A highly relevant piece of news went unnoticed this Wednesday amidst the chaos in the streets of Minneapolis, the outrage over the assault on Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, negotiations to avoid a federal government shutdown, and the latest decision by the Federal Reserve. This news, combined with ongoing gerrymandering processes, military deployment in the streets, maneuvers to limit mail-in voting, and the recruitment of hundreds of litigating lawyers, foreshadows a controversial and litigious midterm election.
Yesterday morning, a large group of FBI agents appeared unexpectedly at a government building in Fulton County, Georgia, the state that has been and continues to be the focus of baseless accusations by President Donald Trump that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump lost the state and has never accepted it. He even tried to have state authorities, Republicans, "find him 10,000 votes," as he famously and infamously said in a phone call from the White House to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State, desperate to reverse the result that led to Joe Biden winning the White House.
The search warrant, accessed by media outlets like Propublica and local ACJ, required all kinds of physical or digital documents related to those elections in a county near Atlanta with a majority of African American and immigrant origin, including all "physical ballots." The agents, inexplicably guided by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's national intelligence director (and a Russian sympathizer), arrived prepared with saws and trinkets and took away hundreds of boxes of papers in trucks and vans. An FBI spokesperson explained that the material would be transported to the FBI Central Records Complex in Virginia.
The warrant allowed them to seize not only physical ballots but also scanned images of the ballots, all voter rolls from that year, and all tapes from the counting machines, which serve as a kind of receipt for the election results. In the U.S., each state has its own voting system, with variations even from district to district, as well as in the required documentation to cast a vote. In Georgia, specifically, the process requires initial voter identification before election officials. Then, voters access a machine to select candidates for all open positions, and each person is instructed to take a printed receipt as proof of voting.
Local authorities (Republicans) have repeatedly stated since then that there was no fraud. Courts have dismissed the lawsuits filed by Trump's lawyers back then (60 nationwide) and even fined those, like Rudolph Giuliani, who defamed local officials by claiming they had deceived and participated in fraud. This has not stopped, six years later, and a few weeks after a civil lawsuit was filed on behalf of the president, the trial judge Catherine M. Salinas has authorized the searches in an investigation into "possible violations of a federal law against the destruction of election documents" and another statute "that criminalizes knowingly obtaining fraudulent voter records or fraudulent votes."
Everything is anomalous. The presence of the FBI, Gabbard, claiming to "play a key role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and electoral infrastructure," or the fact that the prosecutor listed in the warrant is not from Georgia but the interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus.
In the days leading up to the operation, the FBI, led by Trump loyalist Kash Patel, removed the head of the FBI in Atlanta. And this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to the governor of Minnesota demanding voter and census records from the state, which many analysts and the opposition see as a serious threat to the integrity of this year's November election process.
"Fulton County is now the target, the only county still in dispute over elections that have already taken place. This is the beginning of the chaos of 2026 about to unfold," denounced Mo Ivory, county commissioner. "They have taken the ballots from these facilities, out of our control. We don't know where they are taking them, we don't know what will happen to them," lamented Rob Pitts, chairman of the county commission, in a press conference outside the building. "All I know is that while those boxes were under the county's control in these facilities, they were safe and protected. We can no longer, and I, as the president of this board, cannot guarantee to the citizens of Atlanta or the world that those ballots are still safe," lamented the veteran Pitts.
Disenfranchising African Americans and Asians
Trumpism has been active in Georgia for five years, placing pawns on the electoral board, spending many resources trying to disenfranchise African Americans and Asians. In their conspiracy theories, they cling to videos that have been proven false about alleged officials taking boxes of votes in cars. Or another video showing officials changing data in reading scanners, something the Secretary of State's office tirelessly explained was nothing irregular. It was done when there were reading errors in a group of ballots that had to be reprocessed, and if there had been anything irregular, the number of voters would not have matched the number of votes, which did not happen. Steve Bannon and other MAGA world gurus have been demanding federal agents be sent, and finally, their demands have materialized.
In October, Harmeet K. Dhillon, a Department of Justice official and well-known conservative influencer, requested the same ballots through a court subpoena, but the county resisted handing them over. The Department of Justice responded by accusing county officials of violating the Civil Rights Act. In a parallel lawsuit, Attorney General Pam Bondi's team sued the entire state of Georgia to obtain copies of its voter list, which contains personal information such as driver's license numbers or partial Social Security numbers.
Similar to what is now being demanded from Minnesota. The FBI warrant presented this Wednesday requested "all voter records from the 2020 general elections in Fulton County, including those for mail-in voting, early voting, in-person voting, and any other records indicating which voters received a mail-in ballot, from whom a mail-in ballot was received, or who participated in early voting or election day voting."
The raid immediately drew condemnation from Democrats at the Atlanta Capitol. State representative Tanya Miller described the event as "an excessive use of federal power to pursue ghosts that have already been dispelled. As a former prosecutor, I believe in the rule of law, but the law requires transparency to maintain public trust. If this action was ordered by a court, the Department of Justice must immediately provide legal justification to the people of Georgia. We cannot allow the primary federal law enforcement agency to be used as a tool to rewrite history or give credence to repeatedly debunked claims about the 2020 elections," she concluded.
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was not informed of the operation and has not yet commented. Raffensperger, scorned by Trump for not yielding to his demands, managed to be reelected despite everything. And now he is seeking another public office, that of governor no less, for which he will have to defeat in the primaries the candidate also supported by Trump. Geoff Duncan, former Republican lieutenant governor of the state now running for governor as a Democrat, was unequivocal: "It is simply another repugnant attempt by Donald Trump and his administration to try to rewrite history."