Voters wait in line to cast their votes during early voting in the U.S. presidential election at a polling station in Detroit, Michigan, U.S. November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
The Daily Beast reports Georgia officials are “shredding” 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 … petition for a search warrant to raid the county’s election office near Atlanta,” the Beast reports.
“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,” said the filing. The filing also argues that the federal government breached the Fourth Amendment protecting individuals against “unreasonable searches and seizures” by the government.
“The Fourth Amendment demands ‘probable cause’ — not ‘possible cause,’” the filing argues.
A former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office had his own issues with the FBI’s rationalization for the seizure and was removed after he raised concerns. Prior probes for fraud had come up empty., and even conservative judges had shut down many of President Donald Trump’s arguments of fraud in 2020.
Fulton County officials told the courts in their Tuesday filing that the Trump administration dredging for evidence in Georgia’s most Democratic County was based on hypotheticals and conspiracy.
“Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, the affidavit does not identify facts establishing probable cause that anyone committed a crime,” the filing said. “Instead, [the FBI] all but admits that the seizure will yield evidence of a crime only if certain hypotheticals are true.”
The Beast reports local officials also cited FBI witness statements alleging that the search was based on the hope of finding wrongdoing rather than on probable cause.
“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.”
“The newest filing … also poked holes in the FBI’s witnesses’ findings that supposedly prompted it to act,” reports the Beast. “’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.”