Trump’s election raid goes to court as judge gets saddled with 'conspiracy theories'

President Donald Trump's push to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election is facing an early legal hurdle, according to the Washington Post, with the FBI headed to court over allegations it used "conspiracy theories" and long-debunked lies to dupe a judge into signing a warrant for the raid on a Georgia election center.

In late January, the FBI conducted a raid of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing a large amount of ballots and materials from the 2020 presidential election. Trump has long insisted, without concrete evidence, that widespread fraud tipped that race to Joe Biden, and has pushed his subordinates to conduct new investigations to dig up proof. Experts also fear that the raid will be used to build a pretense to meddle in future elections.

Officials in Fulton County have since sued in an attempt to compel the Trump administration to return 650 boxes of materials seized in January, with the case set to go before U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee on Friday. At the heart of the county's argument is the accusation that the FBI presented dubious or outright false information to a magistrate in order to get them to sign off on the warrant for the highly controversial raid.

"Fulton County officials maintain that agents duped a federal court magistrate into approving the warrant by presenting conspiracy theories and previously debunked claims of election irregularities as evidence of possible crimes," the Washington Post's report explained. "Lawyers for Fulton County have called the seizure of its 2020 election materials, and the warrant that authorized it, 'unprecedented in American history.' They have characterized the theories cited to obtain the warrant as little more than 'ill-informed… speculative assertions that, even if true, concern records of no consequence to the outcome of the election.'”

One of Fulton County's attorneys on the case, Y. Soo Jo, recently warned in a written filing that the federal government's conduct surrounding the raid might also act as voter suppression, arguing that, "knowing that the federal government can physically seize and rummage through election records long after the election has been certified will predictably chill voter participation and undermine voters’ confidence in the security and secrecy of their ballots."

Trump's Justice Department has already attempted to argue that U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine M. Salinas's approval of the warrant, in and of itself, means that the raid was justified. These arguments, however, have fallen flat, with Judge Boulee, a Trump appointee, shooting them down in court.

The affidavit requesting the warrant was originally submitted to Salinas by FBI Agent Hugh Raymond Evans. According to the Post, the arguments it put forward were heavily reliant "on accounts from 11 people — many of whom are prominent election deniers or members of Georgia’s Republican-controlled State Election Board," suggesting that "unknown persons" might have been trying to meddle with the 2020 election in the state.

"But the issues Evans cited, including claims of duplicate ballots and missing ballot images, have been addressed by previous audits and investigations that found no evidence of wrongdoing," the Post's report detailed. "County officials described many of them in a court filing as 'types of human errors that… occur in almost every election — without any intentional wrongdoing whatsoever.'”

The report continued: "For instance, Evans cited the fact that Fulton County no longer has scanned images of all 528,777 ballots cast in the 2020 race as evidence of a possible tampering. But officials have dismissed that shortcoming as insignificant, given they still have original paper versions of those ballots. The affidavit also suggested that the county may have scanned more than 3,000 ballots twice during a recount of the 2020 vote. But previous state investigations have produced no evidence that those double scans meant the ballots were actually counted twice. Even if they were, those earlier probes concluded, the outcome would have benefited Trump."

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