FBI carries out search warrant for 2020 election ballots at Atlanta-area site
The FBI on Wednesday searched the election office of a Georgia county that has been central to right-wing conspiracy theories over U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The search at Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election. It appeared to be the most public step from the Justice Department to pursue Trump’s claims of a stolen election, grievances rejected time and again by courts and state and federal officials, who found no evidence of fraud that would have altered the outcome.
FBI agents secured an area around the large warehouse building that houses the county elections hub with yellow tape and could be seen loading boxes from the building into trucks. FBI spokesperson Jenna Sellitto confirmed that the boxes contained ballots. Among the 2020 election documents sought are ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners used to tally the ballots, electronic ballot images and voter rolls.
An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation last week moved to replace its top agent in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a non-public personnel decision. It was not immediately clear why the move, which was not publicized by the FBI, was made or if it had any connection to Wednesday’s law enforcement activity.
State and county Democratic officials expressed concern about the search and ballot seizures, and said they weren’t informed beforehand.
“For the life of me, I still cannot understand the fascination about the 2020 election, which occurred six years ago,” county Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts told reporters Wednesday night. “That election is over with. That election has been reviewed. It has been audited, and in every instance, we get a clean bill of health.”
The Justice Department had no immediate comment. FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey and U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were seen onsite.
Gabbard’s presence angered Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a leading Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence committee. Warner said Gabbard has a duty to inform that committee of “relevant national security concerns,” and worried of the possibility she was taking part in a “domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Trump focused on Fulton County voting
Trump continues to insists that the 2020 election was “rigged,” but has never explained how the the presidential contest alone was corrupted on a day where hundreds of other federal, state and county elections took place without major incident. The director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in his own administration called that election “the most secure in American history,” leading to his firing.
Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states of 2020 all affirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Judges, including some Trump appointed, rejected dozens of his legal challenges, while his attorney general at the time, William Barr, later told a congressional committee that the claims of fraud that affected the outcome were “bullshit.”
Trump has for years focused on Fulton, Georgia’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, as a key example of what he claims went wrong in the 2020 election. His pressure campaign in Georgia included a now-famous phone call in which he beseeched the secretary of state there, a Republican, to “find” nearly 12,000 votes to overcome his deficit to Biden.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in August 2023 obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results in Georgia. That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor, though Trump’s election win in 2024 and a Supreme Court ruling that same year also made the prospect of a trial unlikely.
Donald Trump engaged in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort’ to ‘unlawfully retain power’ after losing the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report published by the U.S. Justice Department.
Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani also directed invective at two Black election workers as part of a debunked conspiracy theory involving a suitcase and ballots. The women — who Trump called “professional vote scammers” — won a $148 million US judgment in a civil suit against Giuliani.
Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Trump promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” in the 2020 election. Past presidents typically did not get advance notice from the Justice Deparment of impending prosecutions.
However, Trump’s desire in his second presidency for prosecutions of officials and politicians who have angered him, much like his 2020 election protestations, have often run into roadblocks in the legal system.
Grand juries in some instances have failed to indict, a rare occurrence in hearings that take place without defence attorneys, while a judge threw out indictments against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, in one of several cases in which the courts found that Justice Department prosecutors were improperly appointed.
The Justice Department has also received pushback from about two-dozen states over requests to seek voter roll information beyond what is already publicly accessible.
Front Burner26:24Trump’s campaign of legal revenge
Ongoing civil suits
The warrant executed on Wednesday is a criminal document, but the Justice Department last month sued the clerk of the Fulton County superior and magistrate courts in federal court seeking access to documents from the 2020 election in the county.
Che Alexander, the Fulton County clerk, filed a motion to dismiss the suit. The Justice Department complaint says that the purpose of its request was “ascertaining Georgia’s compliance with various federal election laws.”
As well, a three-person conservative majority on Georgia’s state election board has repeatedly sought to reopen a case alleging wrongdoing by Fulton County during the 2020 election.
The state board sent subpoenas to the county board for various election documents last year and again on Oct. 6, 2025. A fight over the state board’s efforts to enforce the 2024 subpoena is currently tied up in court.
The Justice Department sent a letter to the county election board Oct. 30 citing the federal Civil Rights Act and asking for all records responsive to the October subpoena from the state election board. Lawyers for the county election board in response sent attached a letter the clerk sent to the state board, indicating the information can’t be released without a court order.
