who had worked as an auditor during the hand count and found no evidence to support the claims.
Fulton County officials moved quickly after the FBI’s Jan. 28 seizure. A week later, officials filed a motion seeking the return of the materials taken and asking that the sworn statement used to support the warrant be unsealed. The affidavit says the warrant sought seizure of documents related to the 2020 election in the county, including all ballots, tabulator tapes from scanning devices, electronic ballot images created during the count and recount, and all voter rolls.
In court filings, Fulton County argued that claims the 2020 results were fraudulent or otherwise invalid had been “exhaustively reviewed and, without exception, refuted.” On Tuesday, Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts described the allegations as having already been settled. “These accusations have already been debunked, but here we go again on a merry-go-round,” Pitts said, adding: “Fulton County will fight. We’ll fight this with every resource that’s at our disposal and we will not stop fighting.” The affidavit does not address evidence of foreign interference, and it indicates that the FBI is still assessing whether any alleged “deficiencies or defects” constitute criminal conduct after prior reviews concluded there was no evidence of fraud or intentional misconduct.