Judge won’t order DOJ to return seized 2020 ballots to Fulton County

By Tierney Sneed

(CNN) — A federal judge said Wednesday he would not order the Justice Department to return ballots from the 2020 presidential election it seized from Fulton County, Georgia, rejecting a request by county officials.

Judge JP Boulee said the county had not met the high legal bar that would allow him to intervene, even as he acknowledged that “events leading up to this case are, in a variety of ways, unprecedented.”

The order comes months after the FBI searched a Fulton County elections office in January and seized election materials. That search was based on a warrant application that leaned on allegations of election fraud that have long circulated in far-right circles. The county quickly filed a lawsuit to retrieve the documents.

The FBI has been probing what the DOJ has described as irregularities in how Fulton County carried out the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump has falsely claimed was rigged.

Fulton County officials have proposed in court filings the criminal investigation appears to be a “pretext to acquire records that this Administration was unable to quickly secure via the civil litigation process.”

But the Justice Department has argued that theory is “nonsensical for multiple reasons” and that the county had not met the high bar required for ordering the seized materials be returned.

The FBI moved seized the election materials just a few weeks after opening a criminal probe, an unusually fast pace for a case of its kind, experts previously told CNN.

Meanwhile, the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections is trying to block the Justice Department from gaining access to the personal information of thousands of 2020 election workers.

CNN’s Aleena Fayaz, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.

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