Fulton County chair: FBI raid was ‘a serious attempt to overturn and to take control of elections’

The FBI seizure of 2020 election records last month was “a serious attempt to overturn and to take control of elections in Fulton County, Georgia,” Robb Pitts, the chair of the county board, said Thursday.

Testifying at the first Fulton County elections board meeting since the raid, Pitts pointed to comments President Donald Trump made about “taking over” elections in “15 places,” including Atlanta, Detroit and Philadelphia. Fulton is home to Atlanta. 

Pitts said he’s spoken to election commissioners in those other cities, “because they’re watching very closely what’s happening here.”

“If they’re successful here in Fulton County, in taking over our election, it’s going to spread,” Pitts said. 

At least one GOP state lawmaker has called for the state to take over Fulton County’s elections, as a Republican-backed law allows it to do in certain circumstances.

Pitts criticized the raid, noting that the first warrant produced by the FBI was signed by a Missouri judge, rather than a Georgia judge. Attorney General Pam Bondi assigned Thomas Albus, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to oversee election integrity cases nationwide shortly before the seizure. The FBI quickly returned with a warrant signed by a federal magistrate in Georgia, taking nearly 700 boxes of election records. 

The county sued to recover the records, and moved to unseal the affidavit in support of the warrant, which was made public on Tuesday, leading to considerable criticism for its reliance on debunked conspiracy theories. 

“The affidavit, in my opinion — I’m not an attorney — but it’s not worth the paper that it was printed on,” Pitts said. 

Even if Fulton County officials get the records back, Pitts warned that the chain of custody has been destroyed. 

“As long as those records were in the custody of Fulton County in that very secure warehouse — and it is very secure — they were safe and secure,” Pitts said. “But the moment that that last FBI truck pulled away from our elections hub… I have no idea who has those records. I have no idea what they’re doing with those records. So we, Fulton County, can no longer be responsible for anything that’s happened with those records.” 

Pitts ended his testimony by dismissing a recent call by a Republican state senator running for lieutenant governor to have the state take over administration of Fulton’s elections.

“I’m sure that there’ll be others because when you make a statement like that, that gives you 10 or 15 seconds of fame on the local news,” Pitts said. “Well, that’s not going to happen here in Fulton County, Georgia. We have run successful elections.”