‘Flagrant Constitutional Violation’: Fulton County blasts affidavit that backed FBI’s 2020 election raid
The search warrant affidavit that initiated the FBI’s unprecedented raid on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, last month failed to provide evidence that a crime had been committed and relied on “a smorgasbord of witness speculation” from biased sources, county officials alleged in a new court filing Tuesday.
The filing, which shreds the logic behind the raid, marks the county’s latest effort to reclaim the materials seized by the FBI during the raid, including the original — and only — copy of Fulton County’s 2020 election records.
It also makes a startling allegation: that the search warrant was granted despite the FBI lacking probable cause that a crime had been committed.
Last week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) obeyed a court order and publicly released the search warrant affidavit. The document, a statement signed by FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans, revealed that the bureau’s search of the Fulton County elections facility was largely predicated on disinformation and debunked voter fraud assertions about the 2020 presidential election, which President Donald Trump has falsely claimed was stolen from him.
It also revealed that the FBI is investigating “deficiencies or defects” in Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 election and whether its tabulation of votes resulted in violations of election record retention rules and voter fraud laws.
A Democracy Docket analysis of the affidavit found that the raid was based on statements from notorious conspiracy theorists and election deniers, some of whom now work in the Trump administration.
Fulton County previously asked a federal court to order the government to return the documents because the raid violated the constitutional rights of voters and the state of Georgia. However, after the affidavit’s release, a federal judge allowed the county to amend its motion.
In their new filing, Fulton County officials blasted the FBI and special agent Evans for deliberately omitting information that would have discredited allegations made by certain witnesses.
As an example, they noted that “witness 7” in the affidavit was likely Kevin Moncla, an election denier whose claims about the 2020 election have been repeatedly rejected. Though it relied upon representations made by Moncla, county officials noted that the FBI failed to note that he had reportedly been referred to the bureau in 2023 for threatening state officials, including an aide to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R).
“In addition to omitting material facts that rule out any nefarious explanations for the supposed ‘deficiencies or defects’ in the 2020 election, [Evans] failed to disclose the overwhelming biases and credibility issues plaguing the witnesses upon whom he relies,” county officials said in the new motion.
“This is hardly a collection of unbiased or credible experts,” they added.
In addition to relying on dubious witnesses, the county alleged that Evans also failed to sufficiently present evidence that a crime occurred — a basic standard required by the Fourth Amendment.
To obtain a search warrant, authorities must present objective,articulable facts demonstrating “probable cause” to believe that evidence of a crime will be found in that specific location. But Evans “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,” the county officials argued.
In the affidavit, Evans said that the FBI’s investigation had focused on deficiencies or defects with Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 election and its tabulation of votes. However, he also stated that a violation of federal law would have only occurred “if these deficiencies were the result of intentional action” by “unknown persons.”
Based on this comment, county officials argued that instead of probable cause of a crime, the FBI’s search was “dependent on unsubstantiated hypotheticals” and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.
“The Fourth Amendment demands ‘probable cause’—not ‘possible cause,’” they wrote.
“Despite years of investigations of the 2020 election, [Evans] does not identify facts that establish probable cause that anyone committed a crime,” they wrote.
Alongside its amended motion, Fulton County filed a court declaration from Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert and a former official with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
Macias said that the “many individual omissions and misstatements” by witnesses in the affidavit “reflect gross mischaracterizations of the facts of how elections work and are directly at odds with the findings and conclusions of all of the prior investigations of the November 2020 election in Fulton County.”
It’s unclear why U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas approved the FBI’s search warrant based on the questionable affidavit. However, by doing so, Fulton County officials said Salinas disrupted existing orders from Georgia state courts allowing the State Election Board to access election records for its own investigation into the 2020 election.
On Monday, civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, asked a federal court to protect voters’ personal information in the seized materials.
They asked the court to require the federal government to use the materials solely for its stated criminal investigation — and not to purge voters from the state rolls, improperly disclose voters’ personal data or to otherwise intimidate them.
