Transcript: Trump FBI Ballot Box Raid Worsens as Damning Info Emerges

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As you may have heard, last month the FBI seized a lot of ballots from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. This raises serious worries that Donald Trump will use law enforcement to try to interfere somehow in the midterm elections. Now this story’s taken a darker turn, though. It turns out the FBI search was precipitated by a well-known election denier who constantly traffics in debunked claims about Trump’s 2020 loss. This suggests another level of politicization of the FBI—one that’s truly dangerous, including for 2026. So we’re trying to parse through the real implications of this with Lauren Groh-Wargo, the CEO of Fair Fight Action. Lauren, nice to have you on.

Lauren Groh-Wargo: Thanks for having me.

Greg Sargent: This is a complicated story, so let’s take it piece by piece. Let’s start with this guy, Kurt Olsen. He’s apparently the person who got this FBI investigation going. Lauren, who is Kurt Olsen?

Groh-Wargo: Kurt is one of the important players. He is an attorney who has had several bar investigations against him. He is close to the White House and has been given broad authority by Trump directly to oversee intelligence and security issues related to the elections. It’s kind of a classic, very nebulous role. And there’s actually been reporting that this guy is disliked within the White House, but he just goes around any normal process.

Sargent: Okay, so Kurt Olsen is named in the FBI search warrant affidavit as the person who made the referral to the FBI for a criminal investigation of Fulton County. The FBI got a search warrant and seized a lot of ballots and other materials. The basis for the referral, though, was a bunch of debunked bullshit about 2020, according to this affidavit. And the FBI did this anyway—the search, yes? Can you walk us through that piece of it?

Groh-Wargo: Yeah, absolutely. So at the core of this alleged crime—there’s no crime, to be clear—is a 263-page report authored by a whole set of discredited election deniers. And Greg, you cannot make this stuff up. This 263-page report is all rehashed, debunked conspiracy theories about 2020. And that is what then has become the evidence that led to the raid. And the raid, which happened two weeks ago, was done by national FBI agents, not our local folks here locally—clearly an entire political hit job.

Sargent: Right, the real thing—a real White House–sanctioned thing, most likely. So Olsen is the one who writes the referral using all this debunked nonsense as “evidence.” And then the FBI acts on that, yes?

Groh-Wargo: That is correct. And so then two weeks ago today, about two dozen FBI agents showed up at the warehouse in South Fulton County where the ballots have been stored, demanding access to them.

There was a bunch of back-and-forth about the validity of the warrant, but they ultimately—and to give you a visual of this, they’re literally there with chainsaws and big clippers to go break into these cages where these old things are stored. And it’s about 700 boxes that they removed on pallets. And it’s not just 2020 ballots; it’s the 2020 voter files. So there’s, like, electronic data they were getting. It’s a whole slew of information that they just took out of there and put on trucks.

Sargent: So what exactly is the FBI doing with the seizure of Fulton County materials? What’s the goal? There’s the ostensible goal, which is to investigate “criminal activity” based on nonsense, as we’ve established. But what’s the real goal, do you think?

Groh-Wargo: Political parties persuade you for your vote, Greg. Autocrats try to destroy and control who can vote and how votes get counted. So this is just a very big escalation in a very known strategy.

And why getting the federal government’s hands on ballots in particular is an escalation is they have no right to ballots. Ballots remain in the custody of local elections officials. The federal government does not run elections—no matter what Donald Trump thinks, it’s very clear in our Constitution.

The good news is that Fulton County is standing up and fighting back. They have filed action in federal court to get the evidence unsealed. So we now know for sure this is based on a bunch of old bunk. And number two, the county has asked for the materials to be returned. And there’s a very serious federal judge looking at this right now.

Sargent: All right, so let’s get into why this is so alarming. Media Matters flagged an example of at least one well-connected right-wing pundit predicting that the FBI is going to do a similar ballot seizure in Arizona.

Here’s the question: After the voting in the 2026 midterm elections, could the FBI seize ballot boxes in, say, a state with a close Senate race or a House district with a close contest by getting a search warrant on some similarly bogus basis and then executing the search? And what would happen to the vote counting if that happened?

Groh-Wargo: I mean, this is the question, right? How does this manifest? Donald Trump, I believe it was last year, said that he should have seized voting machines and is mad at Bill Barr for holding him back in 2020.

In the last two weeks, as part of the FBI raid in Atlanta, there’ve been huge escalations in his rhetoric. For example, he said Republicans should just run elections—we’re going to nationalize elections. As we’re speaking here today, the House is looking at the so-called SAVE America Act, which would literally block millions of Americans from being able to register and vote. So they are moving on all fronts.

On the “could they do this?”—there are very specific laws around what the federal government can and cannot do in terms of law enforcement being at polls and ballots. Ballots are in the custody of local elections officials, period. And the other thing is federal law enforcement—there’s actually a law on the books that federal law enforcement cannot be near polling locations. Federal law enforcement—that would include ICE, the FBI—cannot be near polling locations.

