In extraordinary scenes this week, FBI agents left a warehouse south of Atlanta, Georgia, with hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other documents related to the 2020 presidential election.
Federal authorities have not revealed the purpose of the search and seizure, and the warrant is under seal.
However, it's believed to be a new effort from the Trump administration to prosecute its claims, which have not been substantiated, that voter fraud in Georgia led to a Democratic victory.
Here's what we know.
What happened in Fulton County?
On Wednesday morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation served a search warrant at the election headquarters of Fulton County, Georgia.
While the warrant was sealed and the FBI has not offered an explanation, a cover sheet for the warrant included a list of items the agents were seeking, AP has reported.
This includes the following documents related to the 2020 election in Fulton County:
- All ballots
- Tabulator tapes from scanners that tally the votes
- electronic ballot images created when ballots are counted and recounted
- All electoral rolls
Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts told the Associated Press he was kept in the dark about what they were seeking.
"I could peek in but I wasn't even allowed in the area to see what they were taking," he said.
Photographs showed boxes of ballots marked 2020 general election being loaded by the FBI onto trucks.
While the warrant was initially for the county elections office, the FBI had to reapply after learning the documents they sought were in a secure area at the elections hub.
Why is Fulton County significant?
Fulton County, which votes overwhelmingly Democratic, has been the target of President Donald Trump since he narrowly lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Trump has long insisted that voter fraud in the county cost him a victory in the state.
Georgia is the largest swing state, with 16 electoral college votes.
Fulton County has a population of about 1.9 million and is the most populous county in the state's capital, Atlanta.
If the name sounds familiar, it is because it is where the president was booked for an alleged conspiracy to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results.
Trump's mugshot was widely circulated around the world, but after a brief booking process, Trump left the Fulton County jail on bail for $312,000.
In November, a judge from Georgia dismissed the case against Mr Trump after the prosecutor said he would not pursue the charges.
It was one of several cases dropped against Trump following his return to the White House.
Does this signify a new investigation or legal challenge?
The search in Fulton County may indicate that Trump is continuing to pursue his so-far unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, with some critics saying he is using his administration to pursue his political foes.
Trump seems to be acting on his earlier comments this month at the World Economic Forum, where he said charges related to the 2020 election results in Fulton County were incoming.
Last week, before the Fulton search and seizure, the FBI's special agent in charge of the Atlanta office was dismissed without public notice.
Though an FBI search like the one in Fulton County requires authorisation from a federal magistrate judge, it wasn't immediately clear what information authorities submitted to demonstrate probable cause of a crime.
The US Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was seen at the facility despite not being part of the FBI or other federal law enforcement authorities.
A senior administration official said in a statement that Gabbard "has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure".
Gabbard has been central to the Trump administration's efforts to cast doubt on the intelligence community's conclusions of Russian interference on Trump's behalf during his successful 2016 campaign.
It is believed her presence may be laying the groundwork for the federal government to assert that the 2020 race he lost was somehow tainted by foreign meddling.
If Gabbard believed a foreign intelligence service tried to swing the election, she is obligated to inform the intelligence committee, top democrat in the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Warner said.
"Or she is simply attempting to inject the non-partisan intelligence community into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimise conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy," Warner said at a committee hearing Thursday.
How have Democrats and Republicans reacted?
Democratic officials called the search an attack on democracy.
Georgia state representative Saira Draper said the Trump administration was trying to sow seeds of distrust ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
"Once they start investigating Fulton County, they will say they found something suspicious," she said, on the floor of the state House.
"It doesn't have to be real; it just needs to offer a pretextual justification for what will happen next. And what happens next is going to depend on the backbone and integrity of the people in this room."
Republicans, meanwhile, generally characterised it as a justified action necessary to determine the truth.
"What we saw yesterday is being characterised as a raid — it's being sensationalised in the media; it's being sensationalised here in this room," Georgia state representative Victor Anderson said.
"What we saw yesterday was the lawful execution of a lawfully obtained federal search warrant that was signed by a US magistrate court judge. That's part of the process."
ABC/AP
