The FBI conducted what a legal analyst described as a “highly unusual” search of an election office in the Georgia county where President Donald Trump and his allies were indicted for their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Fulton County commissioner Mo Ivory challenged the warrant as “incorrect legally” seeking all ballots from that election and other evidence, and the FBI then obtained a corrected warrant listing Thomas Albus, an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, as the government attorney, and CNN’s Joey Jackson listed other details about the probe that stood out as odd.
“It’s rather unusual,” said Jackson, a former prosecutor, “inasmuch as this has been investigated and litigated and there have been a determination, there’s been determinations as to no fraud. There’s been three recounts, one of them manually. There’s been inspections. The Trump [Department of Justice] itself has given the indication that there’s no fraud here.”
“Why is that relevant to your question?” he added. “It’s relevant because when you’re looking at a criminal warrant, you’re looking at evidence of criminality. You’re looking at making a determination as to whether there was voter fraud in terms of people who voted that should not have voted or any other type of deception, and so this magistrate would have had to draw some conclusions, and the reason I say that it’s somewhat interesting is because if you have this previous litigation, this is not new, this is from 2020, and you have massive investigations and you have no determination as to criminality. What are we doing here?”
Trump’s DOJ had sued Fulton County last year seeking ballot stubs, signature envelopes and other evidence from the 2020 election, but that case appeared to be going nowhere before federal investigators seized that evidence themselves.
“The civil suit is moot, and just backing up on that, this past October, as in 2025, there was a demand served by DOJ,” Jackson explained. “They were relying upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and that act required that you retain records in terms of voting and that you produce them on demand. However, the issue is relating to discrimination. This was a law that was passed in terms of the Jim Crow South people who were excluded from voting, and so what ended up happening is, is that the the state said, no, we’re not producing those records, and they were in civil litigation, and guess what records they were looking to get produced? The same records that when the state said, we’re not giving them to you and filed a motion to dismiss three weeks ago saying, we’re not giving you boxes of our voting records.”
“Those are the same boxes that were just taken out, 700 of them,” Jackson added. “So they did an end-around [on] the lawsuit. The lawsuit, in all measures, is now moot because the records DOJ was seeking in the civil lawsuit, not criminal, has just been gotten by the FBI.”
The FBI currently has custody of that evidence, which the state has argued should be held under seal to preserve their integrity, but a judge had not yet issued a ruling about whether Georgia had to turn over those records to the DOJ.
“State officials are now saying, well, wait a second, if the narrative of the federal government is that there was fraud here, if the issue of the federal government is you did nothing right, state officials and everyone was rampantly going to vote if they’re in the custody of the feds,” Jackson said. “Now, who’s to know that they’re not going to be manipulated or otherwise used for the narrative of the federal government? That’s the concern.”
FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general who has stated the 2020 election “absolutely stolen” from Trump, was present during the search, in addition to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Jackson was shocked to see them at the scene.
“It’s so highly unusual, I’m just saying, what are we talking about now?” Jackson said. “First of all, taking a step back from that, the deputy director of the FBI, generally, they stay at headquarters. To give you some context, when Mar-a-Lago was raided in 2022, that was done by field operatives. The head of the agency and other important, right, everyone is important, but in terms of the people who run the agency, we’re back at headquarters, the field-level supervisors were there executing that warrant here, right. You have a situation where the deputy director of the FBI is there, and the person who runs national security, who is in charge of foreign affairs, is here”
“It’s unbelievable and it’s unprecedented and we are in another world,” he added, “and the major concern here, I’ll just say very quickly, they’re they’re trying, the federal government, to do this in other jurisdictions. In fact, in Oregon, a judge made a ruling that, no, you’re not getting these records. So I think more of this is to come in other areas.”
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