Jay Bookman: “There is nothing new in those documents, no evidence of crime or even of criminal intent. It is an embarrassment to the FBI and to the magistrate judge who approved the search.”

Atlanta, Ga. — A column in the Georgia Recorder highlights how the warrant and seizure of 700 boxes of ballots and sensitive election materials in Fulton County is based on completely debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. 

Election officials, Republicans, independent election security experts, and national reporting across the board have confirmed that the affidavit was chasing recycled, disproven conspiracy theories.

Read for yourself:

Georgia Recorder: Bookman: FBI Raid in Fulton County Plainly Orchestrated by 2020 Election Deniers
By Jay Bookman | February 12, 2026

KEY EXCERPTS:

• The moment that FBI agents showed up with a search warrant at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center, one of two things had to be true.
  
• The first was that federal investigators must have made an important breakthrough, uncovering previously unknown evidence that fraud had been committed in Georgia’s 2020 election. 
  
• After all, you can’t get a search warrant without probable cause of a crime, right? Given the presence at the scene of Tulsi Gabbard, our director of national intelligence, that evidence might even include foreign interference!
  
• The second, more likely possibility was that federal investigators had no new evidence of election fraud, and no old evidence of election fraud. 
  
• Instead, they had merely repackaged discredited, long-ago-disproved allegations in an effort to please President Donald Trump and hornswoggle a gullible federal magistrate into issuing a search warrant. 
  
• With release of the FBI affidavit this week, we know the hornswoggle scenario to be the correct one. There is nothing new in those documents, no evidence of crime or even of criminal intent. It is an embarrassment to the FBI and to the magistrate judge who approved the search.
  
• In that FBI affidavit, for example, the agency claims that Republican auditors during one of three recounts of the 2020 ballots claimed to have found many “pristine,” unfolded ballots that may have been smuggled into the vote count on behalf of Joe Biden. 
  
• That much is true. Such claims were indeed made. What the affidavit does not tell us – and did not tell the magistrate judge – is that those claims were already fully investigated and proved to be false […]
  
• It’s just fools and grifters from top to bottom.