Georgia’s Fulton County seeks return of 2020 election documents seized by FBI

ATLANTA (AP) — Fulton County has filed a motion in federal court seeking the return of all documents from the 2020 election that were seized last week from a warehouse near Atlanta by the FBI, officials in the Georgia county said Wednesday.

The motion also asks for the unsealing of a law enforcement agent’s sworn statement that was presented to the judge who signed off on the search warrant, according to the county chairman, Robb Pitts. The county is not releasing the motion because the case is under seal, he said.

The Jan. 28 search at Fulton County’s main election facility in Union City sought records related to the 2020 election.

President Donald Trump and his allies have fixated on the heavily Democratic county, the state’s most populous, since the Republican narrowly lost the election in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. Trump has long insisted without evidence that widespread voter fraud in the county cost him victory in the state.

Pitts defended the county’s election practices and said the county has conducted 17 elections since 2020 without any issues.

“The president himself and his allies, they refuse to accept the fact that they lost,” Pitts said. “And even if he had won Georgia, he would still have lost the presidency.”

Pitts cited comments by Trump earlier this week on a podcast where he called for Republicans to “take over” and “nationalize” elections.

“This case is not only about Fulton County. This is about elections across Georgia and across the nation,” he said.

A warrant cover sheet provided to the county includes a list of items that the agents were seeking related to the 2020 general election: all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls.

Kate Brumback, The Associated Press