FBI Seizes 2020 Ballots From Georgia Based on a Warrant Relying on Debunked Conspiracy Theories

As part of a preemptive campaign to discredit midterm congressional elections that his party is likely to lose, Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has seized 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia. But the information they used to obtain a warrant for this search is based on debunked election conspiracy theories.

The New York Times reports:

An FBI search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday shows that a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., was set off by a leading election denier in the Trump administration and relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked. …

Many of the claims in the affidavit refer to long-held—and consistently debunked—conspiracy theories about elections in Georgia, including arguments about fraudulent and duplicate absent ballots, election-machine tabulator tapes and missing ballot images. The claims often focus on small administrative errors or easily explainable abnormalities as evidence of fraud. …

One claim in the affidavit comes from a Georgia resident who said there were 17,852 “missing ballot images” in Fulton County. This claim, and similar ones about ballot images, were popular among Mr. Trump’s supporters immediately after the 2020 election. But Fulton County officials noted that, at the time, the law did not require them to maintain ballot images.

Missing ballot images do not mean ballots are missing. Gabriel Sterling, a former top election official in Georgia, noted in 2021 that election officials “have all of the actual ballots that have been counted 3 times.” …

At least 11 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election results in Georgia have been filed, according to Fulton County court records; none have proved that there was widespread fraud or malfeasance.

It is an abuse of executive power to squander the credibility of the FBI by using it to promote the theories of crazed partisans. This is not about relitigating an old election but about discrediting new ones in an attempt to prevent the American people from withdrawing the consent of the governed.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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