Fulton County Election Investigation Update: Evidentiary Hearing Yesterday on Motion to Claw Back FBI-Seized Evidence
In January, the FBI executed a search warrant on the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center and seized over 650 boxes of election materials from the 2020 election. The warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge and based primarily on evidence from two Georgia State Election Board complaints. The Gateway Pundit has extensively covered those two complaints over the past four years.
The three petitioners, Fulton County, the Fulton County Board of Registrations and Elections, and the Board of Commissioners, in their official capacities, have petitioned the court to claw back those documents from the FBI and Department of Justice, claiming they were seized unlawfully and that this seizure violated the First and Fourth Amendment rights of the petitioners.
Initially, the probable cause affidavit was challenged under Rule 41g, a motion to return property obtained through an unlawful search and seizure. A federal judge ordered mediation between the two parties, which failed last week. An evidentiary hearing was then ordered.
Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge J.P. Boulee of the Northern District of Georgia heard from two witnesses offered by the petitioners: Fulton County Clerk of the Superior Court Che Alexander and the Elections Group's Ryan Macias.
In order for Fulton County to retain the records from the Department of Justice, they are required to meet a four-part substantive test. According to VoterGA's Garland Favorito on X, those questions are:
- Did the government display a "callous disregard" for the plaintiff's constitutional rights?
- Did the plaintiff have an individual interest in and need for the material?
- Will the plaintiff be irreparably injured by denial of the return of the property?
- Does the plaintiff have an adequate remedy at law for the redress of their grievance?
Pitts v. USA Evidentiary Hearing
Fulton Ballot Seizure Criminal Investigation
Why are We Here?
Its Friday morning and we are attending an unprecedented “evidentiary hearing” for a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal procedure in the Pitts v. USA case challenging the… pic.twitter.com/jv2mpBKXTn— Garland Favorito (@VoterGa) March 27, 2026
Favorito and his wife Tamara, who are intimately involved in the election investigation and several cases in the State of Georgia, were in attendance for the hours-long hearing yesterday.
According to Favorito, they spent "all day" on question #1, "callous disregard", of the substantive test. "There's no conceivable way that you could reach a conclusion that there was callous disregard for the plaintiff's right because the [office of the] Clerk has no constitutional rights, number one, and the DOJ adhered to the normal procedures for getting the search warrant," Favorito stated.
"Today, we spent five hours asking the question whether or not the FBI displayed a 'callous disregard'. They had the affidavit which has five different areas, any one of which would have justified probable cause. So if four of them were wrong, they would still have probable cause," he continued.
Question #2, "Did the plaintiff have an individual interest and need for the material", was argued that it fails because in June 2024, Elections Director Nadine Williams had previously requested to the court, in a case brought by Favorito, that the ballots be destroyed, thus negating any "interest of need for the material."
A video was played during the hearing where this request was made before a Georgia court. So is the petition about retaining something with "an individual interest and need for the material" or is it about destroying evidence that could support the claims made in the probable cause affidavit?
Petitioners argued it was because they didn't have room for the election material, however, Favorito pointed out that the request was made three weeks after they purchased a $30 million, 660,000-square-foot warehouse for elections.
The argument regarding question #3, "Will the plaintiff be irreparably injured by denial of the return of the property?", is laughable.
"They actually tried to say that they would [be irreparably injured] for a reason that was just so unbelievable because they said well, now with all of this exposure, there's all these open records requests and we have to have the original records in order to fulfill those open records requests," Tamara Favorito said. "I just wanted to stand up and scream, 'You've got to be kidding me!...Now they want to fill the open records requests!"
Ryan Macias, who worked for the non-governmental organizations The Elections Group at the time, also testified. Favorito said that during the hearing, it came up that Macias was paid $400 per hour for 50-plus hours worth of work and was involved in the elections process in Fulton County. "By default, being conflicted, that should have been enough to boot his testimony right out of there," Favorito stated.
In January, The Gateway Pundit reported that Joseph Rossi, who is party to an amicus brief submitted in this case, testified before the Georgia State Election Board last January that The Elections Group was party to an email in which Fulton County acknowledged that it was aware of a discrepancy in the audit-turned-hand-count in November 2020.
This discrepancy was eventually discovered by Rossi and confirmed by Governor Brian Kemp. It became the subject of SEB Complaint 2021-181 and part of the probable cause affidavit in the warrant obtained by the FBI.
The Gateway Pundit will follow-up with a more detailed breakdown of the claims, and rebuttals, made in the Petitioners' brief.
Favorito joined the Why We Vote podcast on Badlands Media last evening to discuss the hearing. For that specific segment, watch here or in the video below:
For the entirety of the Why We Vote podcast episode, including a demonstration on flipping votes, click here or watch below:
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