The FBI conducted what a legal analyst described as a "highly unusual" search of an election office in the Georgia county where President Donald Trump and his allies were indicted for their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Fulton County commissioner Mo Ivory challenged the warrant as “incorrect legally” seeking all ballots from that election and other evidence, and the FBI then obtained a corrected warrant listing Thomas Albus, an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, as the government attorney, and CNN's Joey Jackson listed other details about the probe that stood out as odd.
"It's rather unusual," said Jackson, a former prosecutor, "inasmuch as this has been investigated and litigated and there have been a determination, there's been determinations as to no fraud. There's been three recounts, one of them manually. There's been inspections. The Trump [Department of Justice] itself has given the indication that there's no fraud here."
"Why is that relevant to your question?" he added. "It's relevant because when you're looking at a criminal warrant, you're looking at evidence of criminality. You're looking at making a determination as to whether there was voter fraud in terms of people who voted that should not have voted or any other type of deception, and so this magistrate would have had to draw some conclusions, and the reason I say that it's somewhat interesting is because if you have this previous litigation, this is not new, this is from 2020, and you have massive investigations and you have no determination as to criminality. What are we doing here?"
Trump's DOJ had sued Fulton County last year seeking ballot stubs, signature envelopes and other evidence from the 2020 election, but that case appeared to be going nowhere before federal investigators seized that evidence themselves.
"The civil suit is moot, and just backing up on that, this past October, as in 2025,there was a demand served byDOJ," Jackson explained. "They were relying upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960, andthat act required that youretain records in terms ofvoting and that you produce themon demand. However, the issue isrelating to discrimination. Thiswas a law that was passed interms of the Jim Crow Southpeople who were excluded fromvoting, and so what ended uphappening is, is that the thestate said, no, we're notproducing those records, andthey were in civil litigation, and guess what records they were looking to getproduced? The same records thatwhen the state said, we're notgiving them to you and filed amotion to dismiss three weeksago saying, we're not givingyou boxes of our voting records."
"Those are the same boxes thatwere just taken out, 700 ofthem," Jackson added. "So they did an end-around [on]the lawsuit. The lawsuit, in allmeasures, is now moot becausethe records DOJ was seeking inthe civil lawsuit, not criminal,has just been gotten by the FBI."
The FBI currently has custody of that evidence, which the state has argued should be held under seal to preserve their integrity, but a judge had not yet issued a ruling about whether Georgia had to turn over those records to the DOJ.
"Stateofficials are now saying, well,wait a second, if the narrativeof the federal governmentis that there was fraud here, ifthe issue of the federalgovernment is you did nothingright, state officials andeveryone was rampantly going tovote if they're in the custodyof the feds," Jackson said. "Now, who's to knowthat they're not going to bemanipulated or otherwise usedfor the narrative of the federalgovernment? That's the concern."
FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general who has stated the 2020 election "absolutely stolen" from Trump, was present during the search, in addition to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Jackson was shocked to see them at the scene.
"It's sohighly unusual, I'm just saying,what are we talking about now?" Jackson said. "First of all, taking a step backfrom that, the deputy directorof the FBI, generally, they stayat headquarters. To give yousome context, when Mar-a-Lagowas raided in 2022, that wasdone by field operatives. Thehead of the agency and otherimportant, right, everyone isimportant, but in terms of thepeople who run the agency, we'reback at headquarters, the field-level supervisors were thereexecuting that warrant here, right. You have a situationwhere the deputy director of theFBI is there, and the person whoruns national security, who isin charge of foreign affairs, ishere"
"It'sunbelievable and it'sunprecedented and we are inanother world," he added, "and the majorconcern here, I'll just sayvery quickly, they're they'retrying, the federal government, todo this in other jurisdictions.In fact, in Oregon, a judge made aruling that, no, you're notgetting these records. So Ithink more of this is to come inother areas."
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