Trump still obsessed with the 2020 election, FBI raids key election office

The US federal police said it was “a court-authorized police action,” without providing further details. For their part, local authorities described the operation as an attempt at “intimidation.”

“As you all know by now, yesterday [Wednesday], shortly after noon, until about 9 p.m. last night, the FBI conducted a surprise search warrant raid on the Fulton County election center [which has been] targeted for years because I stood up to Donald Trump’s big lie and refused to bow to pressure” in 2020, County Chairman Robb Pitts said at a press conference.

“Every audit, every recount, every court decision has confirmed what we in Fulton County already knew: our elections were fair, the results were accurate, and every legitimate vote was counted,” he added.

Georgia and Fulton County have indeed been the target of unproven allegations of election fraud by Donald Trump and his supporters in recent years.

Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had accused two election officials of rigging the results based on a video showing them trading an object. Giuliani claimed that the two women were trading a USB drive, “as if it were doses of heroin or cocaine.”

Given that the object in question turned out to be a simple mint, Giuliani was forced to pay them $148 million for defamation in December 2023.

Donald Trump was indicted in 2023 by federal and Georgia courts for illegal attempts to invalidate the results of the 2020 election, won by Democrat Joe Biden.

These charges against Trump, the first former U.S. president ever to be criminally prosecuted, were dropped after he won a second presidential term in 2024.

They were based, among other things, on a phone call that was made public by the Washington Post in 2021.

During the call, the outgoing president asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the state’s chief election official, to “find” the approximately 12,000 ballots he needed to win Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.

The boxes of election documents were seized without local authorities being able to make copies, reported county elections official Sherri Allen. She emphasized that these documents were in any case due to be disclosed in the coming weeks as part of ongoing legal proceedings.

“The reason I know this number is because this case was already the subject of litigation […] On February 9, we were supposed to go to court to discuss how everything would be handed over,” Allen explained.

Both Pitts and Allen were concerned about possible leaks of personal information contained in these documents and the risk of pressure being exerted on election officials.