Election officials and independent election security experts across the board have confirmed that the warrant and seizure of 700 boxes of ballots and sensitive election materials is based on nothing more than the same long-debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. 

• Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called the claims “baseless and repackaged”

• Election Security Expert David Becker: “This affidavit was much weaker than I suspected. No allegations of intent. No allegations of election theft. No allegations of foreign interference. No allegations that the statute of limitations doesn’t apply.” In the NYT, he added that there was “not a single allegation of a foreign nexus or foreign interference.” 

• According to a WSB Reporter, Georgia State University Legal Professor, Clark Cunningham: “called this the strangest affidavit attached to a search warrant he has ever seen. He said he’s never seen one quite like this before. It basically rehashes public information that’s been out for years now.”

• Former Bush and Trump National Security Official, Miles Taylor: “The basis for the FBI raid in Fulton County appears to be a lot of previously disproven allegations. In other words, the federal government seized the private ballots of American citizens based — at least in part — on conspiracy theories.”

• Cato Institute Scholar Stephen Richer – a non partisan Libertarian Think Tank: “The witnesses are largely drawn from the MAGA people on the Georgia State Election Board and then election-fraud hobbyists…Surprised this got to probable cause.”

• Just Security Democracy Expert Tom Joscelyn: The FBI affidavit used to seize ballots and other materials from the 2020 election in Fulton County relies on debunked conspiracy theories.

And national reporting agrees, this affidavit was chasing completely debunked conspiracy theories:  

• Washington Post: FBI cited debunked claims to obtain warrant for Fulton County vote records, documents show
  
  
  • “The FBI relied heavily on previously debunked claims of widespread election irregularities in Georgia as it persuaded a federal judge last month to sign off on plans to seize 2020 voting records from the state’s most populous county, court documents unsealed Tuesday show.”
    
    
• New York Times: Georgia Ballot Inquiry Originated With Election Denier in Trump White House
  
  
  • “An F.B.I. search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday shows that a criminal investigation into 2020 election results in Fulton County, Ga., was set off by a leading election denier in the Trump administration and relied heavily on claims about ballots that have been widely debunked…
    
    
  • “Many of the claims in the affidavit refer to long-held — and consistently debunked — conspiracy theories about elections in Georgia, including arguments about fraudulent and duplicate absent ballots, election-machine tabulator tapes and missing ballot images. The claims often focus on small administrative errors or easily explainable abnormalities as evidence of fraud.”