Whatever Trump is doing with the Ga. ballots, he's befouled them, rendering them useless in any court action

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"These are the original voting records, original absentee ballots," Fulton County Commissioner Marvin Arrington, a Democrat, told ABC News regarding the materials seized by the FBI. "Once that stuff leaves our custody, where is the chain of custody? How can we know if we're going to get everything back? How can we know if they might do something mischievous?"

Lawfare:

In their quest to prove the steal, Georgia—a state Trump lost by 11,779 votes—became a particular fixation. Rudy Giuliani and others seized on video of ballots being counted in Fulton County, Georgia, to promote their false claims of fraud, publicly accusing election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman of rigging the vote. References to Georgia cropped up in Trump campaign documents, including a “strategic communications plan” and two draft executive orders, which would have directed the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security to seize Dominion Voting Systems machines. And then there was Trump’s infamous call to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia Secretary of State, in which Trump repeated debunked claims of fraud and pressured Raffensperger to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to win the state.

Even after Trump was indicted in two jurisdictions for his efforts to overturn the results of the election, he and his allies continued efforts to discredit the vote. In 2024, a shift in the composition of the Georgia State Election Board—an administrative body that can promulgate voting regulations for the state—reinvigorated those efforts. Since then, the five-person entity has been controlled by a pro-Trump majority. Trump has gone so far as to describe the three members of the MAGA majority as “pit bulls, fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory."

All of which is why it was hardly surprising when the board’s new majority voted to reopen an investigation into Fulton County’s conduct during the 2020 election. The board also sent subpoenas seeking troves of documents related to the 2020 election, and in July asked the Justice Department for assistance. The following month, Justice Department official Ed Martin wrote a letter seeking election records. Trump’s Justice Department followed up again in October, purportedly in response to the Fulton County board’s request demanding election records—and filed a civil suit when the county did not comply. A Fulton County official has publicly signaled that these letters were related, both to each other and to Wednesday’s search.

None of this, however, explains exactly what federal law enforcement officials are doing executing this search warrant. Nothing in the public record remotely suggests that a crime was committed in the tallying of Georgia’s vote—even after numerous audits and court cases challenging the results.

Nor does any of this explain why Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard showed up for the occasion.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/we-have-questions-about-the-fbi-s-fulton-county-search

In addition to the spoiling of any evidence of anything regarding the ballots, there's the open interference by the president in whatever the Trump-enabling plaintiffs who got a court order to halt the routine destruction of old ballots and store them intended to prove, ostensibly on his behalf; on behalf of the perp who was indicted in that very county for trying to get state officials to change the outcome of the vote; a case in which several of his co-defendants, including Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and Scott Hall, pleaded guilty and agreed in those pleas to provide evidence against the remaining defendants.

This may well be a dry run for the midterms, seizing ballots and waiting to see if anyone stops them. That's likely even if other things are true, as well, such as a continuation of Trump's obsessively demonstrated desire to obscure the treason he committed in Georgia and elsewhere.

That conflict of interest, and Tulsi Gabbard's presence at the snatch and grab with and her reported contact with Donald Trump as it was happening, or happened, puts the former defendant nearly at the scene of the crime removing evidence instrumental in contradicting his claims about winning the Ga. presidential contest; namely the actual results.

Trump's open collusion with Tulsi Gabbard in getting his hands on the ballots is an obvious extension of his original crime; charges which were opportunistically dropped against the remaining defendants, despite guilty pleas which included promises of incriminating testimony against the others.

I see that Georgia is now suing to get them back, and they need to because they contain sensitive voter information. In effect, they're now worthless to any criminal investigation, other than this conspiracy of Trump, his DOJ, and Gabbard to break the chain of custody and effectively tamper with voter ballots.

In fact, the order should go out from the courts to destroy them as they were originally scheduled to according to Georgia law; but for their emerging value in this new case of ballot tampering with the very same election results; by the very same defendant state prosecutors just let off the hook for previous attempts to tamper with them.