The FBI on Wednesday raided the election office of a Georgia county that has played a central role in right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election.
The search of Fulton County’s main election center in Union City searched for documents related to the 2020 election. It appears to be the Justice Department’s most public move to follow up on Trump’s claims of a stolen election, claims repeatedly rejected by courts and state and federal officials, who have found no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome.
FBI agents secured an area around the large warehouse that houses the county elections center with yellow tape and could be seen loading boxes from the building onto trucks. FBI spokeswoman Jenna Sellitto confirmed the boxes contained ballots. Among the 2020 election documents sought are ballots, tabulation tapes from scanners used to count ballots, images of electronic ballots and voter rolls.
An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court-authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main elections office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide further information, citing an ongoing matter.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation decided last week to replace its top agent in Atlanta, Paul W. Brown, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a nonpublic personnel decision. It is unclear why the decision, which has not been made public by the FBI, was made or whether it has any connection to Wednesday’s law enforcement activities.
State and county Democratic officials expressed concern about the searches and ballot seizures and said they were not informed in advance.
“I still can’t understand the fascination with the 2020 election, which was six years ago,” said Board of County Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts. told reporters Wednesday evening. “This election is over. This election has been reviewed. It has been audited, and in each case we get a clean bill of health.”
The Justice Department had no immediate comment. FBI Co-Deputy Director Andrew Bailey and US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were seen at the scene.
Gabbard’s presence irritated Senator Mark Warner of Virginiaa leading Democrat serving on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Warner said Gabbard had a duty to inform this committee of “relevant national security concerns” and was concerned about the possibility that she was participating in a “domestic political coup intended to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
Trump focused on voting in Fulton County
Trump continues to insist that the 2020 election was “rigged” but has never explained how the one presidential election was corrupted on a day when hundreds of other federal, state and county elections took place without major incident. The director of his own administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called this election “the most secure in American history.” leading to his dismissal.
The stories, analyzes and audits in the 2020 battleground states have all confirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Judges, including some appointed by Trump, rejected dozens of his legal challenges, while his then-Attorney General William Barr later told a congressional committee that allegations of fraud that affected the outcome were “bullshit.”
Trump has for years focused on Fulton, Georgia’s most populous county and a Democratic stronghold, as a key example of what he says went wrong in the 2020 election. His pressure campaign in Georgia included a now-famous phone call in which he pleaded with Georgia’s secretary of state, a Republican, to “find” nearly 12,000 votes to close his deficit to Biden.
Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis obtained an indictment in August 2023 against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a massive scheme to illegally try to overturn the results in Georgia. That case was dismissed in November after the courts barred Willis and his office from prosecuting her because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor, although Trump’s 2024 election victory and a Supreme Court ruling that same year also made the prospect of a trial unlikely.
Donald Trump engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to “unlawfully retain power” after losing the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani also launched invectives against two black election workers in a debunked conspiracy theory involving a suitcase and ballot papers. The women – whom Trump called “professional voting fraudsters” – won a US$148 million civil judgment against Giuliani.
Speaking in Davos, Switzerland, last week, Trump promised that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did” during the 2020 election. Former presidents were generally not informed in advance by the Justice Department of impending prosecutions.
However, Trump’s desire during his second presidency to pursue officials and politicians who angered him, much like his 2020 election protests, have often faced obstacles in the legal system.
In some cases, grand juries failed to indict, a rare occurrence in hearings that proceed without defense attorneys, while a judge threw out indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James in one of several cases in which courts found Justice Department prosecutors were inappropriately appointed.
The Justice Department has also received pushback from about two dozen states over requests for voter roll information beyond what is already publicly available.
Front burner26:24Trump’s legal revenge campaign
Ongoing civil lawsuits
The warrant executed Wednesday is a criminal document, but the Justice Department last month sued Fulton County’s clerk of superior and trial courts in federal court to gain access to records from the county’s 2020 elections.
Che Alexander, the Fulton County clerk, filed a motion to dismiss the suit. The Justice Department’s complaint says the purpose of its request was to “ensure Georgia’s compliance with various federal election laws.”
Additionally, a three-member conservative majority on the Georgia state election board has repeatedly sought to reopen a case alleging wrongdoing by Fulton County in the 2020 election.
The state board sent subpoenas to the county board for various election materials last year and again on October 6, 2025. A battle over the state board’s efforts to enforce the 2024 subpoena is currently underway in court.
The Justice Department sent a letter to the county election board on Oct. 30 citing federal civil rights law and requesting all documents responding to the state election board’s October subpoena. In response, attorneys for the county board of elections attached a letter the clerk sent to the state board, saying the information cannot be released without a court order.
