An infamous election denier kickstarted a controversial FBI raid on an election center in Georgia which has sparked fears of a bid to hijack the midterms, court documents have revealed.
Kurt Olsen was given a high-level government job last year after directly advising Donald Trump both on Jan. 6, 2021, and on how to overturn the election he still refuses to admit he lost.
The lawyer was sanctioned by judges in Arizona for making “false, misleading and unsupported” claims about elections there.
But the conspiracy theorist was rewarded by Trump and has now been revealed as the starting point for a raid, which was attended by Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, despite her job involving only foreign spying.
“The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity,” an affidavit read, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Unsurprisingly, the affidavit presented debunked claims about voting in the 2020 election, which Olsen and Trump continue to insist was rigged against the current president. According to the Times, the claims “often focus on small administrative efforts or easily explainable abnormalities as evidence of fraud.”
For instance, some in the affidavit claim the presence of “pristine ballots,” or unfolded ballots, is evidence of “extra ballots” being counted. However, the Times notes that some overseas and military ballots don’t have to be folded. Also, ballots that come in to be processed damaged can be reprinted.
Some legal experts say the affidavit should not have been signed by a judge.
“Mere suspicion is not enough to justify a search warrant,” George State University law and ethics professor Clark Cunningham told the Times. “There’s nothing in the affidavit that indicates probable cause that any person acted with criminal intent.”
The White House referred the Daily Beast to the FBI, which declined to comment.
The affidavit, signed by FBI agent Hugh Raymond Evans, instructed agents to take all physical ballots, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and copies of voter rolls from 2020.
Olsen was one of several lawyers who worked closely with Trump on 2020 election litigation. According to the House Jan. 6 Committee, Olsen, 63, called Trump multiple times on Jan. 6 and even drafted an executive order directing the Justice Department to “take voter action.”
Olsen’s pro-GOP efforts to reverse election losses didn’t end with Trump. In 2022, he filed a state lawsuit to overturn Kari Lake’s gubernatorial loss in Arizona to Democrat Katie Hobbs. That case, like the dozens of others about the 2020 presidential election, essentially went nowhere, and the Arizona Supreme Court sanctioned Olsen for making false statements.
Trump, who could end up being a lame duck president after the November midterms, has made increasingly prejudicial comments about the voting process. Last week, he proposed that the GOP “nationalize” elections.
