Fbi Raids Atlanta-area Elections Office Amid Trump’s Push To Relitigate 2020 Election

The FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office outside Atlanta on Wednesday, according to a spokesperson for the agency, which comes amid President Donald Trump’s push to relitigate the 2020 election.

The spokesperson, Jenna Sellitto, said the FBI was executing “a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main elections office in Union City, Georgia. Sellitto added that the investigation was “ongoing,” but declined to say exactly what agents were searching for.

Georgia’s secretary of state’s office and Fulton County’s elections offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the raid.

The action comes just a week after Trump vowed that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did” regarding the 2020 presidential election.

Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory, a Democrat, said in a brief interview with POLITICO that she learned upon arriving at the facility that the FBI was seeking ballots from the 2020 presidential election.

“The FBI agents are here to get the 2020 ballots,” Fulton County Court Clerk Ché Alexander told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “They’re all here — trucks, everything.”

Trump has long held, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “rigged” in favor of former President Joe Biden, falsely alleging there was widespread voter fraud across the country.

The Trump administration has ramped up pressure on Democratic-run states to hand over their voter rolls in recent months, with Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding Minnesota grant DOJ access to its records last week amid an ongoing standoff between the state’s Democratic leadership and the White House.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division also sued the Fulton County clerk of courts last month for voting materials from the 2020 election. Fulton County has also seen pressure from Republicans on Georgia’s election board, who subpoenaed the Democratic-leaning county for the same records earlier last year.

The metro Atlanta county — which was central to Trump infamously and unsuccessfully pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to alter the outcome of the presidential vote — has long been at the heart of conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who brought charges against Trump and several of his allies in 2023 for attempting to overturn the election’s results, has also drawn Trump’s ire. The judge overseeing that case dismissed all remaining charges in November.

Ivory, the Democratic commissioner, said agents did not initially possess a proper warrant to remove the documents. Ivory said the agents were in the process of securing a hard copy of the warrant with the requisite information and had not yet removed any boxes from the facility, as of Wednesday afternoon.

Sellitto said the FBI arrived with a hard copy of a signed, proper warrant, and that the operation was still ongoing.

“This is an effort to scare people, to deter people from going to the polls in May for our primary and then November for the general election,” Ivory said. “We knew this was coming. We could see the strategy working itself out, and it's just another distraction, while people are dying in the streets in Minnesota.”