A federal decide stated Wednesday he wouldn’t order the Justice Department to return ballots from the 2020 presidential election it seized from Fulton County, Georgia, rejecting a request by county officers.
Judge JP Boulee stated the county had not met the excessive authorized bar that may permit him to intervene, at the same time as he acknowledged that “events leading up to this case are, in a variety of ways, unprecedented.”
The order comes months after the FBI searched a Fulton County elections workplace in January and seized election supplies. That search was based mostly on a warrant software that leaned on allegations of election fraud which have lengthy circulated in far-right circles. The county shortly filed a lawsuit to retrieve the paperwork.
The FBI has been probing what the DOJ has described as irregularities in how Fulton County carried out the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump has falsely claimed was rigged.
Fulton County officers have proposed in courtroom filings the legal investigation seems to be a “pretext to acquire records that this Administration was unable to quickly secure via the civil litigation process.”
But the Justice Department has argued that concept is “nonsensical for multiple reasons” and that the county had not met the excessive bar required for ordering the seized materials be returned.
The FBI moved seized the election supplies only a few weeks after opening a legal probe, an unusually quick tempo for a case of its type, specialists beforehand advised NCS.
Meanwhile, the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections is trying to block the Justice Department from gaining entry to the private info of hundreds of 2020 election employees.
NCS’s Aleena Fayaz, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.