On Tuesday afternoon, the FBI finally released a court-ordered affidavit showing the basis for its January raid seizing nearly 700 boxes of ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia. A judge signed off on the raid after the FBI alleged “evidence of a commission of a criminal offense” relating to the 2020 election.
But what the unsealed affidavit actually revealed was a laundry list of debunked and recycled claims about the 2020 election peddled for years by election deniers that have been rejected repeatedly in court and by election officials. Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the claims “baseless and repackaged.”
The affidavit immediately began with a red flag: the declaration submitted to the court by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans said that the bureau’s “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen,” a temporary White House employee tasked with investigating the 2020 election results. Olsen is a prominent election denier who played a leading role in the 2020 “Stop the Steal” movement, lobbying the Department of Justice to file a lawsuit with the Supreme Court attempting to overturn the election (Texas eventually filed a lawsuit that was unanimously rejected) and speaking to Trump multiple times on January 6, 2021. He was subsequently sanctioned by a federal court for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” while representing Arizona gubernatorial...
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...