Fulton County, Georgia, officials said Monday they plan to file a federal lawsuit challenging the FBI’s seizure last week of its 2020 election records. During a raid on the county’s election office near Atlanta last week, the FBI took 700 boxes of election materials for an investigation into President Donald Trump’s repeated but unproven claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
One county commissioner said a lawsuit could be filed as early as Monday. But the commission’s chairman, Robb Pitts, said officials are still developing their legal strategy to contest the unusual seizure.
“There’s a lot of speculation, a lot of talk, but this is a serious matter for the county,” Pitts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We’re taking it seriously, and we’re taking our time to develop whatever legal strategy may be needed at the proper time.”
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“We have to do something to protect our citizens, to protect the voter information and the voter rolls,” Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. told Atlanta’s NBC affiliate, WXIA-TV.
Pitts and Arrington are two of the five Democrats on the seven-member county commission.
Was the seizure legal?
Arrington disputed the validity of the search warrant served by FBI agents at the county election office in the Atlanta suburb of Union City. He said the FBI had the authority to copy, but not take possession of, election records such as ballots voter files.
“We want to ask for forensic accounting,” Arrington told WANF-TV in Atlanta. “We want the documents to stay in the state of Georgia under seal and we want to do whatever we can to protect voter information.”
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Joe Biden won 49.47% of the vote in Georgia in 2020’s presidential election, compared to Donald Trump’s 49.24%.
Arrington also questioned whether the FBI maintained a proper chain of custody of the seized documents.
“Now we cannot verify that we’ve received everything back because there was no chain-of-custody inventory taken at the time the records were seized,” Arrington said.
“They stole our original ballots,” he said. “They stole the original absentee ballots and the original provisional ballots.”
Trump’s longstanding claims of a Georgia victory
Trump continues to claim, without evidence, that he actually won Georgia in the 2020 presidential race.
As Straight Arrow News previously reported, before Congress certified Joe Biden as the winner, Trump placed a phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he asked that the official “find” enough votes to change the outcome.
Joe Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes, or less than one-fourth of 1% of all votes cast. In Fulton County, which includes most of the city of Atlanta, Biden received almost 73% of the more than 500,000 votes cast.
A Fulton County grand jury later charged Trump in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the election. The prosecution was dropped late last year after the original prosecutor was disqualified from the case.
Numerous investigations found no evidence of irregularities or fraud in the county or state’s polling.
New details about raid
Trump personally instructed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to travel to Atlanta to oversee the raid, according to a report Monday in The New York Times. Gabbard, whose job normally involves coordinating the efforts of the nation’s intelligence agencies, was photographed at the election office as FBI agents carried hundreds of boxes into rented trucks.
The following day, according to The Times, Gabbard put several agents involved in the raid on a phone call with Trump, who reportedly praised the agents’ work in taking control of the election documents.
A White House spokesman defended Trump’s engagement with agents conducting a sensitive investigation in which he has a personal stake.
“President Trump pledged to secure America’s elections,” the spokesman, Davis Ingle, told The Times, “and he has tasked the most talented team of patriots to do just that.”
