Fulton County files motion seeking return of seized 2020 ballots, spokesperson says
Voters casting ballot (CREDIT: Hill Street Studios/Getty Images)
(FULTON COUNTY, Ga.) — Officials in Fulton County, Georgia, filed a motion Wednesday seeking the return of all files from the 2020 election that were seized by the FBI last week, according to a spokesperson for the county.
FBI agents last Wednesday removed 700 boxes containing ballots and other materials associated with the 2020 election from a county election site after obtaining a search warrant approved by a federal magistrate judge.
The warrant said the material “constitutes evidence of the commission of a criminal offense” and had been “used as the means of committing a criminal offense.”
The county’s new motion also seeks the unsealing of the affidavit filed in relation to the search warrant, the spokesperson said in a statement.
The statement said that because the case is still under seal, the county is unable to share the contents of the motion.
The FBI’s action comes after Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss.
Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election, and numerous lawsuits challenging the election results in the state were rejected by the courts.
A sign featuring the Department of Justice building is seen on Thursday, December 4, 2025. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The federal judge who presided over the 2019 criminal case against convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein has became the third judge to grant a Justice Department motion to unseal grand jury materials and other undisclosed evidence from the government’s investigative files.
U.S. District Judge Richard Berman of the Southern District of New York issued a four-page order Tuesday that determined that Congress — in passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act last month — clearly indicated that the materials from his criminal case should be publicly disclosed and that traditional rules of grand jury secrecy were overridden by the act.
“The ‘plain language’ of the Epstein Files Transparency Act unequivocally intends to make public Epstein grand jury materials and discovery materials covered by the Epstein Protective Order,” Berman wrote.
This is the third — and final — ruling on the Justice Department’s motions to lift restrictions on materials related to criminal investigations and prosecutions of Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
It comes one day after Judge Paul Engelmayer granted the DOJ’s motion to release grand jury materials and other nonpublic evidence from Maxwell’s criminal case.
Judge Rodney Smith granted a similar request from the Justice Department for records associated with the first federal investigation of Epstein in Florida in the mid-2000s.
Berman, who presided over Epstein’s 2019 arraignment in New York and ordered him detained pending trial, stressed the need to protect the privacy and safety of alleged victims if and when the records from the case are publicly disclosed by the DOJ.
“The Court hereby grants the Government’s motion in accordance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act and with the unequivocal right of Epstein victims to have their identify and privacy protected,” Berman wrote.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in August 2019 while awaiting trial.
(NEW YORK) — New York’s intermediate appellate court should overturn President Donald Trump’s criminal hush money convictions because his trial was “fatally marred” by faulty evidence and overseen by a judge who should have recused himself, his attorneys argued in a court filing late Monday.
Trump’s formal appeal, 17 months after a Manhattan jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, asks the Appellate Division’s First Department to reverse what his lawyers call the “most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”
Trump was found guilty in May 2024 after a six-week trial over a scheme to conceal a $130,000 payment his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep her from talking about a long-denied affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Trump reimbursed Cohen in monthly installments that prosecutors said amounted to falsified records.
“The DA, a Democrat, brought those charges in the middle of a contentious Presidential election in which President Trump was the leading Republican candidate. These charges against President Trump were as unprecedented as their political context,” Trump’s attorneys at the white shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell wrote in their appeal.
Under New York state law, falsifying business records becomes a felony if the records were falsified to commit or conceal another crime. The appeal accused Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg of trying to “twist New York law” to persuade the jury that Trump violated election statutes.
“Targeting alleged conduct that has never been found to violate any New York law, the DA concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory, which the DA then improperly obscured until the charge conference. This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction,” the appeal argued.
Leaning into a decision by the Supreme Court made after the trial that limited the use of evidence related to a president’s “official acts,” Trump’s lawyers also argued the New York Judge Juan Merchan erred by allowing evidence protected by presidential immunity. According to Trump’s lawyers, testimony from Trump’s former communications director Hope Hicks — later described by prosecutors as “devastating” for Trump — as well as evidence taken from his Twitter account and other protected conversations were improperly considered by the jury.
“The trial was fatally marred by the introduction of official Presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a President,” the appeal said.
The appeal also took aim at Judge Merchan, arguing that a $15 donation he made to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and another $20 in donations to Democratic-aligned organizations demonstrated political bias. Before the trial, the New York State Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics concluded that those donations — as well as Merchan’s daughter’s work for a digital ad agency that worked with Democratic officials — did not create a conflict for Merchan.
Following Trump’s conviction, Judge Merchan, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, sentenced him to an unconditional discharge — the lightest possible punishment allowed under New York state law — saying it was the “only lawful sentence” to prevent “encroaching upon the highest office in the land.”
U.S. President Donald Trump departs the White House on January 27, 2026, in Washington, DC. President Trump is en route to Clive, Iowa for a rally with supporters where he is expected to talk about energy and the economy in his speech. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — In the hours after FBI agents seized 2020 election ballots from an elections facility in Georgia on Wednesday, President Donald Trump posted a series of thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — and the 2016 election too.
Fulton County officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility, but said they would provide no further information.
Late Wednesday night, the president reposted to his social media platform a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden.
“China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” the post reads. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.”
That was just one of a flurry of posts and reposts by Trump making discredited claims about the 2020 election, directly tying the allegations to the FBI’s seizure of ballots on Wednesday.
“This is only the beginning,” Trump said, reposting other posts about the FBI’s action in Georgia. “Prosecutions are coming.”
The development comes after Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election, and numerous lawsuits challenging the election results in the state were rejected by the courts.
Among the statements posted and reposted by Trump following the FBI’s actions in Georgia is one on the 2016 election that falsely claims that “Barack Hussein Obama” falsified intelligence and “conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016.”
In addition to being baseless, the claim ignores the fact that Obama was president in 2016, so if he tried to overthrow the government, he would have been overthrowing himself.
The conspiracy theory about Italian military satellites is not new. In 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter.
As documented in my 2021 book, “Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show,” the conspiracy theory was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases including “The Heiress” and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates. She passed her material off to a national security council official at a supermarket parking lot in Arlington.
The Italian spy satellite theory was just one of many unsubstantiated allegations made about the 2020 election by Trump and his supporters. At a Trump campaign press conference in November 2020, lawyer Sydney Powell infamously claimed that voting machines had been rigged using software that was “created at the direction of Hugo Chavez.” This was an especially extravagant claim because Chavez, the former leader of Venezuela, had died three years earlier.
In 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to state charges of conspiracy to commit “intentional interference with performance of election duties” in Georgia and agreed to serve six years of probation and to pay a $6,000 fine.
And now it appears that Sidney Powell is back. In a post on X Thursday morning, DOJ official Ed Martin posted a picture of himself with Powell, writing, “Good morning, America. How are ya’?”
