Election expert testifies FBI’s evidence in Fulton County ballot case ‘doesn’t make sense’

ATLANTA — A prominent elections expert told a federal judge Friday that evidence used by the FBI to justify a recent seizure of 2020 election ballots in Fulton County, Ga., “doesn’t make sense.”

Ryan Macias, a former official with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said the list of irregularities identified by the FBI did not amount to a crime and that the witnesses the government based its investigation on appeared ill-informed.

Witnesses called by the FBI “use contradictory terminology and it represents a misunderstanding of how elections work,” Macias said.

“Most of the witness statements have no real basis,” he said. “There was a lack of information and the information we relied on does not reflect reality, what really happened.”

The testimony came during a hearing on the custody of Fulton County ballots and election materials, which were seized by the FBI in January during an election center raid, and whether the federal government showed “total disregard” for the county’s rights. Fulton County sued and demanded the documents be returned last month.

In court Friday, County Attorney Father Lowell criticized the government’s witnesses and information, which were presented in a since-unsealed affidavit that is “full of inaccuracies.”

The affidavit, which was unsealed in February and largely repeats previously investigated allegations of voter fraud, said the evidence was based on interviews with conservative activists and a referral from Kurt Olsen, a Republican who attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Olsen was appointed by President Donald Trump to investigate the 2020 election within his administration.

Lowell argued that the government’s witness list was untrustworthy because it included, in part, “someone who has been sanctioned twice by the courts for lying about the election,” referring to Olsen.

Friday’s hearing is the first time the FBI’s investigation into 2020 election fraud has gone to public hearing. Trump, who spent years falsely claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him, defended the seizure.

Defending the government, Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, told the judge that Macias’ testimony was “woefully inadequate.”

In his closing argument, Duva said the FBI agent who wrote the affidavit, Hugh Raymond Evans, did his best. The inclusion of the conflicting information – which Macias discussed in his testimony – indicates that he was engaging in an honest exchange with the magistrate who signed the warrant.

Evans is a “conscientious officer who may have missed a thing or two,” Duva said, but the judge’s job is not to assign a score. Rather, he said, it is a question of whether the officer showed a callous disregard for the county’s rights.

“Whether there is an indictment remains to be seen,” Duva said. “All we can judge now is the record we currently have.”

Lowell argued there was no evidence of a crime in the affidavit because there was no evidence of intentional wrongdoing.

“The only thing that turns normal election irregularities into a crime is intent,” he said.

To rebut Fulton County’s arguments that they needed to recover the records, the government’s lawyer played body camera footage of Fulton County Elections Director Nadine Williams telling a federal agent that they “could make paper airplanes” with the records for all she cared.

Georgia became a priority for Trump after the state played a key role in Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory. There have been at least nine legal challenges from Trump and his allies involving Georgia over allegations of irregularities and other voting problems. They were all either abandoned, refused, or rejected by the judges.

Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, a Republican, in a phone call to “find 11,780 votes” — roughly Biden’s margin of victory in the state.

Outside of Georgia, the FBI has also subpoenaed records related to a controversial audit of the 2020 election in Arizona, another key battleground state.