Georgia Ballot Inquiry Originated With Election Denier in Trump White House

A newly unsealed affidavit showed that a criminal investigation into the 2020 election in Fulton County, Ga., relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked.

An F.B.I. search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday shows that a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., was set off by a leading election denier in the Trump administration and relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked.

The unsealing of the affidavit in Fulton County is likely to raise more questions about the Trump administration’s use of the F.B.I. and Justice Department to revive old, largely disproved claims about the 2020 election in the state, which President Trump narrowly lost.

“The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” the affidavit said. Mr. Olsen played a central role in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, including speaking to the president multiple times on Jan. 6, 2021. He has continued to push false claims about elections, and was recently appointed to a key role in the Trump administration.

The affidavit for the search in Georgia, where F.B.I. agents seized ballots and other materials from an election center late last month, draws a clearer connection between the White House and the movement of Trump-supporting election activists who contend that he did not lose the 2020 presidential contest.

Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia and a candidate for governor, criticized the investigation.

“Instead of wasting time and tax dollars trying to change the past with baseless and repackaged claims, let’s focus our efforts on building a safer, more affordable future for all hard-working Georgians,” he said in a statement.

Read the Fulton County search warrant affidavit

The document includes numerous claims about ballots and elections that have been widely debunked. Witnesses’ names were redacted before the affidavit was unsealed.

Read Document

A representative for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many of the claims in the affidavit refer to long-held — and consistently debunked — conspiracy theories about elections in Georgia, including arguments about fraudulent and duplicate absent ballots, election-machine tabulator tapes and missing ballot images. The claims often focus on small administrative errors or easily explainable abnormalities as evidence of fraud.

“The affidavit is a total rehash of rejected and debunked claims from five years ago,” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials, wrote in a text message.

He added that there was “not a single allegation of a foreign nexus or foreign interference,” nodding to the fact that Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present for the search in Fulton County.

Her appearance there had raised questions, given that her agency’s role in elections extends only to foreign interference, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Trump had told her to investigate the 2020 vote: “You go do that, you get it done.” The day after the search, Ms. Gabbard arranged a call between Mr. Trump and F.B.I. agents in which he praised and thanked them for their work on the inquiry, The Times reported.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department had previously investigated many of the affidavit’s claims, and interviewed many of the same witnesses, and had concluded they were not supported by the evidence, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of the investigations.

One claim in the affidavit comes from a Georgia resident who said there were 17,852 “missing ballot images” in Fulton County. This claim, and similar ones about ballot images, were popular among Mr. Trump’s supporters immediately after the 2020 election. But Fulton County officials noted that, at the time, the law did not require them to maintain ballot images.

Missing ballot images do not mean ballots are missing. Gabriel Sterling, a former top election official in Georgia, noted in 2021 that election officials “have all of the actual ballots that have been counted 3 times.”

The F.B.I. agent who signed the affidavit, Hugh Raymond Evans, noted that if any of the alleged deficiencies in ballots “were the result of intentional action,” that would mean the ballots and other documents would constitute evidence of a crime. Yet the affidavit also cites multiple instances of witnesses insisting that any discrepancies were the result of human error and did not change the outcome.

Another section of the affidavit talks about “pristine ballots” that appear to not have any folds or creases in them. (Absentee ballots must be folded to fit into an envelope to be returned.) The presence of these pristine ballots, some in the affidavit claim, is evidence that “extra ballots” were introduced during the counting of absentee votes.

But there are a host of reasons that a ballot might not be folded. Some overseas and military ballots can be printed and not folded. Ballots that are damaged or cannot be read electronically sometimes need to be duplicated, reprinted and reprocessed, and would be unlikely to have creases or folds.

The affidavit also reveals the critical role the Georgia State Election Board played in starting the investigation by the federal government. The board, which is governed by a three-member majority of right-wing election activists, has consistently pushed for the Justice Department to investigate Fulton County and the 2020 election.

Clark D. Cunningham, a law and ethics professor at Georgia State University, said he thought the affidavit fell short of the constitutional requirement that probable cause be established before a search warrant is approved by a judge.

“Mere suspicion is not enough to justify a search warrant,” he said. “There’s nothing in the affidavit that indicates probable cause that any person acted with criminal intent.”

Mr. Cunningham said the language of the search warrant suggested that it was merely repeating “well-known speculations by well-known election conspiracy people.”

At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Robb Pitts, a Democrat and the chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, described the accusations in the affidavit as “recycled rumors, lies, untruths and unproven conspiracy theories.”

“Fulton County’s 2020 elections, they’ve been examined, they’ve been re-examined, they’ve been audited,” he said. “There have been hand counts under a microscope. And in every instance we come up clean. And any honest review going forward will also be clean. These accusations have already been debunked. But here we go again, on a merry-go-round.”

The warrant demanded all physical ballots from the 2020 election, as well as all ballot images, tabulator tapes for Fulton County’s voting machines, and copies of voter rolls from that year.

Fulton County has long been a focus of the election denial movement that exploded after the 2020 presidential contest, with Mr. Trump and his allies targeting Georgia after his loss there. He pressured the state’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to win, and he has continued to promote debunked conspiracy theories about Fulton County, which includes much of Atlanta.

At least 11 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results in Georgia have been filed, according to Fulton County court records; none have proved that there was widespread fraud or malfeasance.

Democrats and election officials across the country have monitored the events in Fulton County with apprehension, as some worry that Mr. Trump might direct the Justice Department to search election centers in other cities or counties as well. Elections have long been conducted by state authorities, with minimal involvement from the federal government.

“Repurposing these conspiracy theories as federal justification is part of a broader campaign to re-litigate the past and lay the groundwork for interference in the 2026 elections,” said Lauren Groh-Wargo, the chief executive of Fair Fight Action, a left-leaning voting rights group.

Last week, Mr. Trump called in a podcast interview for the Republican Party to “take over” and “nationalize” elections. He later told reporters in the Oval Office that “the federal government should get involved” in elections, and cited a list of cities where he claimed there was voter fraud in 2020. (There is no evidence of widespread fraud in any of these places.)

“Take a look at Detroit,” Mr. Trump said. “Take a look at Pennsylvania. Take a look at Philadelphia. You go take a look at Atlanta. Look at some of the places that, horrible corruption on elections, and the federal government should not allow that. The federal government should get involved.”

Julian Barnes and William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

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