Nine months after FBI agents sealed off Fulton County’s election warehouse and hauled away roughly 700 boxes of 2020 presidential election records, the federal investigation into Georgia’s most populous county remains open, unresolved, and without a single criminal charge. The probe, which has grown to involve more than 200 agents and roughly 260 analysts according to an internal memo, continues even as a new state audit found no problems with the machine-tabulated ballots at the center of years of unproven fraud claims.
A January Raid Years in the Making
Federal agents executed a search warrant at Fulton County’s Election Hub and Operations Center in Union City on January 28, 2026, which the FBI described only as court-ordered activity. Fulton County District 4 Commissioner Mo Ivory initially said on social media that agents had filed an incorrect warrant and left empty-handed, but that they intended to return with a corrected one. They did, and investigators ultimately seized roughly 700 boxes of 2020 election documents along with data pulled from the county’s ballot tabulation machines. The raid grew out of the Trump administration’s long-standing, though never substantiated, belief that Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won statewide by 11,780 votes, was marred by widespread fraud.
The Investigation Expands to Hundreds of Agents
By July, an internal memo described the Fulton County matter as a priority investigation and called for roughly 260 analysts to be assigned to it, with more than 200 FBI agents drawn from field offices around the country deployed to Georgia to assist. A 19-page affidavit used to justify the original search cited missing ballot images, inconsistent recount totals, and chain-of-custody problems with physical ballots, arguing investigators needed the original materials to determine whether any irregularities were administrative errors or intentional. Critics, including Georgia election officials, say the affidavit leaned heavily on theories that earlier state and federal reviews had already debunked.
A Federal Judge Pushes Back on Part of the Probe
The investigation has not proceeded unchecked. A federal judge rejected a Justice Department subpoena that sought the names, home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of Fulton County’s 2020 election and poll workers, a request that county officials and voting-rights advocates said amounted to an attempt to intimidate the ordinary citizens who staff polling places. Separately, a judge ruled the Justice Department could keep the seized 2020 ballots in its custody while the broader dispute over the investigation’s scope continues to play out in court.
A New Audit Backs the Machine Count
Adding to the dispute, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office released an audit finding that machine-tabulated ballots proved highly accurate, while hand-counted ballots in several pilot precincts actually produced more errors than the state’s voting system did. State election officials pointed to the audit as further evidence that the technology Fulton County used in 2020 functioned as intended, findings that echo the outcome of Georgia’s 2020 count itself, which was tallied three separate times, including once entirely by hand, with each count affirming Biden’s win.
No Charges, No Timeline, Nine Months In
Despite the scale of the investigation, no indictments have been announced, and the FBI has given no public timeline for when the probe might conclude. Fulton County officials maintain there is no credible evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election, a position shared by state election administrators who note the vote has already withstood three separate counts. Voting-rights groups describe the ongoing search for evidence as a pressure campaign against local election workers rather than a genuine fraud investigation, while the FBI’s Atlanta field office has repeatedly declined to comment on the record about its internal plans.
What’s Next
With no end date announced, the investigation is likely to remain an open question heading into Georgia’s slice of the November 3 midterm elections, and county officials privately worry that the subpoena fight and ongoing scrutiny could make it harder to recruit poll workers this cycle. Litigation over the seized ballots and the rejected worker-data subpoena is expected to continue well into 2027, regardless of whether the broader criminal probe produces any charges. For now, Fulton County is left operating in the middle of an unresolved federal investigation while simultaneously preparing to administer another high-turnout election under national scrutiny.
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