Judge orders federal government to answer Fulton County's questions about FBI search of election hub

A judge has partially granted Fulton County's request to get more information from federal authorities about the FBI's search of the county's election hub earlier this year.

In a ruling, U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee gave the Department of Justice a quick deadline to respond to three questions surrounding the criminal investigation and affidavit that led to the search and seizure of hundreds of ballots and other materials from the 2020 election.

According to the affidavit, the search was part of an FBI investigation into possible "deficiencies or defects" in the Fulton County vote count, including the county's admission that it does not have scanned images of all the ballots counted during the original count or the recount. The investigation was initiated by a referral from attorney Kurt Olsen, who now serves as President Trump's "director of election security and integrity," overseeing the attempt to investigate Mr. Trump's loss.

Boulee has been considering the question of whether the federal government should return the documents seized during the search. Before that, though, the judge had heard arguments between the county and the U.S. government about whether the Department of Justice needed to provide additional evidence before his opinion would be published.

While the judge has denied motions to compel certain requests made by Fulton County, he ruled in court on Thursday that the Department of Justice had to share information regarding three specific dates:

• The date that Olsen referred the investigation to the FBI,
• The date that the FBI opened the criminal investigation, as identified in the affidavit,
• The date on which the Department of Justice began drafting the affidavit.

"As an initial matter, the Court notes that these questions seek an extremely small amount of information and should be simple to answer," Boulee wrote. "Indeed, the DOJ can answer these three questions by doing nothing more than providing dates on the calendar for events that it does not dispute occurred."

The judge has given the federal agency a deadline of Friday at 5 p.m. to answer the three questions. He also allowed both sides to provide supplemental briefs in connection with those answers. Those briefs will be due by May 5 at noon.

Election documents seized in Fulton County

The Jan. 28 seizure from a warehouse near Atlanta targeted the elections hub in Georgia's most populous county, which is heavily Democratic and includes most of Atlanta. Fulton County has been at the center of claims by Trump and his allies that widespread election fraud cost him reelection.

The federal government's affidavit lists multiple possible "deficiencies or defects" in the Fulton County vote count, including the county's admission that it does not have scanned images of all the ballots counted during the original count or the recount. Fulton County has also confirmed that some ballots were scanned multiple times during the recount.

Among the items seized during the search were all ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners that tally the votes, electronic ballot images created when the ballots were counted and then recounted, and all voter rolls from the 2020 election.

The county has pointed to multiple investigations by the Georgia secretary of state's office, an independent monitor, and a performance review by the state elections board, which found that, though there was evidence of "sloppy processes," there was no evidence of fraud or illegal actions that would have affected the election's result.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.