Federal agents executed a search warrant at the Fulton County Elections Hub in Georgia, taking away boxes of records and ballots from the 2020 presidential election.
The FBI sent agents to the Union City facility on Wednesday, allegedly arriving without any prior notice and spending hours loading materials into their trucks. The operation stems from complaints from President Donald Trump’s team about the mishandling of ballots and classified documents in the county, and a peculiar water leak that has raised election integrity concerns.
Fulton County Board of Commissioners Chairman Robb Pitts confirmed the county received no advance notification. “For the life of me, I still cannot understand the fascination with the 2020 election,” Pitts told Atlanta News First.
The search warrant from the FBI follows a formal lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice in December 2025 against Fulton County Clerk Ché Alexander. According to court documents, the Justice Department cited its authority to conduct the search under federal statute 52 U.S.C. 20701, stating that the records request was for “ascertaining Georgia’s compliance with various federal election laws.”
The DOJ complaint also cited a November 2024 letter from the Georgia State Election Board to Fulton County, alleging “unexplained anomalies in vote tabulation and storage related to the 2020 election.”
Trump has maintained since 2020 that there were problems in Fulton County, which includes the city of Atlanta and represents Georgia’s largest Democratic stronghold. Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state since 1992.
The FBI investigation comes more than four years after a water leak incident at State Farm Arena on Election Day 2020 that delayed ballot processing and became a focus of election integrity concerns.
According to an official statement posted on the State Farm Arena website after the incident, staff first notified Fulton County Registration and Elections of a water leak at approximately 6:07 a.m. on November 3, 2020, affecting the room where absentee ballots were being counted. However, the arena’s statement also claimed that repairs were completed within two hours and that no ballots were damaged.
The incident, initially described as a burst pipe or water main break, was later clarified by Georgia officials as an overflowing urinal.
The delay in ballot processing, combined with county officials’ decision to pause counting operations late on election night, fueled suspicions among those questioning the integrity of the 2020 election.
A following video from Atlanta News First shows Georgia state Sen. Josh McLaurin (D) questioning FBI agents this week, with a quote from McLaurin that reads: “Fulton County and Georgia are tired of being the target of Donald Trump’s narcissism…This is an order from on high to try to disrupt Fulton County’s election administration just because Donald Trump is still mad that he lost the 2020 election.”
The FBI operation on Wednesday follows a December 2025 admission by Fulton County elections officials that they had failed to properly sign “tabulator tapes” after the 2020 election, violating state regulations.
County attorney Ann Brumbaugh confirmed during a State Elections Board meeting last year that some tabulator tapes had not been properly signed by poll managers and witnesses as required by Georgia law.
The county also acknowledged that some tapes and documents had been “misplaced.”
The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, has also filed similar lawsuits against 18 other states seeking election records.
In a press release announcing the Fulton County lawsuit in December, Dhillon said: “At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week, Trump also briefly mentioned the 2020 election problems, saying, “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.”
