Before federal agents seized hundreds of thousands of ballots from an elections office outside Atlanta late last month, a state judge had made clear that he was preparing to release copies of them. That would have allowed members of the public to seek access to the ballots, from the 2020 presidential election, and draw their own conclusions.
But the federal seizure meant that the Trump administration had sole control of the Georgia ballots, at least for now, raising fears that an openly partisan Justice Department seeded with election deniers could manipulate them.
On Monday, the judge, Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton Superior Court, who has presided for years over litigation brought by Trump allies pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, dismissed one of three civil cases related to the Fulton County ballots and paused another.
The judge, himself a former federal prosecutor, issued terse rulings that made his frustration with the F.B.I. seizure clear.
“We are left to hope that the bureau and the Department of Justice handle the ballots and related records with the care required to preserve and protect their integrity,” he wrote in one of the rulings.
In the other, he noted that the ballots “were, until recently, here in Fulton County. Now, however, they are somewhere else. Where exactly the court cannot say.” He suggested that the plaintiffs might look for them not in Atlanta but in Missouri, pointing to an oddity of the election office raid — the fact that the search warrant was signed by the United States attorney in the Eastern District of Missouri instead of local federal prosecutors.
Another unusual facet of the seizure is that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present during the raid on the Fulton election office, met with F.B.I. agents who took part and put them on the phone with President Trump.
Judge McBurney was originally appointed to the court in 2012 by Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican. The case that he dismissed on Monday was brought by Garland Favorito, who has for years advanced unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Mr. Favorito, who has been supportive of the federal raid, said in a text message to The New York Times that the case was “legally moot since the F.B.I. has the ballots.”
The judge also stayed a separate case seeking the 2020 ballots, brought by Fulton County against Georgia’s State Board of Elections, which is led by Trump allies. Another case involving Mr. Favorito, which was filed shortly after the 2020 election, remains active.
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In a ruling in December, the judge had said that the state election board had the right to obtain copies of the ballots from Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta, and had scheduled a hearing to work out the costs. Had the copies been produced, members of the public could have filed open records requests to see them.
State Representative Saira Draper, an Atlanta-area Democrat, has been an outspoken critic of the F.B.I. seizure of the ballots, which took place on Jan. 28. In an interview on Monday, Ms. Draper said that federal agents should have taken copies of the ballots, not the ballots themselves. That way, members of the public could still have had access to them, she said, and could have been able to check against any allegations that federal officials might make about the county’s 2020 election results.
“Now that they have the source of truth,” she said of the Justice Department, “they can manipulate it in any way.”
Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election was affirmed in subsequent recounts, and the process was defended by the state’s Republican leadership, including Gov. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state.
Fulton County officials have sued the Justice Department and are seeking the return of the ballots. A federal judge has ordered that documents related to Fulton County’s challenge of the ballot seizure be unsealed on Tuesday, at the county’s request, including the search warrant affidavit.
Democrats have said they see little reason to trust the Justice Department, which is acting on the orders of a president who continues to insist without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen from him. A number of Justice Department officials who have raised questions about the 2020 election were directly involved in the Trump administration’s effort to obtain the Atlanta ballots.
Harmeet K. Dhillon, who runs the department’s civil rights division, was the co-chairwoman in 2020 of a group, Lawyers for Trump, that challenged the election results. She has been a driving force behind the effort to seize the county’s ballots and wrote a letter to Fulton County officials last year demanding that they be turned over.
Another letter demanding the ballots was from Ed Martin, an election denier who now reviews pardons but previously led an effort to weaponize the department against the president’s perceived political enemies.
Last week, Mr. Trump issued a call to “nationalize” elections, despite the Constitution conferring considerable authority over elections to the states.
Danny Hakim is a reporter on the Investigations team at The Times, focused primarily on politics.
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