Now, the DOJ has a long history of having monitors at polling locations, which is different than law enforcement. Why I mentioned those two pieces is because any change in those behaviors would be a breach of law. So there is a massive effort going on right now, Greg, to make sure that local elections officials, county attorneys, and state elections officials know their rights and know the law so that should the FBI show up, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume any county elections worker is going to risk arrest if that happens.

But what they can do is immediately get the right lawyers on the phone and immediately file for an emergency action in the court to get them returned. So here is a very dark piece of good news: If this was going to happen, I’m glad it happened this early in the year, because now it is not a hypothetical. I can tell you the elections officials, lawyers, and advocates are now getting ready much earlier to be ready for this later in the year.

The courts are now attuned that this could very much happen. And we have seen time and again that the courts weigh in—in a big way—in that post-election period and shut down nonsense. In fact, I believe Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson just went on The View and said that she’s very confident that the courts are going to act. So I think we should assume they’re going to try everything. I mean, they said they have—we have to believe them.

So it’s going to take a huge effort of average citizens volunteering and being poll workers, and then using our legal system to try and smack this down so that we could have a count that is fair.

Sargent: Right. So just to be clear, though, the nightmare scenario unfolds a little bit something like this: What we’ve seen in Georgia and Fulton County is kind of a model for Trump, or someone in the White House, or someone in the DOJ who’s been ordered by someone in the White House to go and say to the FBI, Get a warrant for seizing the ballots in this jurisdiction because there’s criminal activity there, there’s fraud.

So, you know, hopefully the local elections officials are up on their rights. Hopefully they’re in touch with their lawyers, but maybe it actually comes to pass that the FBI seizes some boxes and then everybody goes into court and there’s a fight over that. But the damage could be done, right? The counting could be interrupted by something like this. Is that the nightmare scenario?

Groh-Wargo: That is one of the nightmare scenarios. The only thing I can say to make people who are listening feel better on this is it’s very different that the judge allowed this one to go for six-year-old ballots. It’s very different to sign off on active ballots or ballots that are being counted. It’s very different in terms of sort of legal analysis and the practical analysis. So there’s that.

But we all know we’re dealing with a bunch of vigilante thugs here. Look at what they’re doing to American citizens on the streets of Minnesota. So that only gives me so much peace. The reality is what you say—that is one of many pieces here. I mean, the bottom line is they’re trying to control and block people from registering, intimidate people from voting. They’re already using all that rhetoric and then trying to monkey with the count, right? This is autocratic behavior.

And so for every piece of the way, we need informed citizens who understand their vote as their power. We need to vote in large numbers so that we can attempt to wrestle the countdown and have a fair count, even if it takes time. And the only other thing I would say is we saw extraordinary lengths they did in 2020 that we had never seen before. And it was awful and it was painful, but we did wrestle to the ground an outcome.

And so my expectation is that we’re in for a fight. They’re going to try new things. They’re testing the waters; they’re moving the needle. We’re going to see more of that in the first half of the year. And what advocates like ourselves—how we view our role here, Greg—is to then learn the lessons now, use all of this as dry runs so that we are best prepared collectively to navigate the fall.

Sargent: Okay, so we’ve had a number of experts come out pretty forcefully and raise alarms about this affidavit and the basis for this FBI search. Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney, said, “It’s hard to see how the contents of this affidavit rise to the level of probable cause.” Andrew Weissmann, former general counsel for the FBI, described it as “not normal.” And the Republican secretary of state of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, has also sharply criticized this whole thing.

Here’s my final question for you, though: We’re not going to hear any Republicans in Congress or other high-profile Republicans—maybe one or two here and there—come out against this thing. And that is a major part of the problem here. There’s no longer bipartisan condemnation of what appears to be extreme lawlessness. Isn’t that the basic problem here?

Groh-Wargo: Absolutely. Can you imagine if you just flip this entire conversation and it’s Obama’s FBI raiding a Republican county—and you name the state—what would be happening here? I mean, Fulton County is the largest county in Georgia. It has the most African American voters registered of any county in the South. This is outrageous.

And I agree: We’re going to need forceful pushback. And I will remind any Republicans listening to this: If they start raiding ballots and upending the count, it could cause Republican officials to not be seated. It could cause all kinds of downstream chaos to state legislatures, to other local officials. They didn’t just raid Democratic ballots in Fulton; those are Republican votes and many others. We have Republican members in the legislature.

So it doesn’t matter your partisanship; this is a bridge too far. There’s a reason we have local elections in this country. And Trump is going to do his best to try to change the rules and intimidate and nationalize. But at the end of the day, it’s going to be all of our local citizens running at the local level and being really informed of their rights. And then having a really strong pro-voter apparatus ready to fight on every front in every place in the fall.

Sargent: Lauren Groh-Wargo, I think the real key thing that you said here was that extreme vigilance is going to be required, and it’s going to require all of us to be part of that. Otherwise, you know, all bets are off and the very worst could happen. Lauren, thanks so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it.

Groh-Wargo: Thanks for having me.