If you’re reading this post, then you’re likely aware of last Wednesday’s developments from Fulton County, Ga., where the FBI executed a search warrant of the county election office for materials from the 2020 election.
But the act itself builds from a long history, and includes a substantial amount of context. Before weighing in, here are the facts and background:
What happened on Wednesday
An official copy of the warrant is available here. It specifies that four categories of election materials were to be seized:
- One, “[a]ll physical ballots from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County;”
- Two, “[a]ll tabulator tapes,” or printouts of vote tallies from election machines, “for every voting machine used in Fulton County;”
- Three, “[a]ll ballot images,” or electronically scanned and stored copies of cast votes, “produced during the original ballot count beginning on November 3, 2020;” and
- Four, “[a]ll voter rolls from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
The stated purpose of the warrant was to investigate possible violations of federal election law, related to record retention and defrauding the public with ineligible voter applications and votes.
What happened in 2020
President Donald Trump has insisted since 2020 that he was the rightful winner of that year’s presidential election, including Georgia’s 16 electoral votes.
The original machine count there found that former Vice President Joe Biden won by 13,558 votes, and a full hand recount of the presidential race — undertaken given the closeness of the result — showed a margin for Biden of 12,284 votes. The 1,274-vote discrepancy was within what’s called “the margin of error:” It’s improbable that a combination of human error from the original count, and the error inherent in hand-counting more than 5 million ballots, would produce the exact same tally as the original. The recount merely confirmed that Biden had won a narrow race.
Two subsequent recounts — one a full recount requested by the Trump campaign, performed by vote-counting machines, not by hand; and the other a partial audit at the request of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to double-check the legality of voters’ signatures on certain absentee ballots — reconfirmed the same. The reported margins progressed from 13,558, to 12,284, to 12,670, to 11,779. Subsequently, on January 2, 2021, President Trump told Secretary Raffensperger by phone, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.” The audio of that call is available here.
However, five days later, the Trump campaign withdrew its lawsuits against Georgia state officials that challenged the results in local, state, and federal courts, having conceded the lack of merits. One of the suits named 20 local and state election officials, including Fulton County’s election director, as defendants, and argued that county election officials “not only defrauded . . . Republican poll watchers and the press, but also deprived every single Fulton County voter, Georgian, American, and Petitioners of the opportunity for a transparent election process and have thereby placed the Election Contest in doubt.”
What has happened since
Two and a half years later, in June 2023, the Georgia State Election Board unanimously dismissed an investigation of Fulton County poll workers alleged to have committed election fraud at State Farm Arena, a major entertainment venue used in 2020 for vote tabulation. A report compiled by both state and federal law enforcement investigators concluded that “all allegations made against [Ruby] Freeman and [Shaye] Moss,” who were central to the investigation, “were unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.” Freeman and Moss eventually won a favorable verdict in the amount of $148 million against Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani in a defamation case. The suspected happenings at State Farm Arena were referred to in the dismissed complaint excerpted in the previous paragraph.
None of the above clears the Fulton County election board from “disorganization and a lack of a sense of urgency in resolving issues” in previous elections, according to a performance review completed by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office in January 2023. An admission from a Fulton County attorney to the Georgia State Election Board in December 2025 would seem to confirm that assessment. The attorney said that county election workers mishandled tabulator tapes from early voting in 2020 — which, recalling item number two from the warrant mentioned above, were presumably seized as part of Wednesday’s FBI raid — in violation of state regulations.
Republican board member Janelle King stated, “At best, this is sloppy and lazy. At worst, it could be egregious, and it could have affected an election.” Secretary Raffensperger contended that a “clerical error at the end of the day does not erase valid, legal votes.”
In a speech before the World Economic Forum earlier this January, President Trump reiterated his longstanding belief that “[2020] was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that. They found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” Several days later, around the time of the execution of the search warrant at the Fulton County election office, Trump promoted messages on his social media platform, Truth Social, which:
- Revived the accusation about malfeasance at State Farm Arena that was dismissed by the Georgia State Election Board two and a half years ago;
- Alleged the sorts of widespread illegal voter registrations in the state that were withdrawn in court five years prior; and
- Claimed that the clerical failures admitted to the state election board in December 2025 amounted to the illegal certification of votes.
