FBI raids Fulton County, Georgia election office to seize 2020 ballots; DNI Gabbard joins

On January 28, 2026, FBI agents executed a search warrant — issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas — at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in Union City, near Atlanta, and carried away the county's physical ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls from the 2020 presidential election. Fulton County, which Donald Trump narrowly lost along with the state of Georgia in 2020, has for five years been the centerpiece of his debunked claims that the election was stolen. The seizure followed a December 2025 Justice Department lawsuit demanding the records, which itself grew out of a Georgia State Election Board subpoena and an October 2025 demand letter from the attorney general. County officials, who were not notified in advance, said roughly 700 boxes of materials were removed; board chair Robb Pitts said he could no longer assure the public that "those ballots are still secure."

Drawing particular alarm was the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, an intelligence official with no domestic law-enforcement authority, who entered the election center during the operation, has run a parallel inquiry into purported 2020 fraud, and — by her own account and reporting from ABC News — arranged a phone call so the president could personally thank the agents executing the search. Senators across both relevant committees questioned why the nation's top intelligence officer was inserting herself into a domestic criminal matter tied to an election the president lost; Sen. Mark Warner warned the episode "should alarm every American." Fulton County sued on February 4 to recover the records, and a federal court later unsealed the warrant and supporting affidavit.

The Standing records this as an act of election denial executed through the criminal-justice and intelligence apparatus of the federal government. It is distinct from the FBI's separate pursuit of Maricopa County, Arizona's 2020 audit records and the Justice Department's demand for Wayne County, Michigan's 2024 ballots — the same campaign in different states, with different actors, mechanisms, and dates — and is preserved here as its own entry in that pattern.