The FBI elections raid was political theater — but something far more sinister too

If you thought that President Donald Trump and Georgia Republican candidates for higher office have left the 2020 election in the rearview mirror, think again.

Federal agents on Wednesday were seen seizing records from Fulton County’s election center warehouse as the president continues echoing false claims surrounding his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department have not provided a reason for the raid, but a U.S. magistrate judge signed off on a warrant allowing agents to access a trove of information from ballots to voter rolls.

It doesn’t appear that county or state officials had advanced notice of Wednesday’s raid at the 600,000-square-foot facility in Union City, which is used as a polling place, a site for county election board meetings and a storage facility for ballots and information about Fulton voters.

Concerns about election security are not new in Georgia’s most populous county, which includes Atlanta and routinely gives overwhelming support to Democratic presidential and statewide candidates. But this week’s raid is a major escalation in a years-long battle over election integrity — one that appears to be emerging as more of a political litmus test.

“This is a blatant attempt to distract from the Trump-authorized state violence that killed multiple Americans in Minnesota,” said Democrat Dana Barrett, a Fulton County commissioner who is also running for Secretary of State.

“Sending 25 FBI agents to raid our Fulton County elections office is political theater and part of a concerted effort to take over elections in swing districts across the country.”

The raid comes as the 2026 Republican primary for governor, which features many of the same Republicans who sparred over that year’s election results, is starting to heat up. Both Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Attorney General Chris Carr have repeatedly vouched for Georgia’s 2020 tally and refused to join any attempts to subvert it, putting them on a collision course with MAGA world over their loyalty to President Donald Trump as they campaign for the state’s top job.

Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who is running with the president’s endorsement, praised Wednesday’s raid and offered us a preview of what we will likely soon see in his doom-and-gloom campaign commercials.

“Fulton County Elections couldn’t run a bake sale,” Jones said on social media Wednesday. “And unfortunately, our Secretary of State hasn’t fixed the corruption and our Attorney General hasn’t prosecuted it.”

In the months and weeks leading up to the November 2020 vote, Trump’s repeated warnings of potential nefarious activity in that year’s election became part of his rhetoric. Georgia would emerge as the epicenter of the president’s claims of election fraud, even after multiple hand recounts and lawsuits confirmed Biden’s ultimate victory.

His allies in the state Legislature urged leaders to call a special session to reallocate Georgia’s 16 electoral votes. Some Republicans, including Jones, signed a certificate designating themselves as the “electors” who officially vote for president and vice president. And Trump’s January 2021 phone call to Raffensperger, where he urged the secretary to “find” enough votes to erase his defeat, was at the heart of Fulton County’s election racketeering case against Trump and his allies.

The case was dismissed late last year.

Nevertheless, Trump’s claims of fraud have become a key pillar in his party’s political identity: More than half of Republicans in Congress still objected to the certification of Trump’s defeat in the hours following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. A 2024 national poll from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that roughly three in ten voters still had questions about the validity of Biden’s win three years prior, a glaring sign of just how mainstream that belief has become among the general public.

Six years later, Trump’s return to the White House hasn’t helped him move on. He continues to say in remarks and at campaign events that he carried the Peach State “three times.” His now-infamous Fulton County mugshot hangs right outside the Oval Office. And he warned of prosecutions against election officials during a speech in Davos this month.

“[Russia’s war with Ukraine] should have never started and it wouldn’t have started if the 2020 U.S. presidential election weren’t rigged. It was a rigged election,” Trump said. “Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. That’s probably breaking news.”

It’s clear that the past is still very much shaping the present in Georgia Republican politics. This week’s federal raid on the Fulton elections center just adds more fuel to old grudge matches, and a politician’s role in the 2020 election could ultimately determine their political standing.

For candidates like Carr and Raffensperger, the primary could be a test of whether or not there is a political price to pay for defending Georgia’s election results against the barrage of attacks and conspiracy theories. And for Jones, it’s a test of whether election denialism is still an effective political attack for MAGA-aligned candidates to use.

• Niles Francis recently graduated from Georgia Southern University with a degree in political science and journalism. He has spent the last few years observing and writing about the political maneuvering at Georgia’s state Capitol and regularly publishes updates in a Substack newsletter called Peach State Politics. He is currently studying to earn a graduate degree and is eager to cover another exciting political year in the battleground state where he was born and raised.