Fulton County is fighting back.
County officials announced Wednesday they had filed a motion in federal court to retrieve hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots seized in an FBI raid last week and asked the judge to unseal the case to reveal what evidence the U.S. Department of Justice used to justify the raid.
Currently, the case — and Fulton’s motion — remain under seal, but there is some suggestion that Justice Department attorneys may have relied on the word of civilian election skeptics who have long doubted that President Donald Trump fairly lost Georgia in 2020. A co-author of a report questioning those results said a Justice Department attorney interviewed him a couple of weeks before the raid, and he said another co-author also talked.
Fulton officials said they still don’t know where the ballots are being kept and one Democratic state lawmaker worried that the Trump administration was trying to decipher how Georgians voted by looking at the records — although that is highly unlikely.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a team of reporters working on the latest developments and seeking answers to some of these unanswered questions. Check here throughout the day for updates.
An attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice interviewed a civilian critic of Fulton County's 2020 election results a couple of weeks before the FBI raid on the county's election operation hub, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has learned.
Kevin Moncla, who co-authored a report on the 2020 election with several other election critics, said he spoke on the telephone with a Justice Department attorney. He said another co-author also got a call.
The federal court case remains under seal, so what formed the legal justification for the search warrant that allowed the FBI to take hundreds of boxes of ballots and other records remains a mystery.
Read more here.
Democratic state Rep. Stacey Evans voiced today what many Fulton County voters fear: Now that the FBI has the 2020 ballots, does the federal government know how each person voted?
"We are all understandably nervous there will be vindictive action taken from our federal government when they are able to place our name next to our vote," she said.
But even with the documents the FBI seized, it's unlikely they can match ballots to individual voters. The machines that tabulate Georgia's ballots do so in sequential order, so it could be possible to match time stamps of ballot scans with logs of when voters checked in at their polling place.
But doing so would be much more difficult in a high-turnout election in a populous place like Fulton County, where lots of people were voting at the same time.
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts is urging state lawmakers to fight for voters.
"We ask that you lift your voice any time the security of our voters, our poll workers and our elections themselves may be on the line," he wrote in a letter to lawmakers Wednesday.
Pitts told lawmakers that the FBI seizure made it clear that Fulton is a target of the Trump administration. Rather than focusing on 2020, Pitts said the focus should now be on future elections.
"Our focus now is on the safety of our voters and poll workers, and the integrity of upcoming elections," Pitts wrote.
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he wants to "take inventory" of the documents seized by the FBI.
The county filed a motion in federal district court in Atlanta on Wednesday asking for the troves of election records back from the federal government.
Georgia House Democratic leaders say they are preparing for potential arrests related to the U.S. Justice Department's investigation of Fulton County's 2020 presidential election.
"We know that Trump is vindictive. I would not be surprised if he followed up on his vindictive nature," House Minority Caucus Chief Deputy Whip Saira Draper said. "I think everybody is prepared and waiting with bated breath."
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts held a news conference Wednesday morning to discuss the county's legal maneuvers in response to last week's FBI raid on the county's election hub and to take reporters' questions.
You can watch it here.
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts told reporters on Wednesday that county officials are still in the dark about the whereabouts of the 2020 records.
"We don't know where they are," he said. "We don't know really who has them. We don't know what they're doing with them."
Last week, Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he and other officials could be targets for arrest and said he was on the Trump administration’s “hit list” following the FBI raid on the county's election hub.
He walked that back at a news conference Wednesday, saying he is not concerned about being arrested.
“The truth is on our side,” he said. “I have not done anything that would warrant an arrest.”
At a hastily called news conference at the Fulton County Government Center in downtown Atlanta, Commission Chair Robb Pitts said the county's legal response to last week's FBI raid is about the future of elections in Georgia and across the nation.
“Our Constitution, itself, is at stake in this fight,” he told reporters Wednesday.
The county has brought in outside legal counsel in an attempt to force the U.S. Department of Justice to release the criminal file in federal court, Pitts said.
Democratic state lawmakers held a news conference Wednesday at the state Capitol in support of Fulton County's legal efforts to get the FBI to return nearly 700 boxes of ballots and other documents from the 2020 presidential election.
Fulton County is filing a motion in federal court asking the court to unseal documents related to last week's raid on an election hub in south Fulton County.
State Rep. Debra Bazemore, D-South Fulton, said the motion from the county is to “make sure we get our ballots back, unchanged.”
State Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta, said, “We are all understandably nervous there will be vindictive action by our federal government."
Democratic lawmakers, who are in the minority in both the state House and Senate, are working on their own to express their outrage at the raid.
State Rep. Eric Gisler, D-Watkinsville, filed House Resolution 1200 last week urging Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to not release the state’s unredacted voter file to the Justice Department. No Republicans co-sponsored the resolution.
The Senate, meanwhile, passed a Republican-sponsored resolution urging Raffensperger to release the voter file.