Federal judge helped FBI agent correct flaws in Fulton County search warrant application

Since the FBI seized more than 650 boxes of 2020 election records from Fulton County, Georgia, one major question has remained unanswered: How did the Department of Justice (DOJ) convince a federal judge to sign off on the search warrant?

In their lawsuit seeking the return of the materials, Fulton County officials have alleged that U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas, who signed the warrant, was duped by an FBI agent who submitted an affidavit that relied on long-debunked and factually unsupported election fraud claims from notorious conspiracy theorists.

Now, new documents released in Fulton County’s lawsuit show that Salinas found flaws in the FBI agent’s original affidavit and, rather than rejecting the search warrant application, helped the agent refine his request and his flawed theory of probable cause.

The morning of the FBI’s raid on Fulton County’s main election hub, Salinas emailed FBI special agent Hugh Raymond Evans, saying she was ready to swear out his search warrant request after he made two corrections.

First, she said his initial affidavit could be read as seeking election records for all elections and not just those from 2020.

“Was that intentional or can you revise it to clarify?” she asked.

Second, she noted the agent presented alleged “deficiencies or defects” in Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 election as “a foregone conclusion that there was an intentional violation of law.” She asked him to couch his language. 

“Could that paragraph be revised along the lines of Paragraph 10 which reads ‘If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law,’” the judge wrote. 

Roughly 30 minutes later, Evans responded, saying the first issue was not intentional and that the corrections had been made. 

Around 10 a.m., Evans called Salinas, who swore out the affidavit and signed off on the warrant, setting the FBI’s raid in motion.

It is unclear whether Salinas’ actions crossed ethical lines. But the email exchange is noteworthy because it shows that Salinas clearly engaged with the contents of the search warrant application and identified several issues. That suggests she did not simply overlook its flaws, as some have suggested.

At the same time, Salinas — who has served as a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Georgia since 2015 — did not raise other prominent issues.

Though Salinas, who has served as a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Georgia since 2015, noted some problems in Evans’ affidavit, she did not raise other prominent issues.

Most notably, she didn’t question whether the statute of limitations for the two laws cited in the warrant had run out. 

Evans’ affidavit indicated that the FBI was investigating “unknown persons” for possibly violating provisions of the National Voter Registration Act outlawing voter intimidation, election interference and fraud. But the five-year statute of limitations for those alleged violations ran out long before the FBI sought the search warrant. 

Fulton County officials have maintained that Salinas should have rejected the FBI’s application outright because the statute of limitations for the alleged offenses had expired and the bureau could not establish probable cause that evidence of a punishable crime exists.

In his search warrant application, Evans identified five supposed “deficiencies or defects” in the county’s 2020 vote count. During a hearing Friday, Ryan Macias, the county’s elections expert, responded to all five and explained that they do not constitute fraud or intentional violations of federal voting laws.