The FBI’s execution Wednesday of a warrant to seize 2020 presidential voting records in Fulton County, Georgia, is both an unusual event in American election history and a sign of a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s destruction of democratic norms, legal experts said.
Trump has long claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him, specifically blaming Georgia for his loss to Joe Biden. After the election, he famously made a phone call to pressure the Secretary of State to “find” enough votes to win. About a week ago, in a speech at the World Economic Forum, President Trump again called the 2020 election “rigged” and promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for their actions.”
A warrant issued to the Fulton County Election Center seeks ballots, tabulation tape, digital data and voter rolls, which it claims could constitute “evidence of criminal activity.” The report cited severe criminal penalties related to the “procurement, mailing, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots.
“I’m not aware of anything like this ever happening,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “The 2020 Georgia election is undergoing extensive counting, recounting, and investigation, so the idea that federal agents would seize ballots in an attempt to prove fraud when they know no fraud exists is especially dangerous in this context.”
Trump and his allies have filed more than 60 lawsuits across the country seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, but all have failed, including those brought by Trump-appointed judges.
“This appears to be a way to use the power of the federal government to further President Trump’s claims of voter fraud,” Hasen said.
An FBI spokesperson declined a request for comment, but said the agency is “conducting court-authorized law enforcement operations. No other information is available at this time.”
Fulton County Commission Chairman Rob Pitts defended the election as fair and accurate, saying at a news conference that the ballots were stored “securely” in county custody. But now that the ballots have been seized, he said, the county “can no longer be satisfied that those ballots are still safe.”
Democratic Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory said he arrived on the scene shortly after FBI agents and, once the error in the warrant was corrected, backed a line of trucks into the election warehouse and spent hours removing boxes of ballots and other materials. The search began in the morning and continued well into the night.
“This is not legitimate. This is Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election,” Ivory said. “This is his way of sowing suspicion that Fulton County is not conducting proper elections.”
Fulton County, which makes up much of Atlanta’s Democratic stronghold, has long been a target of attempts to cast doubt on the county’s election system as a way to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.
Immediately after the election, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused election officials of rigging votes with suitcases of ballots in an argument to overturn the election, a claim that was quickly debunked and Trump lost a $150 million defamation lawsuit filed by two officials.
But that didn’t end the focus on the county by Trump allies, who continued to flood the county with thousands of voter registration challenges and claims of voter fraud, as ProPublica reported.
The Fulton County Board of Elections became a battleground after Republicans appointed Julie Adams to the board. ProPublica reported that Adams played a key role in trying to change the rules for certifying Georgia’s elections that would allow activists to contest Trump’s loss in 2024. (Adams did not respond to questions from ProPublica for these articles.)
Ahead of the 2024 election, right-wing activists removed moderate conservatives from the Georgia Election Commission, tilting the balance of power. The new MAGA majority, which President Trump hailed by name at a rally as “a pit bull who fights for integrity, transparency, and winning,” has begun relitigating the 2020 election. In October 2024, the State Board of Elections voted to issue subpoenas for 2020 materials, including ballots.
After Trump returned to the White House, state and federal officials worked together to pressure Fulton County to turn over its 2020 voting materials.
Months after the state Board of Elections passed a resolution suggesting the Justice Department intervene, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Fulton County officials citing “anomalies” in vote counting during the 2020 election and requesting records, according to court filings.
Fulton County Clerk Che Alexander did not respond, and the U.S. Department of Justice filed charges against her in December.
Alexander said in a court filing that the federal government had no rights to the ballots and documents, which were sealed because of ongoing litigation related to the 2020 election.
Alexander said that if Bondi can “identify a legitimate basis” for accessing the 2020 election materials, he should ask a Fulton County Superior Court judge to order them unsealed.
On Wednesday, agents wearing tactical vests and jackets that read “FBI Evidence Response Team” arrived with a warrant. Shocked officials watched as the box was carried away in a parade.
Ivory, the Fulton County commissioner, said county officials complied with the warrant but expected to challenge the administration’s actions in court.
“We assembled a team to fight back against this,” Ivory said. “We’ll see what happens. There’s some legal games going on right now.”
Experts said the actions in Fulton County raised concerns about federal interference in this year’s midterm elections.
“This is a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to expand federal control over our nation’s historically state-run election infrastructure,” said Derek Klinger, senior adviser at the National Democracy Research Initiative, a research institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School.
