Law Enforcement Theater in Fulton County

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Hey everyone, Ellie here, wishing you a happy Friday. Well, on Wednesday, Pam Bondi testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee. We talked about it last week. I suggested six. Six important substantive questions that she needed to answer. You may or may not be shocked to find that she answered precisely zero of them. Maybe she even answered negative of them because some of them are even less clear now.

Than they were before. That's issue number one. The complete lack of transparency, the complete lack of candor. Now look. The AG can't just answer every question he or she is asked. He can't just go into pending investigations and commit to things that are ongoing. But there are ways to provide some meaningful information. Are you investigating?

anyone around Jeffrey Epstein criminally. That can be a yes or no. Are you actually criminally investigating the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good? You can just give a yes or no. You don't have to delve into the details. So many other questions could have been answered in a fairly meaningful substantive way. Instead, Oh my gosh, what did we get from Pam Bondi? We got

Claims that Donald Trump is the greatest president in U.S. history. That's something she said on the floor so much for independence. that nobody's ever been more transparent than Donald Trump. I can probably name a few, uh, that, oh, nobody should be wasting time asking her tough questions because the Dow just hit 50,000. We should all be having a DAO party, I guess. And when she was asked questions, pointed questions by members of the committee.

She lashed out like a middle schooler. You would not accept this behavior. If you went to a school debate event and you had a middle school kid who was participating and acted like this, you'd pull him out. You'd pull them out five minutes in. and give him a talking to in the parking lot. And Pam Bondi It it's hard for me to even keep in mind sometimes. She is the attorney general of the United States. She is the chief law enforcement officer of this country, and she is so far out.

over her skis. Her conduct is outrageous. She is, you know, I wrote a piece uh for the New York Times right when she was confirmed. And I basically said, look, on paper, she's qualified. We need to give her a chance. The question is going to be, is she independent and credible enough?

And I raise that for a couple points. First of all, I was wrong about the second two things. Well, I wasn't wrong. We need to see. But the answer is no. She's not credible enough. She's not independent enough. But also to show you I didn't have it in for Pam Bondy. I was more than willing.

to give her the benefit of the doubt. Now she's had a year and change in office and yeah, she has earned all of the negative plaudits. I don't know if anyone really, I mean, obviously there's going to be a political split on this. left versus right, but even centrists, even Republicans, I don't know too many other than people who are just purely playing politics who would try to argue with a straight face that she's done a good job as attorney general.

Okay. Well, one of the topics that the attorney general was asked about and provided no insight. Is the topic of this week's podcast. Hopefully, this gives you some insight into the situation down in Fulton County, Georgia. As always, love to hear your thoughts, questions, comments. Keep them coming. Letters atcafe.com.

When federal agents raided a Fulton County, Georgia elections office last month and seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots, red flags flew. This week we've learned more through the unsealing of key prosecutorial paperwork, and a search that at first appeared shady has now been confirmed as something still works. First some background. Last month, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Missouri, I did not misspeak, Missouri, we'll get to that in a second.

wrote an affidavit seeking authorization to search a Fulton County elections office in Georgia. The US attorney in Missouri, Thomas Albus, is a Trump appointee, but he's not exactly some novice fire-breathing Alina Haba type. Albus was a federal prosecutor for 17 years, and then a state judge before his appointment by Trump and his party line confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

A federal magistrate judge in Georgia, Catherine Salinas, reviewed the paperwork and found that prosecutors had established probable cause that federal election-related crimes were committed, and that the search would likely yield evidence of those crimes. Stalinus took the bench in 2015, but was not a political appointee. Magistrates are chosen by the district court judges for that district, not by any president.

Earlier in her career, Salinas worked for rural legal aid on the Mexican border, and then for the Fulton County Public Defender, not exactly the resume of a typical MAGA firebreather. Obvious questions jumped off the page. Why would federal prosecutors in Missouri investigate purported election-related crimes in Georgia, 550 miles and several federal districts away? Albus, it turns out, had been assigned the task of investigating 2020 election fraud nationwide by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Why then would Bondi insist on using valuable prosecutorial resources to re-re-re-re-re-investigate election fraud claims that have been exhaustively probed and debunked? By Republicans and Democrats, by Trump's own top advisors and experts, by judges and prosecutors, by Congress, and by expert outsiders alike. Why would prosecutors execute a search warrant to seize the Georgia ballots during the pendency of an ongoing civil lawsuit seeking to obtain those very same records?

