DOJ accused of misleading judge to obtain search warrant in Fulton County election case
Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, accused the Department of Justice of misleading a judge to obtain a search warrant last month for 2020 election ballots.
Local officials accused President Donald Trump's DOJ of making “serious” omissions in the application filed by the FBI that fails to allege probable cause that a crime had been committed, reported CNN, but instead “does nothing more than describe the types of human errors that its own sources confirm occur in almost every election — without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever.”
"Fulton County bashed the FBI for not informing the magistrate judge who approved the warrant that the allegations of election 'defects' it was putting forward had been previously investigated," CNN reported. "The local officials also took the FBI to task for not including information in the application that would cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses the federal criminal probe apparently is relying on."
The filing notes that Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier tasked by the White House with making the referral that set off the criminal investigation, has been sanctioned in the past by multiple courts, and county officials argued that other witnesses listed in the affidavit lacked expertise in election administration or based their conclusions on speculation.
The 79-year-old president has claimed for years that the 2020 election was rigged against him, although numerous courts and independent investigations have turned up no evidence of fraud, and Trump was indicted in Fulton County for his attempts at reversing his loss in Georgia.
An FBI agent signed an affidavit stating that the search was based on those long-standing and baseless claims, and Fulton County responded with a declaration election technology and security expert Ryan Macias stating that the FBI's filing was filled with "gross mischaracterizations of the facts of how elections work and are directly at odds with the findings and conclusions of all of the prior investigations of the November 2020 election in Fulton County.”