ATLANTA — A leading elections expert told a federal judge on Friday that the evidence the FBI used to justify a recent seizure of 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, “doesn’t make sense.”
Ryan Macias, a former U.S. Election Assistance Commission official, testified that the list of irregularities the FBI identified didn’t represent a crime and that the witnesses the government based their investigation on appeared misinformed..
The witnesses the FBI cited “use contradictory terminology and it represents a misunderstanding of how elections work,” Macias said.
“There’s no basis in reality for most of the witness statements,” he said. “There was missing information and the information that was relied on doesn’t reflect reality — what actually happened.”
The testimony came amid a hearing over custody of Fulton County’s ballots and election materials, which were seized by the FBI in January during a raid on an election hub, and whether the federal government demonstrated “callous disregard” for the county's rights. Fulton County sued and demanded the materials back last month.
In court on Friday, Abbe Lowell, an attorney for the county, criticized the government’s witnesses and information, which were laid out in a since-unsealed sworn affidavit that is “full of inaccuracies.”
The affidavit, which was unsealed in February and largely rehashes previously investigated election fraud claims, detailed that the evidence was based on interviews with conservative activists and a referral from Kurt Olsen, a Republican who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Olsen was appointed by President Donald Trump to investigate the 2020 election from within his administration.
Lowell argued the government’s list of witnesses couldn’t be trusted because, in part, it includes “someone who was sanctioned twice by the courts for lying about elections,” referring to Olsen.
Friday’s hearing is the first time the FBI’s investigation into 2020 election fraud has been brought into open court. Trump, who has spent years falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him, has championed the seizure.
Defending the government, Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general of the criminal division of the Justice Department, told the judge that Macias' testimony is "woefully inadequate."
In closing arguments, Duva said the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit, Hugh Raymond Evans, did the best he could. Including the contradictory information — which Macias spoke about in his testimony — indicates he was engaging in an honest back and forth with the magistrate who signed off on the warrant.
Evans is a “conscientious agent who may have missed a thing or two," Duva said, but the judge’s job is not to assign a grade. Rather, he said, it’s to determine whether the agent demonstrated callous disregard for the rights of the county.
“If there’s an indictment — that remains to be seen,” Duva said. “All that can be judged now is the record we have now.”
Lowell argued there was no evidence of a crime in the affidavit, because there was no proof of intentional wrongdoing.
“The only element that turns normal election irregularities into crime is intent,” he said.
To rebut Fulton County's arguments that they needed the records back, the government's lawyer played bodycam footage of Fulton County Election Director Nadine Williams telling a federal agent that they “can make paper airplanes” with the records for all she cared.
Georgia emerged as a major of focus for Trump after the state played a key role in Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. There were at least nine legal challenges by Trump and his allies involving Georgia over allegations of irregularities and other voting issues. They were all either dropped or denied or dismissed by judges.
Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, a Republican, in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes” — roughly Biden’s margin of victory in the state.
Outside of Georgia, the FBI has also subpoenaed records related to a controversial audit into the 2020 election in Arizona, another key battleground state.
