An official in Fulton County, Georgia, has announced the county will challenge the legality of the FBI’s search and seizure of 2020 election records.
Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said the effort will seek to “force the government to return the ballots taken.”
Arrington said that the county’s attorneys are expected to file a motion in federal court in the Northern District of Georgia to fight the action of Trump’s Justice Department and the FBI.
The FBI served a warrant last Wednesday at the Fulton County election office, near Atlanta, Georgia, taking 700 boxes of election materials as it probes alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
“I’ve asked the county attorney to take any and all steps available to fight this criminal search warrant,” Arrington said Monday in a press release.
“The search warrant, I believe, is not proper, but I think that there are ways that we can limit it,” the statement continues. “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.”Fulton County’s motion will be designed to compel the government to return the ballots using the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41 (g), which allows a person aggrieved by an unlawful search or seizure to demand the property back.
Arrington said that while the FBI had authorization to copy the records from a separate court order, he believes they did not have proper permission to take physical custody of the original 2020 ballots and voters rolls.
“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.”
The FBI did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment about Fulton County’s anticipated lawsuit.
An FBI spokesperson at the scene on Wednesday told CNN that the materials would be taken to the FBI central Records Complex in Virginia.
By CNN
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