For most election administrators around the country, the FBI’s recent seizure of 2020 Atlanta-area ballots was shocking. But for some members of the Georgia State Election Board, the search was a welcome development.
Led by the commission’s vice chair, Janice Johnston – a retired obstetrician who, according to court filings, had no experience working elections prior to 2021 – the board’s conservative majority has been relentlessly pursuing fraud theories about Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
After subpoenaing some of the Fulton County election records themselves, the board invited the Justice Department’s assistance last year, itself, resulting in a Trump administration civil lawsuit in December that preceded the search warrant secured through a federal criminal probe.
Johnston and another MAGA-aligned board member, former media personality Janelle King, were witnesses cited by the FBI in its application to justify seizing the records, as were other election deniers who have made frequent appearances before the board to allege a tainted 2020 result.
Once the search was underway, Johnston, another Republican board member, as well as its sole Democrat, watched outside the facility from where the FBI collected ballots. She even objected when she was told she could not enter the inner storage room while the search was being executed, arguing that “it’s our subpoena,” according to David Worley, a former Democratic board member who was also there.
Another source present during the search overheard Johnston, say on the phone that the FBI “should take just take all 700 boxes” of election records. (The FBI seized 656 boxes, according to court filings.)
Johnston and King, who did not respond to CNN inquiries for the story, have praised the FBI’s move, while insisting they had no advance knowledge of the search.
“It’s way past time for these matters to have been investigated,” said another Republican board member, Salleigh Grubbs, who pushed theories of 2020 vote tampering before joining the state board this year.
Grubbs, the other Republican board member present outside the warehouse during the search, told CNN she had not been in touch with the federal government about the search, but said it was “great” that “somebody has taken a proactive step to gain access.”
Prior to the Justice Department’s involvement, the conservative state board had been feuding for years with the Democratic-controlled county over the handling of the 2020 vote. Republican politicians have called on the state board to take over election administration for Fulton County, Georgia’s largest county and a chief target of Trump’s 2020 reversal schemes.
Georgia is one of several states where 2020 election skeptics have ascended to state and local government perches, from where they have continued to cast doubt on Trump’s defeat, despite numerous reviews confirming the outcome. As Trump has pushed his administration into taking sweeping and legally dubious actions to get more involved in election administration, the Fulton County ballot seizure shows how that effort can piggyback on the work of election deniers who have enmeshed themselves within the bureaucracy of running elections.
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump told The New York Times last month. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
The FBI’s search warrant application was built around claims of election irregularities that have long been a fixation of the Georgia State Election Board. There were some discrepancies in the election records, but the reviews by state authorities have found they were the result of administrative error and not intentional malfeasance. The FBI’s warrant did not put forward evidence that the alleged irregularities would have changed the presidential outcome – a point the Justice Department said in court filings was “irrelevant” to whether there was probable cause of a crime.
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“Recycling those debunked claims and running them through the Justice Department turns federal power into a tool for attacking the legitimacy of lawful elections,” said Max Flugrath, a spokesperson for Fair Fight Action, the political organization founded by failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Adams that’s focused on voting rights in the state.
Fulton County has filed a lawsuit seeking the return of the seized materials, and a federal judge last week directed the county and the Justice Department to pursue mediation to find a compromise solution.
Just a week before the seizure, one of the witnesses the FBI cited in its warrant appeared before the state board to reiterate his suspicions of a fraudulent 2020 count based on duplicate ballot images in Fulton County’s records. The claim is also a focus of the FBI probe.
The witness, Joseph Rossi, who filed a complaint with the board in 2022 raising the allegation, chastised state officials for missing the opportunity to get to bottom of his allegations “prior to this going to the DOJ.”
Rossi, reached by CNN, declined to comment on his interactions with the Justice Department, but touted a 2021 report by Georgia’s governor agreeing with some of his analysis about discrepancies in Fulton County’s audit records and told CNN that it’s “all in the hands of the DOJ.”
