The FBI raided Fulton County’s election operations center Wednesday, an action apparently connected to the Trump administration’s long-held, but unproven, belief that Fulton’s handling of the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud.
Reached by phone Wednesday, Fulton County Court Clerk Ché Alexander said a large number of federal agents were retrieving boxes of ballots from the warehouse where they were being stored.
“The FBI agents are here to get the 2020 ballots,” Alexander said. “They’re all here — trucks, everything.”
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Tony Thomas, spokesperson for the Atlanta office of the FBI, said the agency was conducting a “court-ordered activity” at the elections operation center on Campbellton Fairburn Road in Union City. Thomas did not offer any further details on the aims of the raid or what might have been seized.
A copy of the search warrant signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas and obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows investigators are seeking:
- All physical ballots from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County, all in-person, absentee and other ballots and absentee ballot envelopes.
- All tabulator tapes for every voting machine used in Fulton County.
- All ballot images produced during the original ballot count beginning on November 3, 2020.
- All voter rolls from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County from absentee, early voting, in person, and any other voter roll.
Neither Fulton County nor Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office appeared to have advance notice of the raid.
President Donald Trump has falsely claimed his narrow defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of a “rigged” vote. Three separate tallies of the roughly 5 million ballots cast in the 2020 election upheld Biden’s narrow victory, court challenges by Trump allies were rejected, and state and federal election officials have vouched for the results.
Still, Trump and his allies continue to spread conspiracy theories about widespread fraud. His demand that Raffensperger “find” votes to reverse his defeat was at the center of the now-dismissed Fulton County election interference case.
The timing collides with Raffensperger’s bid for the GOP nomination for governor, where he faces Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the Trump-backed front-runner who has painted his rival as a “Never Trumper.”
The raid also puts pressure on other top Georgia Republicans who consistently endorsed the integrity of the 2020 vote — and even defeated Trump-endorsed candidates in the 2022 election who echoed the president’s false claims.
Among them is Attorney General Chris Carr, another Republican gubernatorial candidate, and Gov. Brian Kemp, a former state elections official who has repeatedly said the Georgia election “was not stolen” and has long urged Republicans to focus on the future.
Fulton’s 600,000-square-foot elections hub was built in 2023 and is used for voting, county election board meetings and other purposes. It’s also where the county has held onto troves of documents from 2020, including the physical ballots cast by voters, which have been kept under a court-ordered seal.
In court filings, Fulton Election Director Nadine Williams said the 2020 records fill more than 700 boxes.
The raid drew immediate condemnation from Democrats at the Capitol. State Rep. Tanya Miller, D-Atlanta, called the raid “a staggering use of federal power to chase ghosts that have already been laid to rest.”
“As a former prosecutor, I believe in the rule of law, but the law requires transparency to maintain public trust. If this action is court-ordered, the Department of Justice must immediately provide the legal justification to the people of Georgia,” Miller, a Democratic candidate for state attorney general, said. “We cannot allow the preeminent federal law enforcement agency to be used as a tool to rewrite history or breathe life into repeatedly debunked claims about the 2020 election.”
Even after his November 2024 victory, Trump has continued to falsely claim his 2020 defeat was part of a scheme to block his reelection, and he said in January that “people will soon be prosecuted.” No widespread corruption was found. No election was stolen from Trump.
In fact, Trump’s allegations were investigated and repeatedly found to be false.
State and federal investigators found no merit to claims that security footage from State Farm Arena the night of the 2020 election was a “smoking gun” for fraud.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Investigators found the video showed only normal ballot counting, and two Fulton County election workers featured in the video won a $148 million defamation verdict against former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who played a central role in spreading the false allegations.
Investigators debunked allegations that tens of thousands of dead, underage and other ineligible voters cast ballots. And they found no evidence to support allegations of electronic vote-flipping, illegal ballot harvesting and other schemes.
The problems investigators did find — such as several thousand double-scanned ballots — were not widespread enough to affect the outcome of the election.
In 2020, Trump’s then-attorney general, William Barr, told him that federal investigators had not found evidence to change the outcome of his loss to Biden. But that was not the message Trump wanted to hear.
Trump later demanded that Justice Department officials fire Byung “BJay” Pak, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta whose investigators found no evidence of the widespread fraud. Pak ultimately resigned.
Still, the relentless repetitions of false claims convinced many Georgians they were credible. Atlanta Journal-Constitution polls at the time showed that a substantial majority of Republicans believed there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
The investigation is the latest example of the Trump Justice Department revisiting the 2020 election. In December, DOJ filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, seeking to obtain access to its 2020 ballots, absentee ballot signature envelopes and other election materials.
That same month DOJ filed a separate lawsuit seeking to obtain detailed information about Georgia voters. Though Raffensperger’s office has provided some information, it has not provided information that he says cannot be released under state law, including voters’ Social Security numbers, dates of birth and driver’s license numbers.
That suit was dismissed last week when a federal judge in Macon ruled the Justice Department had filed it in the wrong court. Raffensperger’s office is in Atlanta. The DOJ refiled the suit Tuesday in Atlanta.
Jones has hammered Raffensperger on not turning over the voting data to federal investigators, accusing him of a lack of transparency and pressing allies in the Legislature to harangue him at hearings.
At a December State Election Board meeting, a Fulton attorney admitted that poll workers neglected to sign tabulation tapes from voting machines that counted hundreds of thousands of votes. Raffensperger called it a “clerical error” that did not invalidate the votes, but the admission rippled across social media, where some conservatives wrongly cited the error as evidence that those votes were illegally certified.
The Republican-controlled state board, which has long scrutinized Fulton’s 2020 conduct, subpoenaed a slew of county election records from 2020 in 2024. The board issued another subpoena last October for the county’s 2020 ballots and other materials. A legal dispute over the 2024 subpoenas is tied up in Fulton County Superior Court.
Before filing suit against Fulton, the Justice Department sent a letter requesting the same records as the state board.
The Trump administration has increasingly turned to federal authorities to pursue perceived wrongs after the Republican claimed throughout his campaign the justice system was weaponized against him.
Federal officials also demanded the names of FBI agents who investigated the violent pro-Trump mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and sued a state attorney general who won a fraud verdict against Trump.
Staff writers Michelle Baruchman and David Wickert contributed to this report.
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