Georgia officials have shredded the FBI’s justification for seizing Fulton County’s 2020 voter rolls, writing in a new filing that their evidence fell “woefully short” of showing probable cause.
In a petition demanding the return of 2020 election ballots, officials accused the FBI of having “serious” omissions in its successful petition for a search warrant to raid the county’s election office near Atlanta.
“Instead of alleging probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, the affidavit does nothing more than describe the types of human errors that its own sources confirm occur in almost every election—without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever,” the filing says.
Officials also accused the FBI of breaching the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
“The Fourth Amendment demands ‘probable cause’—not ‘possible cause,’” the filing reads. “The Affidavit fails that constitutional requirement.”
The scathing filing comes three weeks after FBI Director Kash Patel and other agents marched into the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operation Center and hauled away 700 boxes of records tied to an election that has already been audited, recounted, and upheld by the courts.
Paul Brown, the former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, was removed earlier this month after he raised concerns about a renewed push to find fraud where prior probes had already found none.
Trump has repeatedly amplified the baseless claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him in Georgia—but investigations into the allegations have repeatedly uncovered no voter fraud.
Fulton County officials reminded the courts of this on Tuesday, writing that the latest crusade to find irregularities in the state’s largest and bluest county is based on hypotheticals and conspiracy, not fact.
“Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the affidavit does not identify facts establishing probable cause that anyone committed a crime,” the filing reads. “Instead, [the FBI] all but admits that the seizure will yield evidence of a crime only if certain hypotheticals are true.”
It continues, “Unsupported by probable cause and dependent on unsubstantiated hypotheticals, Respondent’s seizure violated the Fourth Amendment.”
The filing singled out FBI witness statements that it alleges showed the search was based on the hope of finding wrongdoing rather than on probable cause to believe a crime had been committed.
“It is woefully deficient for an affiant to say that if I develop additional evidence at some later point in time, the seized property would potentially be evidence of a crime,” the filing reads. “Probable cause requires more: a reasonable likelihood that a crime did, in fact, occur.”
Making Patel’s shock raid all the more bewildering, Fulton County officials note that the statute of limitations for the pair of supposed crimes being probed—a misdemeanor relating to election records retention and a felony statute criminalizing efforts to “deprive” or “defraud” residents of a fair election—has a five-year statute of limitations, which has since expired.
The FBI’s Atlanta office declined to comment on this story.
The newest filing in the Northern District of Georgia also poked holes in the FBI’s witnesses’ findings that supposedly prompted it to act. “Witness 5” claimed to have received data that may have shown proof of a crime “second hand,” from an unidentified person, but not to the degree Trump has long alleged.
In reality, Witness 5 said that the purported error added votes for Donald Trump—not the other way around.
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