Election officials acknowledged some of the ballots may have been double-scanned due to human error, but a 2024 review by Georgia’s secretary of state that partially substantiated Ross’ complaint nonetheless stood by the overall accuracy of the 2020 results, noting the outcome was confirmed with a hand recount.
While many claims in the FBI’s warrant application were familiar to those who follow the state election board, the affidavit notably made no claims of foreign interference – an allegation that has gotten play in Georgia courtrooms over the last five years – that could have explained why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Atlanta for the search.
With the FBI limiting who was allowed in the room holding the ballots during the search, Gabbard – the only non-FBI federal official in the room – stood out, sources said.
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Gabbard has defended her involvement in the search and says that Trump has tasked her office with working on election integrity. Her office has also conducted a review of Puerto Rico’s election infrastructure for vulnerabilities to foreign intrusion.
State election officials and members of Congress are increasingly concerned that Gabbard is poised to use her position atop the US intelligence community to spin a narrative that foreign actors have compromised US voting systems and, thus, tainted the results of future elections, sources told CNN.
Her office has pointed to the “broad statutory authority” she has “to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security” and “our known work on understanding vulnerabilities to foreign and other malign interference.”
The FBI’s affidavit, once it was unsealed, revealed that another prominent election denier, now serving in the federal government, played a key role in the search. Kurt Olsen, who was deeply involved in some of the most bombastic plots to overturn the 2020 results, made the referral that launched the Fulton County probe from his current perch as White House director of election security and integrity.
The White House declined to comment on Olsen’s Georgia ties.
Prior to his White House gig, Olsen represented the DeKalb County Republican Party in an unsuccessful lawsuit that raised the specter of a “malicious” intrusion into the 2020 election while seeking decertification of the types of voting machines used in Georgia because of alleged vulnerabilities.
An expert witness the county GOP put forward in the case is now working as a temporary federal employee for the Trump administration and offered an analysis that the FBI relied up on in its search application. The witness, Clay Parikh, had previously appeared before the state election board to allege vulnerabilities in Georgia’s voting systems.
(Parikh could not be reached by CNN, but he declined to discuss his government role in an extraordinary interview last month with Talking Points Memo, in which he referred to the 2020 election as the “fedsurrection” and asserted that 315,000 ballots that “were fabricated” in Georgia.)
One of the federal laws the Justice Department is citing to justify seizing the election materials requires that election officials preserve voting records for 22 months after an election – a requirement that for the 2020 election would have expired in September 2022.
That the records still exist in Georgia is a result of the non-stop litigation in the Peach State over how the 2020 count was handled. Just a month before FBI’s seizure of the ballots, a state court judge sided with the state board, declining to block its subpoena of the Fulton County voting records, but with a caveat. His order said he would require the state board – rather than Fulton County taxpayers – pony up the roughly $400,000 it would cost to copy the documents for the subpoena.
Fulton County has pointed to that litigation, among other reasons, to argue it was improper for the Justice Department to seize the materials. Its court filings have also highlighted recent Trump comments that his FBI had obtained Fulton County’s “crooked ballots,” as well as a looming threat that the state board is poised take over Fulton County election operations.
“Without the ballots, Petitioners cannot rebut false narratives and are at risk of the state or federal government stripping them of the ability to administer Fulton County’s elections,” Fulton County said.
But the board was unable to convince a federal judge to jump in immediately. US District Judge J.P. Boulee said last week that he was abandoning plans to hold an evidentiary hearing – where there was potential for live testimony from the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit – because, he said, case law instructed a “spirit” of “compromise” in the dispute that would allow the government to keep copies of the records while giving the originals back to the county. He gave the parties until March 18 to try to work on such a solution via mediation.
At a hearing Friday, the judge encouraged the Justice Department to refrain from looking through the seized ballots while mediation was underway, given the risk that the FBI might ultimately have to return the materials, but he did not issue an order prohibiting that review.
According to a transcript obtained by CNN, Boulee said that if mediation were to fail, he intended on holding arguments and taking evidence if necessary. “I really don’t think it should come to that,” he said.
