ATLANTA — Georgia's Fulton County has gone to federal court seeking the return of all ballots and other documents from the 2020 election that were seized by the FBI last week from a warehouse near Atlanta.
Its motion also asks for the unsealing of a law enforcement agent's sworn statement that was presented to the judge who approved the search warrant, the county chairman, Robb Pitts, said Wednesday. The filing on behalf of Pitts and the county election board is not being made public because the case is under seal, he said.
The Jan. 28 search at Fulton County's main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election. Many Democrats have criticized what they see as the use of the FBI and the Justice Department to pursue President Donald Trump's political foes.
The Republican president and his allies have fixated on the heavily Democratic county, the state's most populous, since the Republican narrowly lost the election in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden that year. Trump has long insisted without evidence that widespread voter fraud in the county cost him victory in the state.
“The president himself and his allies, they refuse to accept the fact that they lost," Pitts said. "And even if he had won Georgia, he would still have lost the presidency.”
Pitts defended the county’s election practices and said Fulton has conducted 17 elections since 2020 without any issues.
“This case is not only about Fulton County. This is about elections across Georgia and across the nation,” Pitts said, citing comments by Trump earlier this week on a podcast where he called for Republicans to “take over” and “nationalize” elections. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has said the president was referring to legislative efforts.
A warrant cover sheet provided to the county includes a list of items that the agents were seeking related to the 2020 general election: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.
The FBI drove away with hundreds of boxes of ballots and other documents. County officials say they were not told why the federal government wanted the documents.
“What they’re doing with the ballots that they have now, we don’t know, but if they’re counted fairly and honestly, the results will be the same,” Pitts said.
Andrew Bailey, the FBI's co-deputy director, and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, were seen on-site, at the time. Democrat in Congress have questioned the propriety of Gabbard's presence because the search was a law enforcement, not intelligence, action.
In a letter to top Democrats on the House and Senate Intelligence committees Monday, she said Trump asked her to be there "under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security."
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