Top Election Denier Involved in FBI’s Georgia Election Office Raid

The Department of Justice lawyer behind the FBI raid on a Georgia county’s election operations center used to work under a state attorney general who sought to overturn the 2020 election results.

The sealed search warrant that authorized a federal raid Wednesday at the Fulton County election office was proffered by Thomas Albus, the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, and signed by Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas.

Albus previously worked at the Missouri attorney general’s office as the first assistant to then–Attorney General Eric Schmitt while Schmitt actively worked to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Schmitt was elected to the Senate in 2022.

In December 2020, when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit attempting to convince the Supreme Court to toss the election results from three Biden-won states, Schmitt’s office filed an amicus brief supporting his effort and drummed up support from 17 other Republican attorneys general.

Years later, the second-in-command from that same office has allowed the federal government to play out President Donald Trump’s ultimate revenge fantasy on Georgia, where he has baselessly claimed the election was stolen from him.

At a press conference Thursday, local officials said that they had not received a full copy of the search warrant, and were still not aware of where the seized records had been taken or why. Seven hundred boxes of election-related records were seized in the raid, according to Sherri Allen, chair of the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections.