Trump can keep seized ballots from Georgia: judge
A U.S. judge ordered the Justice Department to seize 2020 election ballots during an FBI search in January; This is a win for President Donald Trump’s administration, which has continued the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
Atlanta-based U.S. District Judge JP Boulee denied Fulton County’s request to return original copies of the seized material.
Lawyers for the district argued that the FBI’s search of the polling station was based on faulty and discredited evidence and violated protections under the U.S. Constitution.
Boulee found flaws in the FBI affidavit used to secure a judge’s search warrant, but concluded that those flaws did not amount to a “callous disregard” for the county’s rights, the legal standard required to return records.
“While the affidavit is certainly far from perfect, this is not a case where an officer omitted all facts that might undermine probable cause or where an officer knowingly lied,” Boulee wrote in his 68-page decision.
Spokespeople for Fulton County, the FBI and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decision is a rare court victory for Trump’s Justice Department in investigations Trump has requested. This will allow the FBI to retain more than 600 ballots from 2020 while it conducts a criminal investigation into whether election records were properly stored or whether Fulton County residents were defrauded out of a fair election.
But the investigation still faces significant hurdles. Justice Department lawyers did not identify individual targets of the investigation and did not dispute claims that the statute of limitations had expired on both crimes that prosecutors said they were investigating.
The dispute has been closely followed by U.S. election officials and experts across the country as Trump continues to threaten the federal government to potentially take over some local elections and cast doubt on voting ahead of the November election.
Trump continued to falsely claim that his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 was the result of widespread fraud and deployed U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to re-investigate claims about vote collection and counting.
Justice Department attorneys argued that Fulton County did not meet the strict legal standard required to secure the return of material seized during a court-approved search.
During the search, which was approved by a federal magistrate judge, FBI agents seized original 2020 ballots and other records from the county election center in Union City, Georgia.
Officials cited allegations of “deficiencies or defects” in the 2020 voting, including allegations that some digital ballots were missing and some ballots were not folded properly.
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