Fulton County officials said Monday they are filing a motion in federal court challenging the FBI’s seizure of 2020 election records in Georgia.
The filing comes in response to last week’s FBI operation at the county’s elections hub in Union City, near Atlanta, in which agents executed a search warrant and removed 700 boxes of ballots and voter data linked to the 2020 presidential election.
Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said the county argues that the search warrant and seizure went beyond what federal authorities were legally permitted to do and violated local control of elections. Arrington said the county plans to seek the immediate return of materials and will request to have the documents remain under seal in the state.
“I’ve asked the county attorney to take any and all steps available to fight this criminal search warrant,” Arrington said in a press release. “The search warrant, I believe, is not proper, but I think that there are ways that we can limit it. We want to ask for forensic accounting, we want the documents to stay in the State of Georgia under seal, and we want to do whatever we can to protect voter information.”
Arrington initially said in a news release that the county would file a lawsuit over the search, then clarified that county attorneys will instead file a motion in the existing case that the search warrant is part of.
Arrington argued that while the FBI was authorized to copy records under a separate court order, agents instead took the original copies, including in-person, absentee and provisional ballots.
“They got copies of our voter rolls and all the original ballots,” Arrington said, adding that the county has concerns about the lack of an official chain-of-custody inventory at the time of the seizure.
President Donald Trump has continued to claim falsely that widespread voter fraud cost him the 2020 election in Georgia, despite multiple audits proving that Joe Biden won. Trump renewed those baseless claims during an interview Monday.
“We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order, the ballots. You’re going to see some interesting things come out. But you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it,” Trump said on the internet show hosted by Dan Bongino, who recently resigned as deputy director of the FBI.
Arrington reiterated in an interview Monday that the county’s 2020 results were valid.
“They were counted time and time again, and Trump lost,” he said.
Fulton County officials have publicly pushed back against the FBI’s operation while maintaining that they complied with the warrant as executed.
“We will not give one inch to those who seek to take control of elections in Fulton County — not today, not tomorrow, not ever. We’re going to fight this in court with every resource that we have,” County Chairman Robb Pitts told reporters last week.
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at CNN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.