Citing BS, Bondi Steals Ballots
The election fraud freaks are back.
The cranks, kooks, and crooks from 2021’s “Stop the Steal” movement are back in a big way. They’ve been recruited by Thomas Albus, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, whom Attorney General Bondi tasked with finally finding those “11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” For a year now, Albus has wielded the power to issue subpoenas nationwide. So far, the best he’s been able to come up with is a pile of long-debunked claims made by a bunch of weirdos in Georgia.
Those frivolous claims undergird the warrant for the FBI’s January 28 raid on the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in Atlanta. Knowing that multiple courts and state investigations had already rejected their allegations, the Justice Department nonetheless presented them to federal Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas to show probable cause to seize all ballots, tabulator rolls, ballot images, and voter rolls from the 2020 election. There’s a word for this in the law, and it rhymes with unethical.
On February 5, Fulton County sued to get their stuff back and requested that the court unseal the affidavits sworn out by FBI Agent Hugh Evans in support of the warrant. Notably, Paul Brown, the longtime head of the FBI’s Atlanta office, resigned the week before the raid. While no reason for his departure was given, it matches a pattern of career officials leaving on the eve of an inappropriate exercise of prosecutorial power by Pam Bondi’s goons.
The case was assigned to Judge Jean-Paul Boulee, a Trump appointee, who ordered the Justice Department to unseal the affidavit on Tuesday.
The first kook to make his appearance in the document was Kurt Olsen, a MAGA lawyer involved in countless lawsuits on behalf of Kari Lake, Mike Lindell, and, of course, Donald Trump. Olsen coauthored Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s complaint asking the Supreme Court to throw out all the votes from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Michigan. And he actually managed to get himself sanctioned in Arizona for making “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” in a suit to force the state to use paper ballots — something which it already did.
The president named Olsen a special government employee tasked with investigating election fraud. Politico reports that he’s being given access to highly sensitive and classified material, and, according to one source, “Every time he hits a roadblock, he just calls POTUS.” The affidavit says that “The FBI criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.”
