By the bureau’s own admission, the recent FBI search of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office did not center on uncovering evidence that the 2020 presidential election results there were tainted by fraud.
The release of the affidavit submitted in support of the warrant makes that clear. The document argues that the potential illegality requiring federal intervention involved “many allegations of electoral impropriety relating to the voting process and ballot counting” in the county. It also claims that if failures on the part of election officials were “the result of intentional action,” a crime might have occurred.
The affidavit offers no evidence of intentionality, though. Instead, it centers primarily on rehashing existing, broadly debunked claims about purportedly dubious activity in the county at the time of the election. There is no evidence in the affidavit that the election was dishonest; there’s not even any evidence of significant, suspicious activity.
So why does the affidavit exist?
The direct answer to that question is offered by the affidavit itself.
“The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans writes.
Olsen is not an objective party here. At the time of the 2020 election, he worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, leading efforts to overturn the results of a contest that Trump lost. He’s identified in the final report of the House select committee that probed Trump’s efforts as having “authored a memo urging Vice President [Mike] Pence to adjourn the joint session of Congress without counting electoral votes.” Trump tapped Olsen last year essentially to resume his work.
That is the indirect answer to the question. The reason the affidavit exists is that Trump and his allies have spun up the election denial infrastructure that emerged in a mostly ad hoc basis in November and December 2020 to get a head start on undercutting confidence in the election results. The same pattern that was observed then can be observed now: elevating baseless claims of election fraud, testing (or undercutting) state-level election systems, insisting that elections in the U.S. are not “honest.”
“Everything we lived through in 2020 was the beginning — not the end — of this multi-year effort to dismantle democracy in America,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson recently told Politico.
None of this alters what has been known since a few weeks after the 2020 contest. Donald Trump lost Georgia.
The affidavit in Georgia exists in part because Trump is desperate for people to believe that he won the state in 2020, which he didn’t. But it exists primarily as a means of elevating distrust in American elections, potentially creating political space for a federal — that is, Trumpian — intervention in the elections process or in election results.
The affidavit delineates a number of “irregularities” that serve as the foundation of the warrant. None proves criminality, but an affidavit for a search warrant is definitionally aimed at obtaining evidence rather than providing it. What’s striking, though, is how flimsy the claims are — perhaps not surprising, since they appear to have been sourced, at least in part, from a conspiracy theorist named Kevin Moncla.
Because one of the desired outcomes of raising allegations of impropriety is to have any one of them serve as a seed crystal for doubt, here is a quick explanation of why the included claims do not constitute serious questions about the 2020 election.
There is not a mystery involving “missing ballot images.” Images of cast ballots were not required to be retained, until Georgia’s state legislature mandated they be preserved in a bill passed in March 2021. Nonetheless, images for most ballots were still available during the period after the election, save for some that were stored on a memory stick and may have been corrupted — as the affidavit notes.
Some ballots were scanned more than once, but their votes weren’t counted multiple times. This is an old claim, one that extends back five years. The secretary of state’s office had already investigated it, in fact, finding that ballots can be rescanned if an error occurs. In this case, though, the number of ballots matches the final vote total (after multiple recounts). What’s more, Trump overperformed among the rescanned ballots.
Again, this information is in the affidavit.
Batch tallies from the hand recount were inaccurate, but the vote wasn’t affected. As the state was counting ballots, some of the batches of ballots were reported to include a different total number of votes than ballots. In other words, the hand recount was less accurate than the machine recount, which … of course. Humans make mistakes that machines don’t. The overall totals from the recounts matched the initial total, save for small shifts that didn’t affect the outcome.
Let’s take a step back for a moment to remember the intent of the affidavit: to obtain evidence that these irregularities were intentional. The argument, then, is that someone intentionally wrote incorrect tallies on batches of hand-recounted ballots. Why? This question of purported motive doesn’t have to be answered in the affidavit, luckily for the FBI.
Incidentally, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp acknowledged in November 2020 that there had been errors discovered in several counties during the hand recount, including Douglas, Fayette, Floyd and Walton. Notice that Fulton County is not listed. Also: Trump won three of those counties. There was no inconsistency in the number of ballots reported. In essence, a preliminary report is being presented as a final one in order to appear suspicious. Again, there’s no reason to think that anything untoward occurred, much less that there was some intentional effort to … do something. (Just Security’s Tom Joscelyn walked through this one in a helpful social media thread.) Unfolded absentee ballots are not proof of fraud. As an affidavit witness (who worked for the state during the election) explained to the FBI, unfolded absentee ballots are common, because damaged ballots would at times be replaced with a clean, readable one. The supposed evidence of suspicious activity, as is the case with many of these allegations, comes from an amateur observer who likely misinterpreted what was happening. Administrative errors are not evidence of fraud. The affidavit looks at administrative errors — unsigned tabulator tapes, chain-of-custody errors — that led to criticism from the state but that do not themselves serve as evidence of fraud. It’s akin to alleging tax fraud because someone lost a receipt. Again, what use would intentionally introducing errors to the chain of custody serve if there’s no evidence that votes were manipulated? None of this alters what has been known since a few weeks after the 2020 contest. Donald Trump lost Georgia. There are no serious questions about that result. In fact, as the affidavit itself notes, a review sanctioned by the state did “not see any evidence of fraud, intentional misconduct, or large systematic issues that would have affected the result of the November 2020 election.” The affidavit offers no evidence of intentionality, though. Instead, it centers primarily on rehashing existing, broadly debunked claims about purportedly dubious activity in the county at the time of the election. There is no serious question about the results in Fulton County, either. Trump and his allies have spent more than five years trying desperately to generate doubt in those results because Trump is eager to have people believe the outcome was something other than what it was. The sum total of that five years of work is little more than a document aggregating claims that have already been dismissed. There are two other efforts of Trump’s that are useful to consider here. The first is his attempt in 2019 to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, the abuse of power that led to his first impeachment. The second is his invocation of “national emergencies” to levy tariffs against foreign countries. The Ukraine example reminds us that Trump is content to use the shield of a putative “investigation” as a mechanism to create doubt about a perceived opponent. Here, lamentably, the opponent is confidence in state and local elections. The tariffs example reminds us that his administration is happy to stretch the boundaries of the law past their breaking point in order to exact punishment. There’s no emergency that demanded we pay more for coffee. Likewise, there is no serious reason to believe that there was a criminal scheme to fumble Fulton County’s 2020 election process, given that no fraud resulted. There is very good reason, though, to assume that it would benefit the president to stretch the focus of a search warrant affidavit to gin up an investigation that suggests wrongdoing. Particularly as a midterm election looms in which his party will almost certainly fare badly. At least, in a free and fair election.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
