Was the FBI’s raid of Georgia’s Fulton County elections office legal? | The Excerpt

On the Friday, February 6, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: The FBI’s recent seizure of election documents in Georgia, a state whose election President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won in 2020, has legal experts concerned. USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Aysha Bagchi joins The Excerpt to unpack the story.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Podcasts: True crime, in-depth interviews and more USA TODAY podcasts right here

Dana Taylor:

Two recent elections related developments are playing out today that have some election officials concerned. The first relates to the FBI seizure of election documents in Georgia, a state whose election President Donald Trump continues to falsely claim he won in 2020. The second involves recent public comments made by the president that elections should be nationalized in 15 states. Both of these actions may be illegal, as the Trump administration crossed a line.

Hello, and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Friday, February 6th, 2026. Here to help me unpack this important and evolving story is USA TODAY Justice Department Correspondent Aysha Bagchi. Aysha, thanks for hopping on.

Aysha Bagchi:

Sure thing. Happy to be here.

Dana Taylor:

Aysha, start us off, please, by telling us about the raid. Where was it and what happened?

Aysha Bagchi:

This raid was at a very large election center in Fulton County. It's the Fulton County election hub near Atlanta. It's a hub that actually I've been to a couple times. I was covering the 2024 national elections down in Georgia. It's a very important hub when it comes to vote tabulation and it stores a lot of voting records, and this is tied to much of Atlanta. Fulton County is the most populous county in Georgia, so it's a very important county for understanding what happens in the state as a whole. Joe Biden's win there in 2020 helped propel him to victory across the nation. And the FBI conducted a raid here where it was authorized by a search warrant to seize physical ballots, to seize ballot images, and to seize some records tied to vote counting, vote tabulation in Fulton County, all in relation to the 2020 election.

Dana Taylor:

And has the FBI given a compelling reason for the raid? What did they say they were investigating?

Aysha Bagchi:

The FBI has been pretty tight-lipped when it comes to this investigation. When I reached out to them, they told me just that they were engaged in some sort of court-authorized law enforcement activity. But the search warrant that they used to conduct this raid has been released, and that tells us something about what they are looking at. It cited two different criminal statutes. One has to do with maintaining voting records, that those records have to be maintained after a federal election for 22 months. So it looks like part of what they're looking at is whether Fulton County did that after the 2020 election.

And then the second one has to do with potential threats or coercion or fraud in relation to the voting process. So it looks like the FBI is looking into some sort of potential crime related to that. What specifically that involves, we don't know. The government would've submitted an affidavit in which they would've described specifically what the details really are of what they're looking at here, but that affidavit remains under seal. So we haven't really gotten a picture of the evidence that a magistrate judge looked at when she signed this warrant. It is true that for a judge to sign a warrant, the judge has to find that there's something called probable cause. That means basically just looking at the evidence that the government presented, a judge is saying that there's a reasonable belief that a crime may have occurred. It's not the type of process that you have when you have two sides often in criminal cases, making their cases, but it does say that the judge saw something that she thought gave the government license to seize these records.

Dana Taylor:

Perhaps the biggest question looming over the FBI's action is one of legality. What are the experts saying here?

Aysha Bagchi:

It's a bit of a challenge for legal experts right now because there's so much we don't know. Because the affidavit hasn't been released, we don't actually know what evidence the government presented to a judge. So it's hard for outside legal experts to be able to weigh in too much on what happened here. But we do know that Fulton County has filed a motion challenging the legality of the search warrant and basically asking a court to make the government return all the records it seized and to halt the government from searching the records, doing anything with those records until a judge has decided whether Fulton County should win on its motion. So we know a legal challenge is going on here that's challenging the lawfulness, but even that is under seal. So unfortunately, right now there's a cloud of mystery still shrouding what's happening here.

Dana Taylor:

Following the 2020 election, Trump and his allies launched dozens of lawsuits across the country, all seeking evidence of voter fraud or rigged elections. Did this include Georgia and is there any new evidence that might come to light?

Aysha Bagchi:

It did include Georgia. It's important to note, Trump and his allies filed about 60 lawsuits around the country. Nothing from that was successful in showing that there was any type of widespread voter fraud that would've overturned the results of the 2020 election. They did file lawsuits in Georgia that did not work. Rudy Giuliani, who was a very close ally of President Trump, alleged that particular election workers in Georgia had engaged in some sort of fraud or rigging. Those election workers later sued him in court for defamation and they won an enormous judgment, more than $100 million for defamation, which basically means you have to show that what the person said was false and that they said it in some sort of reckless fashion.

And then Georgia also brought charges against President Trump, essentially arguing that he unlawfully tried to overturn election results in that state as part of his efforts to overturn election results across the country. That case never went to trial for the president. It has now been dropped. There's a little bit of a backstory around that involving the lead prosecutor. But another reason it was dropped has to do with the fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election. And a prosecutor who took over this case decided that that would push this case out by many years and that was a reason to just drop the charges entirely. But Trump did try very much to overturn the Georgia election results. That state only had 16 presidential electoral votes. That wouldn't have been nearly enough for Donald Trump to have reversed the overall national election results because Joe Biden won that election by winning several swing states, not just Georgia.

Dana Taylor:

It's been over five years now since the 2020 election. Does the statute of limitations apply?

