The FBI's Fulton County Raid Was Based on Debunked Claims By Election Deniers [View all]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/fulton-georgia-fbi-trump-2020-election-raid/

On Tuesday afternoon, the FBI finally released a court-ordered affidavit showing the basis for its January raid seizing nearly 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. A judge signed off on the raid after the FBI alleged “evidence of a commission of a criminal offense” relating to the 2020 election.

But what the unsealed affidavit actually revealed was a laundry list of debunked and recycled claims about the 2020 election peddled for years by election deniers that have been rejected repeatedly in court and by election officials. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the claims “baseless and repackaged.”

The affidavit immediately began with a red flag: the declaration submitted to the court by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans said that the bureau’s “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen,” a temporary White House employee tasked with investigating the 2020 election results. Olsen is a prominent election denier who played a leading role in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, lobbying the Department of Justice to file a lawsuit with the Supreme Court attempting to overturn the election (Texas eventually filed a lawsuit that was unanimously rejected) and speaking to Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He was subsequently sanctioned by a federal court for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” while representing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake in her unsuccessful attempt to challenge the results of the 2022 election.

Evidence provided by Clay Parikh, another election denier who testified on behalf of Lake in 2022, is also prominently cited in the affidavit.

Beyond that, there wasn’t much new or surprising, other than the fact that a state judge signed off on the raid. In order to obtain a search warrant, a law enforcement agency has to establish probable cause: a reasonable belief, going beyond suspicion, that a crime was committed. But the run-of-the-mill procedural errors and claims that the affidavit focuses on have already been investigated and disproven. Moreover, it omits relevant information illustrating the election results were not fraudulent. These crucial omissions are at odds with numerous federal court rulings that establish the standards for probable cause.

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