A federal judge ruled that the government can keep 2020 election ballots from Fulton County, Georgia.
U.S. District Judge J.P. Boulee wrote, “While the Affidavit was certainly far from perfect, this is not a situation where an officer left out all the facts that might undermine probable cause or where an officer intentionally lied.”
“This Court acknowledges that the events leading up to this case are, in a variety of ways, unprecedented,” he wrote, and noted that the “seizure in this case was certainly not perfect.”
“More specifically, Petitioners did not establish that their rights were callously disregarded either through the lack of probable cause, omissions in the Affidavit or by the manner of the execution of the seizure,” the judge explained. “Petitioners also failed to show that they have a need for the documents or that they will be irreparably harmed without the documents, especially since they have copies of them.”
Lawyers for the county previously argued that the document seizure “callously disregards multiple Fourth Amendment rights,” calling the activity a “gross intrusion” of the state’s role in its election process.
The Trump administration had argued in a February filing that a judge “authorized the FBI to execute a search warrant and seize those records.” Efforts to return the records aim to “disrupt an ongoing federal criminal investigation.”
The U.S. was “scrupulously careful to comply with any Fourth Amendment constraints: it seized the records only after obtaining a warrant based on a magistrate judge’s probable-cause determination,” the DOJ added. “The agents who executed the warrant (after seeking an amended warrant out of an abundance of caution) had no reason to doubt its validity or the magistrate’s determination. That is the antithesis of ‘callous disregard’ for constitutional rights.”