Aysha Bagchi:

This is a bit of a tricky question. I've spent some time looking into it. Basically, for most federal statutes you have a five-year statute of limitations. What that refers to is, for a lot of different crimes prosecutors only have a limited window in which they can bring those charges. And as you pointed out, the election was more than five years ago. But if you look at the search warrant and the particular crimes that it looks like the FBI is ... Potential crimes that the FBI is looking into, one of them, that one about preserving records for 22 months, that would mean that someone could have hypothetically committed a crime by failing to preserve records anytime up to at least a significant part of 2022. And then if you apply the five-year statute of limitations from then, that means that the federal government could have until 2027 to bring charges for that kind of hypothetical crime.

When it comes to the separate criminal statute that was cited in the warrant, that has to do with this idea that someone may have engaged in threats or coercion or fraud related to the voting process or vote counting process in the 2020 election. That's where it seems to get a bit more complicated about how the government can be saying that the statute of limitations hasn't closed for those charges. I don't want to say I know what's going on here because there is a lot of mystery still, but hypothetically speaking, it could be the case that the federal government is looking into something someone did after that election that relates to that type of charge.

For example, you can engage in a conspiracy to violate a federal statute and you can do actions in furtherance of a conspiracy even later on, like destroying evidence or lying to federal investigators. Again, I'm just throwing some thoughts out here about how the government could be saying that it still has time to bring that type of charge, but the truth is until we get some more details about what evidence they're looking at and what they're even considering as a potential crime, it's hard to know how the government would still be able to bring charges. But maybe they have a theory for that.

Dana Taylor:

Some of the media have suggested that this raid is now evidence that the White House is now directly running the FBI. Aysha, is there any precedent for this?

Aysha Bagchi:

Well, in terms of recent precedent, a lot of this activity falls out of what we are used to. If you look at the post-Watergate era, basically after the presidency of Richard Nixon, a lot was done both in terms of formal rules and norms and practices within the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, to basically separate the White House from that kind of investigative and law enforcement branch. And the point of that is that you don't want law enforcement to be inappropriately influenced by what a particular president who's elected and serves a political role wants done. You want some objectivity to what law enforcement is doing in this country.

This isn't the only example where we've seen those norms erode during the current Trump administration. Here, there's reporting that Donald Trump had a phone call with his National Security Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, where she put him on the phone with FBI agents who engaged in this raid. That appears highly unusual for the president to be involved in the raid. And frankly, in court, it could create this impression that there is improper political interference in the investigation. We've seen that be a potential problem for Trump in some other cases. His Justice Department secured indictments against some people that he has explicitly targeted. James Comey, who was his FBI director in his first administration for some time, Letitia James, the New York Attorney General, who has also sued Donald Trump previously. The Justice Department was able to get charges against both of them, though they've now been dropped. And in those cases, both Comey and Leticia James said that these charges should be dropped because the president is engaging in vindictiveness, we're being selectively prosecuted, and that can be unconstitutional.

They didn't get a ruling on that issue because the cases were dismissed for another reason, but that was a problem, a potential problem in those cases. And seeing the president be involved in this type of raid presents that potential problem for the administration again. It is something that, at least in recent decades, looks pretty new.

Dana Taylor:

How might all this impact the high-stakes midterms happening later this year? Is the Trump administration laying the groundwork to challenge those results in November?

Aysha Bagchi:

That might be the case. I have talked to lawyers looking at this, who ponder whether this sort of investigation into 2020 might not just be about Trump wanting to vindicate himself in some way or rewrite the history of what happened with that election and ultimately with the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th of 2021, as part of an effort by his supporters to overturn those election results, that it could also be about establishing some framework or groundwork for people to cast out on future elections if Trump or his allies don't win. In the midterms, we're talking about whether Republicans hold on to the House and the Senate, hold on to Congress.

So it could be the case that these investigations are designed to stoke suspicion about the nation's election processes and whether you can trust the results, especially if those are results that people in power aren't happy with. In that way, this could affect the midterms and future elections even after that. And it could also be part of trying to lay groundwork for increased federal intervention in state election processes in a way that could also be designed to try to benefit the president, his allies, other people in power. We'll have to wait and see, but there could be a tie-in to future elections.

Dana Taylor:

I want to turn the focus now to recent statements President Trump has made on two occasions that elections in 15 states should be nationalized. Here's what he said in the Oval Office last Tuesday. Let's give a listen.

President Trump:

The federal government should get involved. These are agents of the federal government to count the votes. If they can't count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.

Dana Taylor:

Aysha, is what he's suggesting even legal?

Aysha Bagchi:

The US Constitution includes some language actually, about how congressional races are supposed to be conducted, congressional elections are supposed to be conducted. The Constitution specifically authorizes states, not the federal government, to set locations and processes around those elections. Now, the Constitution does also include language that authorizes Congress to regulate certain areas and what states are doing in that space, so Congress does have some power here. But nowhere does the Constitution say the president has the authority to be regulating those elections. So there's no question that if this ended up getting some legs, there'll be plenty of lawyers out there who are ready to challenge the administration.

It's also not quite clear what Trump is proposing here or potentially laying the groundwork for. Is he going to try himself through executive action to try to do something to nationalize elections or elections in certain states that he wants to have more control over? Is he trying to push Congress to do something? In the space of Congress, there could be a broader argument about whether Congress has legal authority and what that legal authority looks like, but certainly in terms of the president doing it unilaterally, it doesn't look like the US Constitution authorizes that.

Dana Taylor:

Aysha Bagchi is a USA TODAY Justice Department correspondent. Thank you so much for joining me on The Excerpt, Aysha.

Aysha Bagchi:

Glad to be here.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for her production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back Monday morning with another episode of USA TODAY's The Excerpt.