The FBI document behind an unprecedented raid of an elections office in Georgia, sparked by an election denier close to Donald Trump, echoes allegations about the 2020 presidential election that have circulated for years and faced thorough investigations.
Those investigations did not uncover any evidence of widespread fraud to change the outcome of a race that Trump lost, and the affidavit itself provides no additional evidence to support a claim of fraud, even noting that “many allegations” have already been “disproven.”
“After more than five years, dozens of court cases, and over a year in total control of the federal government, this is all they’ve got?” said elections law expert David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.
“If taken at its word, this entire affidavit at most alleges human error after a late night during a global pandemic, all of which had no impact on the outcome of the race,” he said.
Here is what’s inside the document.
Election deniers lead investigation
The criminal investigation into allegations of fraud and the destruction of records was prompted by former Trump campaign attorney Kurt Olsen with support from witnesses who have promoted debunked conspiracy theories about election administration and the outcome of the 2020 race.
While the search warrant was executed in Georgia, the federal prosecutor whose name is on the document is Thomas Albus, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri.
Albus, a Trump appointee who was tapped by Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate elections, is among a fleet of newly hired government lawyers who boosted false claims about the 2020 election or were directly involved with litigation to overturn the results.
The affidavit then notes that the criminal probe “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”
Olsen worked closely with Trump’s campaign in 2020 to challenge election results as part of a “Stop the Steal” movement that was largely rejected by courts across the country.
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He was later sanctioned by a federal judge for “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in support of Republican Kari Lake’s unsuccessful attempt to overturn her loss in the 2020 race for Arizona governor.
Olsen also spoke with Trump on January 6 as a mob of the president’s supporters stormed the Capitol and breached the halls of Congress.
Deputy FBI director Andrew Bailey, the former attorney general of Missouri who publicly endorsed the president’s false narrative that the election was stolen, joined agents during the Georgia raid.
The FBI also called on Clay Parikh, who had joined Lake’s failed effort to reverse her loss in the Arizona governor’s race.
He is now a special government employee in the Trump administration, and the FBI relied on his analysis of Fulton County’s results to pursue the investigation, according to the affidavit.
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The affidavit also lists several witnesses whose names are redacted, though descriptions of their allegations and activities match those from State Election Board members and other figures who denied the results of the 2020 election and promoted conspiracy theories about the vote count.
FBI alleges ‘deficiencies or defects’ that were previously debunked
The document states that the investigation involves two statutes — one concerning the destruction of election records and another that makes it a crime to “knowingly and willfully deprive” residents of a “fair and impartially conducted election process.”
Election law experts say the rest of the document provides no evidence to support a claim of fraud; Georgia’s ballots were counted three times, three different ways, following the election and challenges withstood scrutiny each time.
The FBI is instead investigating five alleged “deficiencies or defects” from those recounts, according to the affidavit.
Those allegations include missing images of ballots, ballots that were scanned multiple times, inconsistent vote counts from a hand recount, ballots that could have been improperly added, and changing vote totals during a machine recount.
Only one of those allegations — that ballots may have been scanned twice during a Trump-requested recount — had previously been “partially substantiated” by law enforcement officials, who have repeatedly affirmed Trump’s loss in the state.
One allegation alleges “inconsistent” ballot tallies during a Risk Limiting Audit, which Georgia’s secretary of state addressed in 2022. In its report, the office noted that the audit is designed to confirm a winner, not deliver a precise count of more than 5 million ballots, which “is impossible.”
“Human counting will always produce errors,” the report said. “These differences are well within the expected variances in a computer count vs. a hand count and further support the overall conclusion of the hand audit — that the initial reported result in the presidential contest in Georgia was correct.”
The FBI also notes that there were ballots “that had never been creased or folded,” which could happen for a number of reasons, including damaged ballots that cannot be read electronically and must be duplicated, or certain overseas and military ballots that cannot fit into scanners.
In 2023, the secretary of state’s office determined that “investigators could not substantiate the allegations of ‘pristine’ ballots being counted during the risk-limiting audit.”
“This affidavit was much weaker than I suspected — no allegations of intent, no allegations of election theft, no allegations of foreign interference, and no allegations that the statute of limitations doesn't apply,” according to Becker, the elections law expert.
What about the statute of limitations?
One of the crimes cited by the affidavit requires election officials to keep records for 22 months after an election, so the statute of limitations would expire five years after that.
The 2020 election falls well outside of that five-year window, and the affidavit concerns activities that happened in the immediate aftermath of that contest, not in the two years that followed.
And while it is technically possible that election officials could have disposed of those records within that time, the affidavit does not provide any allegations that they did.
“That raises serious questions about probable cause for the investigation and why such an intrusive action is being taken more than five years after the election was certified,” according to Michael McNulty, policy director with Issue One.
“This raid fits a growing pattern by the administration to exert executive control over elections, despite the Constitution’s clear assignment of election administration to the states and Congress,” he added. “Targeting election officials and records years later risks undermining confidence in the process for future elections. If allowed to stand, this could set a troubling precedent that would chill election administration nationwide and invite more executive interference.”
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