Fulton County ballot seizure

The search warrant was the culmination of a process that began in the White House, not the FBI. Kurt Olsen, appointed White House Director of Election Security and Integrity in October 2025, drafted the criminal referral that DOJ used to open the investigation ¹. Olsen’s background is in product liability defense: he co-founded Klafter Olsen and Lesser LLP in 2003 in New York, specialized in product liability, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, and had never worked in election law before 2020. His law firm removed his name and renamed itself in February 2021 following his election denial activities ⁴, Kurt Olsen. His 2020–2021 activities included advising Texas AG Ken Paxton on the Texas v. Pennsylvania case that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected for lack of standing, telephoning acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to demand DOJ file a Supreme Court complaint to invalidate electors in six swing states, and speaking with Trump by phone at least twice on January 6, 2021 after the Capitol attack ⁵. He was sanctioned USD 122,200 in attorneys’ fees by a federal district court under FRCP Rule 11 for filing frivolous election claims in the Kari Lake lawsuit, affirmed by the Ninth Circuit in March 2025 ⁶.

After DOJ opened the investigation based on Olsen’s referral, FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans prepared the 22-page affidavit citing 11 witnesses and presented it to Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas, who approved the warrant. According to a synthesis of multiple news accounts, the affidavit cited federal statutes 52 USC §§ 20701 and 20511, governing election record retention obligations and prohibiting deprivation of rights secured by federal election laws ². According to DOJ’s own subsequent statements, the affidavit merely noted the investigation originated from Olsen’s referral and did not rely on him as a witness or as a source of evidence ⁷.

Records indicate that DNI Gabbard’s participation was directed by Trump personally; she accompanied FBI Deputy Director Bailey and Atlanta Acting SAC Pete Ellis to the facility ². According to news accounts, Trump’s own explanation for her presence shifted: he first asserted he directed it, then later claimed that AG Pam Bondi had insisted on Gabbard providing oversight ². Gabbard’s claimed statutory basis was that 50 U.S.C. § 3024 grants the DNI authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counterintelligence and foreign and other malign influences. Former senior intelligence officials and Senator Mark Warner publicly disputed this reading, noting that the statute explicitly ties the DNI’s election security authority to risks posed by foreign entities, not to domestic search warrant execution ⁸. Gabbard had separately announced an ODNI investigation of electronic voting machine vulnerabilities in April 2025, including physical seizure and testing of Puerto Rico voting machines in May 2025, where no evidence of foreign interference was found ⁹.

Olsen was simultaneously working with Ed Martin’s DOJ Weaponization Working Group ¹⁰. Martin, who was installed as interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in January 2025 without prior prosecutorial or judicial experience, led the Weaponization Working Group established by AG Bondi on February 5, 2025. Martin helped plan and finance the January 6, 2021 rally and subsequently represented some of the defendants as an attorney; he was demoted from the Working Group chair role in February 2026 and DC Bar initiated disciplinary proceedings against him ¹¹, Pam Bondi.

Fulton County’s legal challenge centers on the adequacy of the probable cause showing in Agent Evans’s affidavit. The county argues Evans established only possible cause, not probable cause, by relying on unsubstantiated hypotheticals about intentional acts by unidentified persons — a standard that requires speculation about unknown criminal intent rather than articulable facts supporting a belief that a crime was committed ³. Expert Ryan Macias, a former official at the Election Assistance Commission, submitted a declaration stating that witness accounts cited in the affidavit reflect gross mischaracterizations of how elections operate ³.

According to investigative reporting, Key Witness 7 is identified as Kevin Moncla, whose fraud claims were rejected repeatedly by courts over multiple years ⁷. Records indicate Moncla published a 263-page report in early January 2026 as part of a yearslong campaign to compel access to Fulton County’s 2020 records ⁷. According to the same reporting, in 2023 Moncla was referred to the FBI for sending threatening emails to Georgia State Election Board members and an aide to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger; that referral was omitted from Evans’s affidavit, which cited him as a credibility-bearing witness ⁷. Records indicate that a second prominent witness, Janice Johnston, is a retired physician who has sustained a multi-year campaign alleging election fraud ⁷.

NPR reporting independently characterized the affidavit as relying on debunked claims. The county’s filing argues these omissions and mischaracterizations amounted to deliberate misleading of Magistrate Judge Salinas, which if established could warrant suppression of the seized evidence under the Franks v. Delaware doctrine governing affidavit integrity ³. According to court filings, Johnston’s prior history and the full scope of Moncla’s 2023 FBI referral remain subjects of ongoing proceedings ⁷.

The NAACP and civil rights organizations filed a separate motion seeking court-imposed restrictions on the use of the seized voter data, on the grounds that the voter rolls included sensitive personal information for hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters whose data was swept up in a broad seizure not targeted at specific individuals ³.

The January 2026 warrant was not the first federal attempt to obtain Fulton County’s 2020 election materials. For months prior, the DOJ had pursued the same records through civil proceedings, which Fulton County resisted. Those civil efforts failed. The FBI search warrant converted the dispute from a civil records access question to a criminal investigation, giving federal agents the authority to compel physical seizure without the county’s consent ¹².

The Fulton County action is one component of a broader campaign by the DOJ Voting Section to obtain election records from across the country. The section sued 29 states and the District of Columbia in seven waves between September 2025 and February 2026, seeking production of unredacted voter registration databases including Social Security and driver’s license numbers ¹². Federal courts in multiple states rejected those requests. Twelve Republican-led states complied voluntarily. Separately, AG Pam Bondi sent demand letters to 15-plus states for voter registration rolls and sued Georgia in December 2025 specifically seeking 2020 ballot documents ¹³.

A DOJ attorney signing cases against both Georgia voter rolls and Fulton County’s 2020 ballots is Christopher J. Gardner, who participated in the Georgia fake-electors legal effort alongside John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro ¹⁴, DOJ Voting Section. Gardner is now a Trial Attorney in the Voting Section. The Voting Section’s acting chief, Eric Neff, previously prosecuted a county elections vendor based on a tip from True the Vote, saw the charges dismissed within six weeks, and was placed on administrative leave before being hired into DOJ ¹⁵.

The DOJ concurrently shared voter roll data obtained from states with the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE citizenship verification program, which was upgraded from single-name to bulk-search capability for mass voter registration scanning. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Blumenthal formally called for investigation of the Fulton County seizure in the context of this broader voter data collection effort ¹².

Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts, the full board of commissioners, the elections board, and Court Clerk Che Alexander filed suit on February 4, 2026 seeking return of the 650-plus boxes of seized materials. Alexander was added as a plaintiff specifically to address standing: DOJ argued the county as a governmental body lacked standing to seek return of election records, a position the clerk’s independent constitutional role was intended to counter ³.

Judge J.P. Boulee ordered the parties to mediation on February 26, 2026. Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Harold Melton was appointed mediator on March 5, 2026, with a report to the court due by March 18, 2026 ³. The docket had been unsealed on Judge Boulee’s order on February 7, 2026, making the warrant materials publicly accessible under docket reference Gov.uscourts.gand.355087 ¹.

The county’s Fourth Amendment theory — that an affidavit built on speculative hypotheticals about unidentified persons does not establish probable cause — has not yet been decided on the merits. If the mediation does not resolve the dispute, the constitutional adequacy of the probable cause showing and the Franks challenge to the affidavit’s completeness will proceed to briefing ³.