(The Center Square) – The FBI raid on a Fulton County Board of Elections warehouse did not surprise a former board member, while others question the motives behind the search.
Agents took 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election amid continuing questions from President Donald Trump, who lost Georgia to former President Joe Biden by 11,780 votes. Biden defeated Trump 306-232 in electoral college votes; Georgia contributed 16 to the Democrat’s win, not enough of a swing (32 points) to reverse the 74-point setback.
Fulton County is the epicenter of the questions. The Georgia State Election Board voted last week to send a letter to Attorney General Chris Carr requesting more scrutiny of improperly signed tabulation tapes from Fulton County that include more than 300,000 votes.
Federal officials have said very little since Wednesday’s FBI search warrant was executed and have not indicated what they hoped to find.
Stan Matarazzo served on the Fulton County Board of Elections for eight years and left the board before the 2020 elections. Fulton County had some issues during his tenure, but nothing so significant that it would have changed an election’s outcome, Matarazzo said Thursday in an interview with TCS.
He said he was not surprised by what happened on Wednesday.
“You got to remember, in 2020 there were all these new rules about how to deliver ballots, including mail-in ballots that could be put in boxes and stuff,” Matarazzo said. “None of that existed before that. That was all due to COVID.”
The Justice Department sued the Fulton County Election Board for its election records. Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said Thursday that the records would likely have been turned over in a few weeks.
“We in Fulton County have nothing, nothing, nothing to hide,” Pitts said in a news conference shown on Fox5 Atlanta’s social media page.
Georgia senators criticized the search warrant during the Thursday morning session.
Sen. Donzella James, D-Atlanta, called the search “nonsense” and said there was “no rigging” or “fake votes” in the 2020 election. She also lambasted the use of the FBI for the search.
“The FBI exists to keep people safe, to stop violent crime, to stop terrorism, to protect the public,” James said. “It is not supposed to be the president’s personal play thing, using federal law enforcement to chase political grievances of 2020? This is wrong.”
On the FBI website, the agency lists areas it investigates: terrorism; violent crime; cyber; transnational organized crime; counterintelligence and espionage; weapons of mass destruction; civil rights; public corruption; and white-collar crime.
Trump posted several references to the raid on social media Thursday. One post was a retweet from Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, who is a candidate for lieutenant governor.
“I was one of just four Georgia senators who originally called for a special session in the aftermath of the 2020 election,” Dolezal said in the post on his campaign page. “Glad to see the FBI here working to uncover the truth.”
The secretary of state’s office did not comment on Wednesday’s raid. Brad Raffensperger said claims that the unsigned voter tabulation tapes would have changed the election were not true.
“The basis for these claims is that Fulton County admitted to sloppy election administration and not following a State Election Board rule,” a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office said. “There is no mechanism in law to overturn the election based on not following this rule – as it wasn’t even part of the election code – it was a procedural rule.”