He has since told podcaster and former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, “The Republicans should say we want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least many, [or] 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes — we have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now, you’re going to see something in Georgia, where they were able to get, with a court order, the ballots, you’re going to see some interesting things come out. But, like, the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it.”
This isn’t a complete timeline of the developments relevant to federal law enforcement activity inside the Fulton County election office last Wednesday, but it suffices for constructing a narrative of reality.
This ends the “explainer” portion of this post. An additional editor’s note is below.
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Now — what to do with all this information?
It would be insufficient to recount all of it . . . think about all of it . . . and not connect it to something broader: something which points to communications technology in the 2010s and 20s, its strategic use by President Trump and those in his political orbit, and how it confuses Americans’ relationship with the political process. Many editors would say that this is too indulgent; that it is an “academic exercise.” But I’m sorry. This is concrete, it’s about the world we live in, and it continues to go unaddressed in American society.
These are not my words, but Steve Bannon’s: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” He said this to author Michael Lewis in 2018. Like the news media or hate it, the challenge for most Americans with President Trump at the center of our politics is the same: It is not just journalists but average citizens who are put into the position of understanding a new “Fulton County” every other day. If such an event seems unlikely to harm the immediate, material wellbeing of the country — and, by this short-sighted standard, the seizure of voting materials in one county in one state does not qualify — then most people are not incentivized to pay much attention. That is an explainable consequence of the times. We are all flailing our arms and legs to keep our heads above a deluge of, let’s call it, “political excrement.”
Nevertheless, there are innumerable information sources at work trying to portray some version of these or any other headline-grabbing events. The president often promotes a subset of them: Anonymous social media influencers, individuals who call themselves “independent journalists,” and alternative cable news channels are all examples linked in the bullet points above. These information sources flourish, even while they are rewarded not for the ultimate veracity of their work, but the initial explosiveness of their claims. This is true across the political spectrum, even if it is most relevant with President Trump; my very first story for this website called out some individuals on “the left” for exactly the issue I am describing here.
Now, combine this new state of seeking political information with one other fact and one other reasonable assessment. One, local news, a relatively trusted source of information closer to home, continues to disappear across the country, leaving the superabundance of alternative sources described above and the national press as alternatives. Two, researchers and mainstream news professionals themselves have documented left-of-center bias in the national press, from UCLA to UPenn, and The Washington Post to The Economist, which merits a certain kind of skepticism of it — just not outright distrust.
Where, in such a world, are doubters about the reality around them supposed to go for trustworthy information and defensible conclusions about situations like the one in Fulton County? And the answer is: to sources that hold themselves accountable to the facts and the conclusions of what they say. Wild allegations are a dime a dozen; tracking down their truth or falsity is rarer yet essential to America’s stability. I will vouch that you actually will find quite a few of these sources in the so-called “legacy media,” even if these media are far from flawless. Competitors should be built on what they try but sometimes fail to do, not on using those failures as a limitless excuse to tell untruths. Declare is attempting to be that first kind of competitor: Whereas sources with some left-of-center bias but a pledge to the facts tell some truthful stories from left-of-center perspectives, we make a similar pledge while uplifting certain right-of-center voices or values. It is inevitable we won’t always fulfill the pledge; “to err is human.” It is up to us, then, to correct the record when we stray.
Given these aspirations, the only defensible conclusion about the FBI’s confiscation of Fulton County election property has to be in the realm of this: It is an extraordinary act, without modern precedent, that could be justified only by reasonable suspicion of a crime of devastating harm to self-government. In half a decade, no legal process has caught so much as a whiff of such suspicion. In the continued absence of one, the damage is being wrought not by the accused, but the accusers, who have not been deterred in general by failed court challenge after failed court challenge, or personal fine after defamation settlement; whose complaints are filed endlessly on social media but disintegrate quickly inside courts of law; not a defense of a “shining city upon a hill,” but a campaign built on a hill of dust.