FULTON COUNTY, Ga. — U.S. District Judge JP Boulee is taking some time to decide if the FBI’s warrant to seize about a million Fulton County election ballots from 2020 was justified back on Jan. 28.
Channel 2’s Tyisha Fernandes said an attorney representing Fulton County Abbe Lowell said the FBI misled a magistrate judge with an affidavit full of lies. The attorney also said agents should’ve never been able to take the documents indefinitely with no inventory of what they seized.
While Assistant Attorney General Tysen Duva acknowledged that the agent behind the affidavit “may have missed a thing or two,” he argued that the agent included enough information to ensure the magistrate judge who signed the warrant was informed.
Notably, Duva also sought to distance the DOJ investigation from Donald Trump’s controversial director of election security and integrity Kurt Olsen, who made the criminal referral in Fulton County. Olsen has previously been sanctioned for his election claims and attempted to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.
“There is no mention of Kurt Olsen after that,” Duva said about the brief mention of Olsen in the search warrant application.
Lowell attempted to emphasize the role of Olsen and other purportedly unreliable witnesses interviewed by the FBI. He also pushed back on the assertion that the omissions to the warrant application were minimal, arguing the FBI misrepresented key information.
Lowell also argued that the statute of limitations for the two laws cited in the warrant have already run out, suggesting the investigation was a fishing expedition to find a crime to charge.
“In this posture, it does not matter what the statute of limitations is,” Duva said, suggesting they could find other crimes to charge.
Fulton County Superior Court Clerk Ché Alexander told the judge she was the custodian of the records when the FBI took them.
“I asked the agent to go box by box to understand what they were taking and they said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Alexander testified.
Lawyers with the Department of Justice sought to cast doubt on her claims, including by playing a video from a 2023 court proceeding when a lawyer for her office urged a judge to allow the removal of the records. According to the attorney, Fulton County wanted to make room for incoming records related to the 2024 election.
Fulton County Commission Chair Robb Pitts considers Friday a victory because the DOJ never wanted Friday’s hearing to happen.
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