The F.B.I.’s Extraordinary Seizure of Voting Records

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, what we're learning about the FBI's highly unusual seizure of voting records last week in Georgia, the presence of the nation's top intelligence official at the scene, and the stunning phone call that that reveals how personally involved president Trump has become in the investigation. I spoke with my colleague, Devlin Barrett. It's Tuesday, February 3. Devlin, this story begins with a dramatic scene which unfolded a few days ago in Fulton County, Georgia. Can you just describe that to us? Sure. So take a live look at the Fulton County Elections Office near Atlanta. Last Wednesday morning, a group of FBI agents show up for a massive undertaking. The collection of a huge volume of stuff related to the twenty twenty election in Fulton County. FBI agents spent the afternoon inside the records warehouse for the Fulton County Georgia Board of Elections. Fulton County contains the city of Atlanta, so obviously it has a lot of election records. But specifically, what the agents were there to get were the paper ballots from that election, but also other things such as voter rolls, such as tabulation tapes, all of which is essentially data and documentation about the twenty twenty election. But just to be clear, every single ballot or close to it from an election six years ago is taken by the FBI out of this building. Right. And it takes hours to load all those hundreds of boxes into trucks and bring them to an FBI storage facility. And what exactly is the rationale for this search? I think by now, most people understand president Trump has a fixation on Fulton County and its recurring place in his baseless claims of election fraud in 2020 when he lost reelection. But those claims of fraud, we've covered them many times on this show in Fulton County. They have been so thoroughly litigated and relitigated that it would be hard to understand why a new investigation into them would ever be undertaken. Right. This stuff has been investigated before. These ballots have been counted multiple times to make sure they got the count right, and it's always checked out. And so when you see an investigation like this, when you see an FBI search warrant like this, it raises the obvious question, well, why now? What has changed? What new or different information do we have to justify this search? And the reality is the affidavit that is the underlying rationale for the search warrant, we can't see. That's still sealed. So we don't know exactly what evidentiary argument was made to justify this, but we know what the theoretical argument is. Right? It's just not possible to have lost Georgia. It's not possible. Trump's been making it more or less for six years. In Georgia, the secretary of state began illegally processing ballots weeks before election day. That somehow, some way Thousands and thousands of counterfeit ballots …