Judge denies Fulton’s request for return of 2020 ballots seized in FBI raid

A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the U.S. Department of Justice does not have to return 2020 election ballots seized by FBI agents to Fulton County.

It is the latest twist in the bitter fight between Fulton County and the Trump administration over the county’s 2020 election records. Fulton could appeal the ruling to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling is a substantial blow for Fulton officials as it may have been the county’s best shot at reclaiming the election documents.

Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he agrees that the affidavit was troubling, but adamantly opposed Boulee’s ruling. He said the county would pursue all available legal options and called the culmination of the DOJ’s efforts to probe the 2020 election a coordinated effort aimed at harassing and intimidating the county.

“We’re at war, and that’s the only way to describe it,” he said. “We have to defend ourselves — defend democracy, defend the right for our citizens to vote and the right to have every legal vote cast to be counted.”

Fulton had challenged the FBI’s January seizure of more than 600 boxes of ballots and other election materials. The Justice Department had taken the records as part of a criminal inquiry into Donald Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia.

In Wednesday’s order, U.S. District Court Judge J.P. Boulee wrote that, “The seizure in this case was certainly not perfect.”

“The events leading up to this case are, in a variety of ways, unprecedented,” he added.

But ultimately, he said, Fulton had failed to prove they had been harmed.

“Petitioners have not shown that their rights were callously disregarded either through supposed defects in the warrant or through the manner in which the warrant was executed,” Boulee wrote.

Officials at the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The matter was referred to the Justice Department by Kurt Olsen, a prominent election denier whom Trump appointed as the director of election security and integrity last year.

Trump has never let go of his 2020 loss, even though numerous inquiries have found his allegations of fraud and election rigging baseless. After reclaiming the White House, the Trump administration has wielded the federal government to reinvestigate his longstanding grievances and taken aggressive actions to try to insert the federal government into elections.

At the center of many claims in Georgia has been Fulton, a Democratic stronghold and the state’s most populous county.

The probe into Fulton escalated again this week when it was revealed that the DOJ issued an April grand jury subpoena seeking personal information about thousands of election workers who helped administer the November 2020 election, which Fulton is fighting to quash.

Shortly after the ballot seizure, Fulton sought to retrieve its records and turned to high-profile attorneys — Abbe Lowell and Norm Eisen. The county contended that the ballot seizure violated the county’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure.

The attorneys have said that the FBI carting off the records impacts other pending litigation related to the 2020 election and that the county needs original copies of such records to defend against baseless election fraud claims.

But lawyers for the federal government said during a hearing last month that the Justice Department supplied Fulton with digital copies of the seized documents, which Boulee said would allow the county to “rebut attacks on the 2020 election and respond to any allegations of misconduct.”

The federal government said returning Fulton’s documents would disrupt the Trump administration’s criminal probe into 2020 election “irregularities” and has pointed to two federal laws that have potentially been violated.

One requires the county to retain election records for at least 22 months after a federal election. The other prohibits coercion in the voting process and knowingly counting fraudulent ballots. But legal experts have questioned whether the evidence could support a successful prosecution, and said violations of either law would likely be outside the five-year statute of limitations.

Among the “irregularities” authorities said the FBI is investigating are whether county officials failed to retain ballot images; whether ballots were scanned and counted multiple times; whether uncreased and unmailed ballots were counted as absentee mail-in ballots; as well as tabulator tape irregularities.

Boulee said an affidavit doesn’t need to establish every element of a suspected crime, but did note that some of the statements regarding the importance placed on ballot images and tabulator tapes in the affidavit were “troubling.”