The FBI last month raided a Georgia election hub near Atlanta and seized ballots and voter records at the urging of a lawyer who had worked with President Donald Trump to try to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a newly released court record revealed Tuesday.
FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans wrote in an affidavit that the investigation “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”
Olsen, who took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign more than five years ago and promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, was previously sanctioned by a federal judge for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions."
He was hired last year by the administration to investigate the 2020 election.
On Jan. 28, FBI agents were authorized to take all physical ballots from Fulton County related to the 2020 general election, tabulator tapes for every voting machine, all ballot images, and voter rolls, according to the warrant.
The search warrant also allowed the government to review any evidence stored electronically.
The order to make the affidavit public was issued by U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee, who was nominated by Trump in 2019 to the federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. Some of the details were redacted, including the names of people who argued there had been voter irregularities.
In an order filed Saturday, Boulee gave the Trump administration a Tuesday deadline to produce the affidavit to obtain the search warrant.
That affidavit spelled out the arguments federal prosecutors made to persuade federal Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas to issue the search warrant, most of which are retreads of Trump's voter fraud claims from 2020 that were disproven by local and state election officials, as well as members of his own Cabinet.
"Following the November 3, 2020, presidential election, there were many allegations of electoral impropriety relating to the voting process and ballot counting in Fulton County, Georgia," the affidavit states. "Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County."
Election officials concede that isolated instances of voter fraud do happen, but they are rare. To change the outcome of an election, they say, there would have to be evidence of voter fraud on a massive scale that would shift the margins.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, dismissed the Trump administration's effort as baseless.
“As Secretary of State, I’ve made Georgia the safest and most secure place to vote," he said in a statement. "Instead of wasting time and tax dollars trying to change the past with baseless and repackaged claims, let’s focus our efforts on building a safer, more affordable future for all hardworking Georgians.”
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, questioned the presence at the Georgia raid of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence.
Gabbard also arranged a call with FBI personnel and Trump, to allow the president to express his gratitude to the FBI agents who conducted the search.
"The newly unsealed affidavit shows this search originated from the frivolous claims of Kurt Olsen, an attorney who traffics in debunked falsehoods about the 2020 election," Warner said in a statement. "It also makes clear there was no foreign intelligence nexus. ... So why was the Director of National Intelligence there?"
Gabbard said last week in a letter to the top Democrats on both the House and Senate intelligence committees that she was at the Fulton County center in keeping with U.S. law and her responsibilities as the country’s top intelligence official.
But Gabbard oversees the country’s spy agencies and is barred from taking part in domestic law enforcement. NBC News has reached out to both Olsen and Gabbard for comment.
The federal judge also unsealed the court file for the lawsuit that Fulton County Commission Chairman Rob Pitts filed against the government after FBI agents raided the Fulton County elections warehouse and left with 700 boxes of ballots and other records related to that election.
"Given the importance of the public’s access to judicial proceedings, the Clerk is DIRECTED to unseal the docket in this case," Boulee wrote.
Georgia was one of the key states Trump lost in the 2020 when he was defeated by Joe Biden. It was also one of the states where he tried to overturn the election results.
There were at least nine legal challenges by Trump and his allies involving Georgia following the 2020 election over allegations of voter irregularities and other voting issues; they were all either dropped or denied or dismissed by judges.
In the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, Trump pressured Raffensperger in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes,” which was roughly Biden’s margin of victory in the state.
Trump has continued to falsely claim that election was stolen from him despite evidence to the contrary and admissions, under oath, by key allies like Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch that Trump's claims were “bulls--- and damaging.”
