An FBI press officer approaches the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center in metro Atlanta on January 28, 2026.Arvin Temka/AP

While the country was still reeling on Wednesday from the killing of two Americans by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, the Trump administration undertook one of its most blatantly authoritarian actions yet, deploying the FBI to seize ballots and voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily blue area in metro Atlanta that has been an epicenter of the president’s conspiracy theories about the election he lost. “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” Trump vowed in Davos last week. Fulton County appears to be the newest victim of Trump’s long-running retribution campaign.

The raid was as much about the next election as the one six years ago. The capture of ballots in a large urban county in a key swing state is exactly what Trump contemplated when he tried to overturn the 2020 election—federalizing the National Guard to seize voting machines, something he now says he regrets not doing—and sets a chilling precedent for how........

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