When the FBI executed a warrant on Wednesday to seize records from the 2020 presidential vote in Fulton County, Georgia, it marked both an extraordinary event in the history of American elections and a significant escalation in President Donald Trump’s breaking of democratic norms, several legal experts said.
Trump has long claimed, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him and blamed Georgia, in particular, for his loss to Joe Biden. After the election, he famously made a call pressuring the secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to win. About a week ago, in a speech at the World Economic Forum, Trump once again called the 2020 election “rigged” and promised, “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
The warrant served on the Fulton County election center sought ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data and voter rolls, which it alleged might constitute “evidence of the commission of a criminal offense.” It cited stiff criminal penalties related to “the procurement, casting, or tabulation” of fraudulent ballots.
“I’m not aware of something like this happening ever before,” said Rick Hasen, a professor at the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles. “The idea that federal officials would seize ballots in an attempt to prove fraud is especially dangerous in this context when we know there is no fraud because the Georgia 2020 election has been extensively counted, recounted and investigated.”
Trump and his allies filed over 60 legal cases across the nation seeking to overturn the 2020 election results — all of which failed, even those before Trump-appointed judges.
“This just looks like a way to use the might of the federal government to further Trump’s voter fraud narratives,” Hasen said.
An FBI spokesperson declined a request for comment except to say that the bureau “is conducting court-authorized law enforcement activity. No other information is available at this time.”
At a press conference, Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said that the ballots had been “safe” in the county’s custody and defended its handling of the election as fair and accurate. But now that the ballots had been seized, he said, the county “can no longer satisfy … that those ballots are still secure.”
Mo Ivory, a Democratic Fulton County commissioner, arrived on the scene shortly after the FBI agents and said that once an error on the warrant was corrected, they backed up lines of trucks to the elections warehouse and spent hours carting away boxes of ballots and other materials. The search began in the morning and was still going well past nightfall.
“This is not legitimate. This is Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election,” Ivory said. “This is his way to sow doubt that Fulton County doesn’t hold proper elections.”
Fulton County — which covers much of the Democratic-stronghold of Atlanta — has long been the target of attempts to call into question its election systems as a way to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.
In the immediate aftermath of the election, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani accused election workers of rigging the vote with suitcases of ballots in his arguments to overturn the election — claims that were quickly debunked and for which he lost a nearly $150 million defamation lawsuit brought by two of the workers.
But this did not end the focus on the county by Trump’s allies, who inundated it with thousands of voter registration challenges and continued to make claims of voter fraud, as ProPublica has reported.
The Fulton County Board of Elections became a battleground, once the Republican Party appointed Julie Adams to it. Adams, ProPublica has reported, played a key role in trying to change rules around certifying elections in Georgia that could have allowed activists to dispute a Trump loss in 2024. (Adams didn’t respond to questions from ProPublica for these articles.)
In advance of the 2024 election, right-wing activists also forced out a moderate conservative on the Georgia State Election Board, tilting its balance of power. Its new MAGA majority — which Trump praised by name at a rally as “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory” — began relitigating the 2020 election. In October 2024, the State Election Board voted to issue subpoenas for 2020 materials, including ballots.
Once Trump returned to the White House, state and federal officials combined to pressure Fulton County to hand over 2020 voting materials.
In the months after the State Election Board passed a resolution suggesting the Justice Department should intervene, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent letters to Fulton County officials demanding records and citing “anomalies” in counting votes during the 2020 election, according to a court filing.
Fulton County Clerk Ché Alexander didn’t respond, and in December the U.S. Department of Justice sued her.
In a court filing, Alexander said that the federal government had no right to the ballots and documents, which were under seal because of ongoing cases related to the 2020 election.
Alexander said that if Bondi could “identify a legitimate basis” for accessing the 2020 election materials, then she should seek an order from a Fulton County Superior Court judge to unseal them.
On Wednesday, agents wearing tactical vests and jackets reading “FBI Evidence Response Team” arrived with a warrant. Shocked officials looked on as the boxes were paraded away.
Ivory, the Fulton County commissioner, said that while county officials had complied with the warrant, they expected to challenge the administration’s actions in court.
“We’ve assembled a team to fight back against this,” Ivory said. “We’ll see what happens. The legal maneuvers are happening right now.”
Experts said the action in Fulton County had triggered fears of federal interference in this year’s midterm elections.
“It’s a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration’s efforts to expand federal control over our country’s historically state-run election infrastructure,” said Derek Clinger, a senior counsel at the State Democracy Research Initiative, an institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School.