When federal agents raided a Fulton County, Georgia elections office last month and seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots, red flags flew. This week, we’ve learned more through the unsealing of key prosecutorial paperwork – and a search that at first looked shady has now been confirmed as something even worse.

First, some background. Last month, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Missouri wrote an affidavit seeking authorization to search a Fulton County elections office in Georgia. The U.S. Attorney in Missouri, Thomas Albus, is a Trump appointee, but he’s not exactly some novice, fire-breathing Alina Habba-type. Albus was a federal prosecutor for seventeen years and then a state judge before his appointment by Trump and party-line confirmation by the Senate.  

A federal magistrate judge in Georgia, Catherine Salinas, reviewed the paperwork and found that prosecutors had established probable cause that federal election-related crimes were committed, and that the search would likely yield evidence of those crimes. Salinas took the bench in 2015, but was not a political appointee; magistrates are chosen by the district court judges for that district, not by any president. Earlier in her career, Salinas worked for Rural Legal Aid on the Mexican border and then for the Fulton County public defender – not exactly the resume of a MAGA fire-breather. 

Obvious questions jumped off the page. Why would federal prosecutors in Missouri investigate purported election-related crimes in Georgia, 550 miles and several federal districts away? (Albus, it turned out, had been assigned the task of investigating 2020 election fraud nationwide by Attorney General Pam Bondi.) Why, then, would Bondi insist on using valuable prosecutorial resources to re-re-re-re-re-investigate election fraud claims that have been exhaustively probed and debunked – by Republicans and Democrats, by Trump’s own top advisors and experts, by judges and prosecutors, by Congress, and by expert outsiders alike? Why would prosecutors execute a search warrant to seize the Georgia ballots during the pendency of an ongoing civil lawsuit seeking to obtain those very same records? What was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has no enforcement authority, doing on the scene of a criminal investigative search? 

The answer to all the above questions, in a word: Politics. (Or, in another word: Ego.) The investigation appeared to spring from Donald Trump’s exhausting, delusional claims of 2020 election fraud, the search itself an effort to manifest his fantasies through blunt force: If we endlessly insist there was major fraud, perhaps we can make it so. 

This week, when a federal judge in Georgia ordered the Justice Department’s search warrant affidavit unsealed, we got our first meaningful look at the probe and the proffered justifications for it. Count me thoroughly unconvinced. 

At first glance, the affidavit – unsealed in a lawsuit by Fulton County officials to challenge the search itself – appears to present a non-ridiculous claim that there were errors in the 2020 vote count in Fulton County. Indeed, County officials have acknowledged certain minor errors in ballot preservation and tabulation (some of which seemingly worked in Trump’s favor). 

But things fall apart quickly from there. Most importantly, the sourcing for the factual claims in the affidavit lands somewhere between dubious and nuts. 

Consider, for example, the section titled “Duplicate Ballots.” The FBI explains that its source is an unnamed “data analyst” (whatever that means) who claims he “downloaded the data online from ‘ZebraDuck’ and believed it was from an Open Records Request from Fulton County but was not positive as he was not a part of acquiring the data [and] received the data second hand.” So the FBI forcibly entered a county elections office and seized ballots based on the word of some unnamed guy who got some unspecified information off the internet from “ZebraDuck” and doesn’t know where the esteemed Mr. Duck got the information in the first place. 

And the affidavit specifies that the investigation itself “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.” You’ll not be shocked to learn that Olsen is a dogged 2020 election denier who spoke to Trump several times on January 6, 2021. Olson has made claims about 2020 election fraud that leaders of Trump’s own DOJ found “not viable,” and he has been sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making “unequivocally false” claims about fraud in the 2022 state governor’s race. It’s tough to determine who’s least reliable as between Olsen, the unnamed data analyst, and ZebraDuck. 

Even were it properly sourced, the search warrant affidavit suffers from a fatal structural flaw. The FBI declares in the affidavit that its investigation focuses on two potential federal crimes: (1) failure to comply with laws requiring the retention of documents for 22 months after any election (a misdemeanor), and (2) obtaining or casting false voter registration documents or ballots (a felony). (Note that the five-year statute of limitations on the felony election fraud count appears to have lapsed; the limitations period for the document retention count likely started running at the end of the mandatory 22-month post-election period, so that one could survive — but it’s a lowly misdemeanor.)  

Most fundamentally, for all the claims of error, the FBI never alleges that any actual person committed any actual crime. Never does the affidavit specify any particular individual who intentionally mishandled or miscounted ballots – and mistakes, without intent, are not crimes. 

Why, then, would Judge Salinas have approved the warrant request? We can’t know for sure at this point, but the legal bar (probable cause) is fairly modest. Nor would the judge have the ability to question the witnesses and other sources whose information comprised the basis for the request. And, frankly – I speak from prosecutorial experience here – judges don’t always subject search warrant affidavits to the most probing scrutiny; I’ve had judges flip through warrant documents and sign off within a minute or two. 

At bottom, the newly-unsealed affidavit confirms the worst suspicions that accompanied the FBI’s raid on Fulton County. This is a politically-driven investigation, built on a decrepit foundation of half-truths and wishcasting. The Justice Department has taken a smattering of (proven) instances of nondispositive error and mashed them together with a tired slate of (disproven) allegations of fraud. The result is an intrusive search warrant likely to go nowhere but certain to be held up as confirmation of wild 2020 election-theft conspiracy theories. This is political score-settling, masquerading as criminal enforcement. Don’t be fooled by the repackaging.