What was Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has no enforcement authority, doing on the scene of a criminal investigative search? The answer to all of the above questions, in a word, politics, or in another word, ego. The investigation appeared to spring from Donald Trump's exhausting, delusional claims of twenty twenty election fraud, the search effort itself an effort to manifest his fantasies through blunt force.

If we act like there was major fraud, perhaps we can make it so. This week, when a federal judge in Georgia ordered the Justice Department's search warrant affidavit unsealed, we got our first meaningful look at the probe and the proffered justifications for it. Count me thoroughly unconvinced.

At first glance, the affidavit, unsealed in a lawsuit brought by Fulton County officials to challenge the search itself. appears to present a non-ridiculous claim that there were errors in the 2020 vote count in Fulton County. Indeed, county officials have acknowledged certain minor errors in ballot preservation and tabulation, some of which seemingly worked in Trump's favor.

But things fall apart quickly from there. Most importantly, the sourcing for the factual claims in the affidavit lands somewhere between dubious and nuts. Consider, for example, the section titled Duplicate Ballot. The FBI explains in the affidavit that its source is an unnamed quote data analyst, end quote, whatever that means, who claims he quote, downloaded the data online from quote zebra duck, one word.

and believed it was from an open records request from Fulton County, but was not positive as he was not a part of acquiring the data and received the data second hand. End quote. So the FBI forcibly entered a county elections office and seized thousands upon thousands of ballots. Based on the word of some unnamed guy who got some unspecified information off the internet from Zebra Duck and doesn't know where the esteemed Mr. Duck got the information in the first place. Okay.

And the affidavit specifies that the investigation itself, and I quote, originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olson, presidentially appointed director of election security and integrity, end quote. You'll not be shocked to learn that Olson is a dogged, discredited 2020 election denier who spoke to Trump several times on January 6, 2021.

Olsen has made claims about election fraud that leaders of Trump's own DOJ found, quote, not viable, and he has been sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for making, quote, unequivocally false. claims about fraud in the 2022 Arizona governor's race. It's tough to determine who's least reliable, as between Olson, the unnamed data analyst, and Mr. Zebraduff.

Even were it properly sourced, the search warrant affidavit suffers from a fatal structural flaw. The FBI declares in the affidavit that its investigation focuses on two potential federal crimes. First, failure to comply with laws requiring the retention of documents for 22 months after any election, which is a misdemeanor. And second, obtaining or casting false voter registration documents or ballots.

That's a felony. Note that the five-year statute of limitations on the felony election fraud count appears to have lapsed. The election was November 2020. Here we are in February of 2026. The limitations period for the other retention count likely started running at the end of the mandatory 22 month post-election period. So that one could survive, but it's a lowly misdemeanor.

Most fundamentally, for all the claims of error, the FBI never alleges that any actual person committed any actual crime. Never does the affidavit specify any particular individual who intentionally mishandled or miscounted ballots, and mistakes without intent are not crime.

Why then would Judge Salinas have approved the warrant request? We can't know for sure at this point, but the legal bar of probable cause is fairly modest. Nor would the judge have the ability to question the witnesses and other sources whose information comprised the basis for the request. And frankly, I speak from prosecutorial experience here.

Judges don't always subject search warrant affidavits to the most probing scrutiny. I've had judges flip through warrant documents and sign off within a minute or two. I don't offer that as an excuse, but I offer that as a potential explanation. At bottom, the newly unsealed affidavit confirms the worst suspicions that accompanied the FBI's raid on Fulton County.

This is a politically driven investigation built on a decrepit foundation of half-truths and wish casting. The Justice Department has taken a smattering of proven instances of non-dispositive error. and mash them together with a tired slate of disproven allegations of fraud. The result is an intrusive search warrant, likely to go nowhere, but certain to be held up as confirmation of wild 2020 election theft conspiracy theories.

This is political score settling masquerading as criminal enforcement. Don't be fooled by the repackaging. Thanks for listening everyone. Stay safe and stay informed.