Debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election made by notorious conspiracy theorists and election deniers were the basis of the evidence used by the Trump administration to obtain a search warrant for the FBI to raid a Fulton County, Georgia election hub earlier this month, newly unsealed court records make clear.
The search warrant affidavit, which was unsealed Tuesday, revealed that the FBI’s criminal probe into the 2020 vote in Georgia — which President Donald Trump failed to subvert after losing to Joe Biden by a little over 11,000 votes — originated with Kurt Olsen, a special government employee at the White House who was recently appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.
“It’s no surprise that the Trump DOJ is recycling the same election conspiracy theories Georgia officials have already investigated and debunked,” Fair Fight CEO Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement to Democracy Docket. “We’re now watching those false claims – pushed by the very same network of election conspiracy theorists who fueled misleading claims after the 2020 election – get dressed up and passed off as new ‘evidence.’”
Olsen, a former Trump campaign lawyer, played a key role in the president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Olsen was involved in Texas’ challenge of the election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Olsen also pushed DOJ officials to file a motion with the U.S. Supreme Court to nullify the election results, urging the court to...
The FBI relied on years-old claims of fraud, many of them thoroughly investigated, to obtain a search warrant to seize ballots from election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, according to an affi...