司法部为搜查富尔顿县选举办公室辩护的证据解析

Breaking down the evidence DOJ used to justify searching a Fulton County elections office

Analysis by Aaron Blake
Updated 1 hr 48 min ago
Updated Feb 10, 2026, 11:34 PM ET
PUBLISHED Feb 10, 2026, 10:48 PM ET

Georgia state elected officials attempt to access the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center but are turned away after the FBI executed a search warrant there in relation to the 2020 election.

Alyssa Pointer/Reuters

President Donald Trump’s long-running stolen-election crusade entered a potentially fraught new phase recently, with the FBI search of an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia.

Some fear it could be a precursor to an even more heavy-handed Trump intervention in American elections.

And a big question after the search was how it got the go-ahead from a magistrate judge. After all, searches require probable cause of a crime, and the magistrate judge, Catherine Salinas, was not exactly some reputed judicial extremist or election skeptic; according to Lawfare, she had previously worked for a public defender’s office and clerked for a Clinton appointee.

Maybe there was some new information that suddenly lent some credence to claims of malfeasance in Fulton County in 2020?

Or, as it turns out, maybe not.

The affidavit that was used for the search warrant application was made public on Tuesday, and it overwhelmingly recycles old claims about voting irregularities that have either been debunked or haven’t gone anywhere.

The application also relies heavily on information from prominent election-deniers whose claims have failed to produce the voter-fraud smoking gun Trump has sought over the past five-plus years.

In addition, the affidavit cites no evidence of any actual criminal intent.

Let’s annotate some key parts from the affidavit.

“Following the November 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.”

The combination of “electoral impropriety,” “ballot counting” and “substantiated” paint a dire picture. But a misleading one.

While it’s true that certain aspects of Fulton County’s election administration were not perfect – and officials have acknowledged as such – there has been no proof offered of widespread fraud. Similarly, dozens of lawsuits from Trump’s campaign and allies failed after the 2020 election – nearly all of them, in fact.

And it’s never been demonstrated that any of the problems owed to anything other than human or administrative errors. Which, in this context, usually aren’t treated as crimes.

A drone picture shows the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center a day after the FBI executed a search warrant in relation to the 2020 election in Union City, Georgia on January 29.

Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters

“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.”

The key word there is “if.” The affidavit doesn’t cite any real evidence of criminal intent.

In one case, it cites a member of the state election board who “believed” she had witnessed “an intentional act.” In another, it cites a data analyst who “concluded that what he observed could be intentional but was not partisan.”

Criminal intent isn’t required to convince a magistrate to find probable cause to approve the warrant. But the lack of evidence on that front is notable given previous reviews of the election have failed to turn up any evidence of it.

Two high-profile reviews of Fulton County’s elections, including an extensive “Performance Review Board” report, both found significant problems but no evidence of fraud or misconduct. Georgia’s GOP governor, Brian Kemp, and secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, have both frequently defended the election results.

“The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”

The warrant application cites a number of prominent election-deniers.

Olsen is a lawyer who played a key role in challenging the 2020 election, including working on a lawsuit to nullify the results of key states that Trump lost. Such lawsuits overwhelmingly failed. He had multiple phone calls with Trump on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the US Capitol.

Olsen was also sanctioned over what a federal judge found to be “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” about the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial campaign, which Republican Kari Lake lost.

He was recently made a special government employee in the Trump administration.

The affidavit also cites another person who tried and failed to overturn Lake’s loss, Clay Parikh.

“[Witness No. 1] filed a complaint with the Georgia State Election Board on July 8, 2022, alleging, among other things, that during the Recount of the 2020 Election there were 17,852 missing ballot images from the reported results on the Georgia Secretary of State’s website.”

This is a years-old claim, and a spokesman for Georgia’s Republican secretary of state has explained it.

Basically, there were about 17,000 fewer ballots counted during a recount than in earlier counts, because the county used the same name on two batch files, USA Today has reported. The count was later corrected through a process called “reconciliation.”

And while the affidavit cites missing ballot images as potential evidence of a crime, Reuters has reported that it’s not clear that the law at the time of the election required such ballot images to be saved.

“[Witness No. 5] concluded there were duplicate ballots included in both the Original Count and the Recount. Further, [the witness] identified new ballots as well as test ballots in the Recount that did not appear in the Original Count.”

This refers to the so-called “duplicate ballot” issue. And among the issues cited in the affidavit, it’s perhaps the most legitimate. But there’s still no real evidence of malfeasance.

State officials in 2024 acknowledged a little more than 3,000 duplicate ballot images. But duplicate ballot images are not the same as counted votes, and officials couldn’t determine that any of them were actually tabulated in the recount.

“If the ‘3,000 duplicate ballot images’ had been counted as votes … the results would have been off by 3,000 — and they were not,” a spokesman for the Georgia secretary of state told PolitiFact back then.

A local official cited human error for the duplicate ballot images.

“[Witness No. 8] recalled receiving one batch of ballots that contained 110 ballots. [She] said she noticed quickly that those ballots seemed different. Of the 110 ballots, 107 had the exact same votes for each candidate on the ballot. These ballots were also pristine in that they had not been folded. She said the 107 were labeled as absentee ballots but they were too clean to be absentee ballots, in her opinion. She also said the texture of the 107 ballots felt different from all the other ballots and the bubbles were all filled in the same.”

This refers to the so-called “pristine ballots” theory. A judge in 2021 dismissed a lawsuit that relied on these claims.

The secretary of state’s office reviewed the claims and said it was “unable to substantiate the allegations that fraudulent or counterfeit ballots were counted.” They found no ballots that appeared to be counterfeits.

An official in that office has explained that some overseas and military ballots might not be the right size for scanners, so those votes can be transferred to ballots that can be scanned and might appear more “pristine.”

Two key words/phrases that notably don’t appear: ‘foreign’ and ‘statute of limitations’

The affidavit notably makes no mention of any theories about foreign election interference. That should ratchet up questions as to why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the FBI search. (Gabbard’s job generally revolves around foreign threats, not domestic law enforcement.)

The affidavit also does not address a pretty significant potential problem with any ensuing prosecutions: the passage of time. The statute of limitations is generally five years, and the 2020 election is now just outside that window. That might not matter to the extent this is about record retention – one of the crimes the affidavit cites requires keeping records for 22 months after an election, so the statute would expire five years after that. But it could matter for more severe potential offenses.