Lawyers for Fulton County, Georgia, are planning to file a lawsuit in federal court Monday against the FBI and the Justice Department over a search warrant that the FBI executed at an election hub last week seeking records related to the 2020 presidential election.
Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. announced in a news release that the county plans to file a motion in the Northern District of Georgia challenging "the legality of the warrant and the seizure of sensitive election records, and force the government to return the ballots taken."
“I’ve asked the county attorney to take any and all steps available to fight this criminal search warrant,” Arrington said in a statement. “The search warrant, I believe, is not proper, but I think that there are ways that we can limit it. We want to ask for forensic accounting, we want the documents to stay in the State of Georgia under seal, and we want to do whatever we can to protect voter information.”
According to the announcement, FBI agents seized hundreds of boxes of ballots, ballot images and voter rolls under the search warrant. Arrington said in his statement that a separate court order had allowed the FBI only to copy records.
“They got copies of our voter rolls and all the original ballots,” Arrington said. “Now we cannot verify that we’ve received everything back because there was no chain-of-custody inventory taken at the time the records were seized.”
When contacted by NBC News, the FBI said it does not comment on potential or ongoing litigation.
The search warrant was executed Wednesday at the Fulton County election hub. The FBI’s Atlanta field office previously confirmed the activity and said an “investigation into this matter is ongoing so there are no details that we can provide at the moment.” The chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, Robb Pitts, said last week that he didn't know where the records were being taken.
Asked about the FBI’s seizure of the records, Director Kash Patel said in an interview on Fox News last week, “The FBI and the DOJ went in and collected numerous pieces of evidence that the judge authorized us to collect, and what we’re going to do next is go through the voluminous amounts of information collected and continue our investigation. At this point, there’s not much more I can say publicly.”
President Donald Trump lost Georgia in the 2020 election, which he has continued to claim was stolen from him. Georgia was among a number of states in which Trump tried to overturn the election results.
