Discussion
RE: https://esq.social/@SuffolkLITLab/116925515071976416
The background for this is that despite the 2020 election being past the statute of limitations for prosecuting anyone for any election-related crime, the FBI earlier this year somehow got a search warrant to seize ballots and records from Fulton County, GA, and has been mining these records to find evidence, any evidence, of anything.
They have also issued subpoenas for other records, but those have been successfully challenged in court.
This highlights an important difference between a subpoena and a search warrant in criminal cases.
A subpoena is an order, issued on request of a prosecutor, to produce documents or testimony. If you think the subpoena is invalid or overbroad, you can challenge it in court before you comply. The subpoenas in Fulton county have been successfully challenged this way.
A search warrant, OTOH, allows the government to seize evidence without your cooperation. You have to go court to get it back.
A search warrant is issued by a judge, who must find that there is probable cause that the material contains evidence of a crime. But that determination is "ex parte", meaning that the target is not there to argue the other side before the order is issued. You find out about a search warrant when they show up and take stuff, and there's generally nothing you can do about it until after the seizure has happened.
Had the government tried to get the Fulton County ballots with a subpoena, the county would have made all of the arguments they're now making to try to get the documents returned, and they'd have made them BEFORE the government got their hands on them. But because this was a search warrant, the government has all the "evidence" and is getting to analyze it while these arguments are taking place.
Normally, documents like this, held by a government entity, would be obtained with a subpoena. Search warrants are generally reserved for cases where there's some chance evidence will be destroyed or tampered with. But here, I suspect the government used a search warrant because they worried that a subpoena would be successfully challenged in an adversarial process (as other subpoenas in the same case were).
The affidavits that the government filed to get the Fulton County search warrant were published, and they contain a lot of seriously questionable assertions and "evidence". But that's not the most damning problem with the warrant or with this case as a whole.
The big problem is that there can't possibly be any crimes to prosecute, because the statute of limitations for 2020 election crimes, if there were any, has already passed.
Is this what mean when they call something a fishing expedition? 😂
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