F.B.I. agents executed a search warrant on Wednesday for an election center in Fulton County, Ga., seeking to seize ballots in a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to investigate a jurisdiction that President Trump has continued to criticize over his 2020 defeat in the state.
The move harnesses the investigative power of the Justice Department and the F.B.I. behind baseless claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from him. State and local officials and election experts have repeatedly refuted those assertions.
The search warrant authorized F.B.I. agents to search for all “physical ballots from the 2020 general election” in the county, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times, as well as all ballot images produced by scanning ballots, all voter rolls from that year, and all tabulator tapes, which serve as a kind of voting machine receipt for election results.
The warrant, which was signed by a magistrate judge, Catherine M. Salinas, said the records were sought as part of an investigation into possible violations of a federal law against destruction of election-related records, and another statute that makes it a crime to knowingly procure fraudulent voter registration or fraudulent votes.
In an unusual twist, the prosecutor listed on the warrant is not from Georgia, but the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus. It is unclear what would connect prosecutors in Missouri to Mr. Trump’s longstanding complaints about how the 2020 election in Georgia was conducted.
By Wednesday afternoon, about a dozen agents had descended on the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center. The vast, hangar-like building south of downtown Atlanta houses the county elections office, and is where votes are counted on election night.
The action comes a month after the Trump administration filed a civil lawsuit against Fulton County, seeking to seize and inspect old ballots from the 2020 election. Wednesday’s search broadens the administration’s attacks on the integrity of that race to include a criminal investigation — not long after Mr. Trump vowed his administration would charge people with crimes over the vote six years ago.
The search signals a more aggressive approach from the Justice Department in its fights with state and local officials over election data. Days earlier, Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a letter to Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, suggested that the administration would reduce its immigration enforcement operation there if the state turned over its complete and unredacted voter rolls to the department, among other demands.
The administration’s intensifying investigation and litigation targeting elections — which are historically the purview of individual states — have raised concerns among Democrats, voting experts and some Republicans. Wednesday’s search only heightened those fears.
Mo Ivory, a Democratic commissioner for Fulton County, said in an Instagram post that the F.B.I.’s first warrant was flawed and that agents returned with a second warrant later in the day to collect hundreds of boxes of old ballots.
Ms. Ivory said she and her colleagues were determining a legal plan “to stop this.” She called the search an effort by Mr. Trump “to create chaos” before the 2026 congressional elections.
“This is an attempt to take your vote away,” she said. “This is all about November 2026.”
Josh McLaurin, a Democratic state senator who arrived at the scene on Wednesday afternoon, called the search “extremely alarming” and “an order from on high to try to disrupt Fulton County’s election administration, just because Donald Trump is still mad that he lost.”
Adding to the federal presence on the ground in Fulton County was Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. A senior administration official said Ms. Gabbard “has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”
Fulton County, which is largely nonwhite and voted overwhelmingly for Joseph R. Biden Jr., quickly became a nexus of Mr. Trump’s effort to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. It has remained central to a host of conspiracy theories about that election that have persisted, animating an activist base in the state. After leaving office, Mr. Trump and some of his allies were criminally charged with election interference in Georgia, and the former president was booked at the Fulton County jail.
Around 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Salleigh Grubbs, a Republican member of the Georgia State Election Board, emerged from the building. She said the activity was “on the clerk’s side” of the building.
“It’s been a long time in coming, I think, and getting a lot of the answers that need to be given,” said Ms. Grubbs, who has previously shared doubts about the 2020 election and who once followed a truck that she believed was bringing ballots to be shredded.
About 90 minutes later, Ms. Grubbs was spotted inside the elections building with Janice Johnston, another Republican member of the State Election Board. The pair were complaining to Fulton County officials that they could not reach the area where the search was ostensibly taking place, according to David Worley, a Democrat and former member of the election board, who was also on the scene. “But it’s our subpoena!” Ms. Johnston repeatedly said, according to Mr. Worley.
Mr. McLaurin said he had been in the same room on Wednesday, and that at one point he had heard Ms. Johnston say, “They should just take the 700 boxes away,” presumably referring to the boxes from 2020.
A spokesman for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, could not be reached for comment. The office was not given advance notice that the F.B.I. would be conducting a search, according to two people familiar with the situation.
A week earlier, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, forced out the head of the bureau’s Atlanta office, though it is unclear whether the ouster was related to the search.
The administration has long signaled its interest in the ballots from six years ago.
In October, Harmeet K. Dhillon, a conservative activist who runs the Justice Department’s civil rights division, subpoenaed Fulton County’s 2020 ballots, but the county resisted turning them over. As part of its civil lawsuit in December, the Justice Department accused county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act by not handing them over.
In a separate lawsuit, the Justice Department sued the state of Georgia, seeking copies of its private voter list, which contains personal information such as driver’s licenses or partial Social Security numbers.
Appearing onstage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Mr. Trump vowed to arrest people in connection with what he claimed was voter fraud in 2020. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” he said.
Some discrepancies in Fulton County’s recount process did emerge after the 2020 election, but the state’s Republican leadership ultimately affirmed Mr. Biden’s victory there. Mr. Trump then pressured Georgia’s top elections official to “find” him enough votes to overturn his loss in the state.
In particular, Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly zeroed in on footage from State Farm Arena, one of the vote-counting sites in the county during the 2020 election, that appears to show some election workers running ballots through scanners more than once.
But the governor, secretary of state and top election officials in Georgia — all Republicans — said that the footage did not show anything nefarious.
“The standard operating procedure on a high-capacity scanner is that if there is a misread, you take that batch, press a button, delete that batch, and take that batch and put it back in again,” Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, said at the time. “We also know, if there had been multiple scans, there would have been a lot more votes than there were ballots.”
But despite repeated explanations from top Republican election officials, Fulton County has remained an obsession among conservative election activists, who still believe the county counted fraudulent ballots to swing the election to Mr. Biden.
In July, conservative members of the State Election Board passed a resolution calling on the secretary of state and other officials to seek assistance from the Justice Department “to take any action necessary to bring a prompt resolution of the these issues, including obtaining all necessary voting records and documents.”
In November, Steve Bannon implored Ed Martin, an official at the Justice Department who has promoted false theories about elections in the past, to send U.S. marshals to Fulton County to claim ballots.
“We have to adjudicate 2020, it’s the railhead of so much of the problem in the country,” Mr. Bannon said on an episode of his podcast, “War Room.” Mr. Martin said that along with Kurt Olsen, a lawyer in the White House, he “and a couple of others” had been working on election integrity, and signaled that Fulton County was in their sights.
“At this point it’s 4.5 years later, they’re fighting to keep them secret,” Mr. Martin said. “The clerk has them, supposedly down the hall, and they won’t let us see them to review them? If they want to prove the election was fine, show it to us. We’ve raised enough serious concerns.”
Sean Keenan contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Julian E. Barnes from Washington.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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