ATLANTA — A federal court judge has quashed a subpoena that would have required an FBI agent involved in the raid on the Fulton County election hub in January to testify.
An evidentiary hearing had already been set for Friday after Judge JP Boulee earlier this month said the court-ordered mediation between the two parties was unsuccessful.
Fulton County had subpoenaed Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans to testify, claiming his affidavit “misstated and omitted key facts that if accurately disclosed would have undermined any pretense of probable cause.”
The government argued that “FBI agents cannot be drawn away from their important work every time the recipient of a search warrant disagrees with it.”
Boulee sided with the government on Thursday, saying,“the Court finds that it was not clear error for the DOJ to deny the request based on concerns that SA Evans’s testimony would ‘reveal investigatory records compiled for law enforcement purposes, and would interfere with enforcement proceedings or disclose investigative techniques and procedures the effectiveness of which would thereby be impaired.’”
Channel 2 Action News was there when federal agents removed box after box, 700 in total, from the Fulton County Elections Hub in South Fulton County. The ballots were from the 2020 election.
Fulton County later sued to get the ballots returned.
The NAACP and other civil rights organizations have also sued “before the federal government disseminates the seized voter information beyond the agents responsible for its criminal investigation.”
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“So, my concern is the use of the criminal process to go on a fishing expedition for access to the voter rolls,” said Gerald Griggs, the former president of the Georgia NAACP and a civil rights attorney.
According to the warrants over the raid, the FBI was told to investigate a discrepancy in the vote counts reported by Fulton County election officials, with the warrant alleging that there were missing ballot images from the 2020 election records.
The warrant called for all physical ballots from the election, including absentee ballots and envelopes, advanced voting ballots, provisional ballots, in-person ballots from election day, emergency ballots, damaged or destroyed ballots, duplicated ballots, and any other ballots used to cast a vote.
Agents were also directed to get the tabulator tapes for all Fulton County voting machines from the 2020 election, all ballot images from Nov. 3, and copies of voters’ rolls from that year’s elections.
An affidavit filed over the raid said that if deficiencies in the number of election records were the result of intentional action, then seizing the records would corroborate an analysis saying election records were destroyed and/or that the vote counts included materially false votes, including duplicated specific ballots.
The document also said it supports keeping records sealed to prevent “giving targets opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence, change patterns of behavior, notify confederates or flee from prosecution.”
Independent experts say these claims in the warrants are founded on debunked theories or already investigated claims.
“I’ve never seen an affidavit filed by an FBI agent that looks at all like this affidavit,” Georgia State University Law Professor Clark Cunningham said.
Beyond the loss of sensitive information, Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts said he’s worried that the raid is setting up a move for the future.
“[I] think it’s more about 2026 and 2028, and the desire to have election boards, state’s elections board take over the running of elections,” he said.
The federal evidentiary hearing is scheduled for Friday at 9 a.m.
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