Fulton County FBI Search Was Ordered By Trump’s Election-Denying Lawyer

The FBI search of election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, that led to the seizure of ballots from the 2020 election was ordered by Kurt Olsen, who previously helped President Donald Trump challenge his loss in that election and is now working for the Trump administration.

The revelation comes from an affidavit filed by the FBI and disclosed on Tuesday. That affidavit led a judge to authorize the Jan. 28 raid on Fulton County election offices in order to investigate whether election officials in the county illegally altered or tampered with the 2020 election results in a manner that could have cost Trump the election.

On Election Day in 2020, Trump immediately claimed that fraud led to his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, a claim that has since been exhaustively disproven. Nevertheless, he mounted a nonstop public and legal campaign to overturn the results. Much of this effort focused on Georgia, where he attempted to pressure Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find 11,780 votes,” the exact number needed to put Trump ahead of Biden. Raffensperger did not oblige. No fraud was found in Georgia or any other state, and Trump eventually pivoted to trying to block the certification of Biden’s win, culminating in the Jan. 6 insurrection and his second impeachment.

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Now back in office, Trump is following through on his promise to get revenge on his enemies. This includes those people he imagines stole the 2020 election from him. Fulton County is his first target, despite Georgia having conducted multiple recounts and audits of the election and found no evidence of fraud.

Olsen, a proponent of Trump’s election lies, now appears to be directing that vengeance campaign from the federal government where he acts as the “Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” according to the affidavit. He is being fed any intelligence he wants from U.S. intelligence services to prove the false theory of election fraud, according to Politico.

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Following Trump’s 2020 election loss, Olsen made his way into the center of the election denial community. He advised Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on his failed lawsuit challenging the election results, teamed up with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to promote election fraud lies and in 2022 represented GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake when she challenged her own loss on similar false fraud claims. A court sanctioned him for making “false factual statements to the Court” in the Lake lawsuit.

The affidavit shows how much the FBI’s raid of Fulton County election offices is based on Trump’s debunked election fraud theories. It cites two reports connected to election denialist Kevin Moncla, who ProPublica reported was at the center of the investigation. One report was filed as a complaint to the Georgia State Election Board in 2022 and the other report was published in January by the Election Oversight Group.

Olsen is also not the only election denier who is working in the Trump administration and cited in the report. Clay Parikh, who served as Lake’s star witness in her election fraud case and is also tied to Lindell, is noted in the affidavit as “a Special Government Employee, a temporary officer or employee in the U.S. Executive Branch appointed to work for up to 130 days.” Parikh has also stated that the predictions of QAnon, the conspiracy that Trump would purge a cult of liberal pedophiles, “are dead on.” He is cited for reviewing Fulton County ballot tabulator tapes and believing that they had been compromised.

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