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ATLANTA (CN) — The Justice Department unsealed documents Tuesday related to the FBI’s seizure of Fulton County’s ballots from the 2020 presidential election.
The release comes in response to an order from U.S. District Court Judge J. P. Boulee, a Donald Trump appointee, to unseal search warrant affidavit-related paperwork.
It reveals that the search was led by Hugh Raymond Evans, a special agent assigned to the Atlanta Field Office’s Public Corruption Squad.
In the affidavit, Evans lists statements from at least 11 different witnesses to support a finding of probable cause to believe that unknown persons committed election law violations by improperly preserving records and tabulating fictitious ballots.
“Following the Nov. 3, 2020, presidential election, there were many allegations of electoral impropriety relating to the voting process and ballot counting in Fulton County, Georgia. Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County,” Evans wrote.
“This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional actsthat violated federal criminal laws,” he added.
The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, presidentially appointed director of Election Security and Integrity, Evans wrote.
It was spurred in response to witnesses claiming Fulton County does not have scanned images of all the 528,777 ballots counted from the tabulator machines used.
Boulee allowed for the names of nongovernmental witnesses to be redacted.
One of the witnesses was described as a Georgia resident and chemical engineer who reviewed ballot images made available by the Georgia secretary of state’s office following the 2020 election. He claims the number of ballot images from the recount did not reconcile with the number of ballots case.
Evans said federal investigators are also concerned with a report from the state’s performance review board that secretary of state investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the risk limiting audit, where auditors counted the votes by hand.
According to Evans, the auditors reported counting purported absentee ballots that had never been creased or folded, as would be required for the ballot to be mailed to the voter and for the ballot to be returned in the sealed envelope requiring the voter’s signature for authentication.
On the day of the deadline to report the recount results, Fulton County reported a recount totaling 511,343 ballots, which was 17,434 ballots fewer than original counted, Evans wrote. The following day, Fulton County then reported a total of 527,925 ballots counted, he added.
“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” Evans wrote.
Witness two is listed as a Republican-appointed member of the Georgia State Election Board since March 2022, who worked previously as an obstetrician.
The third witness is the current “House-appointed” State Election Board member who purportedly confirmed there were missing ballot images.
Another witness, who was the director of elections for the Georgia secretary of state in 2020, reportedly was not aware of physical ballots not matching the number of ballot images, but said that a discrepancy like that “would be problematic.”
A data analyst witness is said to have determined there were duplicate ballots included in both the original count and recount after using a computer program to review the ballot images to look for duplicates.
He concluded that what he observed could be intentional but was not partisan, as the addition of the duplicate ballots gave Trump 10% more votes than his average in Fulton County.
According to the affidavit, a former investigator at the secretary of state’s office said the complaint of duplicate ballots was investigated by tallying ballots by hand for the presidential race and that no further investigation was conducted once the investigators learned that 40% of the duplicated ballots cast a vote for Trump.
A January 2021 report from Seven Hills Strategies, which was contracted by the Georgia State Election Board to serve as an independent, nonpartisan monitor for preelection processes in Fulton County leading up to the 2020 election, is also included in the affidavit. It reported that Fulton County’s absentee processes were “extremely sloppy and replete with chain of custody Issues.
On Feb. 11, Fulton County asked the court to order the return of the seized ballots and election materials, arguing the Justice Department disregarded Fourth Amendment rights by relying on disproven theories of fraud in the election.
The county also argued the Trump administration bypassed two pending civil lawsuits seeking access to the 2020 records. One is from the Justice Department and the other was brought by the State Election Board, which has long scrutinized Fulton’s 2020 performance.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney previously allowed the State Election Board to obtain ballot images and other election documents in its investigation of the county’s conduct of the election. But on Monday, McBurney noted those documents are now in the FBI’s custody.
“This court thus can no longer set measured and thoughtful parameters governing the handling and copying of these materials,” McBurney wrote. “We are left to hope that the bureau and the Department of Justice handle the ballots and related records with the care required to preserve and protect their integrity.”
On Jan. 28, federal agents seized an estimated 656 boxes of ballotsand other 2020 election materials from Fulton County’s election operations center in Union City, Georgia.
Fulton County Board of Commissioners chair Robb Pitts and other Democratic officials have expressed concern that the action is part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to take over state elections, noting Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the warehouse.
During a podcast interview with former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino just days before the seizure, Trump called for Republicans to nationalize elections.
Fulton County and Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have repeatedly denied Trump’s endless accusations of election fraud, pointing to the state’s three recounts, ballot audit, and over 50 failed court challenges.
The majority Democratic area, home to Atlanta, is where Trump became the first president criminally charged for attempting to overturn his narrow defeat to Joe Biden in Georgia, as part of a sprawling racketeering case that was ultimately dismissedin 2025.
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