(Washington) The recent search by the FBI in an electoral center in Georgia (southeast) resulted from a report from an adviser to Donald Trump, who had accompanied his unsuccessful efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a search warrant made public Tuesday.
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Late last month, federal police removed 700 boxes of ballots and other election materials from the Fulton elections center in Atlanta, the state capital, without allowing local officials to make copies.
A judge appointed by Donald Trump ordered Tuesday that the search warrant authorizing this operation be made public.
According to the document, the FBI is investigating suspected “election irregularities” during the 2020 presidential election and is seeking to determine “whether any of these irregularities were intentional acts in violation of federal criminal law.”
“The FBI criminal investigation was opened following a report from Kurt Olsen, presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” it is further written in the document, which is based on a number of already known and unfounded allegations.
Kurt Olsen was part of Donald Trump’s legal team that initiated dozens of lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 election, which were rejected by courts across the country.
A few days after the FBI operation, county authorities filed a legal challenge to “obtain the return of all confiscated documents”, its president Robb Pitts claiming that he was targeted because he had “stood up to Donald Trump’s big lie” in 2020.
Donald Trump was indicted in 2023 by federal and Georgia state courts for illegal attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election won by his Democratic competitor Joe Biden.
These lawsuits for electoral interference were based in particular on a telephone call from January 2021 in which the outgoing president asked a senior local official to “find” the approximately 12,000 ballots he was missing to win the 16 electors of Georgia.
They were abandoned after his new election in 2024, but Donald Trump recently reiterated his desire to take revenge on the officials who instructed them.
In the United States, electoral operations are managed by the states, not the federal government.
But Donald Trump, faced with the prospect of a defeat for his Republican Party in the mid-term legislative elections in November, recently suggested a “nationalization of the vote” by the federal authorities.
