**Trump Posts Discredited Conspiracy Theories Following Seizure of 2020 Ballots**

FBI agents seized original 2020 Fulton County voting records on Wednesday, sparking a flurry of activity in Georgia's elections facility. In the hours that followed, President Donald Trump took to social media to post a series of thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election – and even the 2016 election.

Fulton County officials confirmed that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county's Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI stated that they were conducting court-authorized activity, but declined to provide further information. Late Wednesday night, Trump reposted on his social media platform a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from him to Joe Biden.

"China reportedly coordinated the whole operation," the post reads. "The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet." This was just one of several posts and reposts made by Trump, directly tying the allegations to the FBI's seizure of ballots on Wednesday.

"This is only the beginning," Trump said, reposting other posts about the FBI's action in Georgia. "Prosecutions are coming." The president has repeatedly claimed that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. However, Georgia officials audited and certified the results following the election, and numerous lawsuits challenging the election results in the state were rejected by the courts.

Among the statements posted and reposted by Trump following the FBI's actions in Georgia was one on the 2016 election that falsely claims that "Barack Hussein Obama" falsified intelligence and "conspired with foreign powers, not one, not two, not three, but four times to overthrow the United States government in 2016." This claim ignores the fact that Obama was president in 2016, so if he tried to overthrow the government, he would have been overthrowing himself.

The conspiracy theory about Italian military satellites is not new. In 2021, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows directed both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense to look into the matter. As documented in my 2021 book, "Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show," the conspiracy theory was brought to the White House by a woman who went by several aliases including "The Heiress" and was known at the Pentagon for her claimed ties to Somali pirates.

She passed her material off to a national security council official at a supermarket parking lot in Arlington. The Italian spy satellite theory was just one of many unsubstantiated allegations made about the 2020 election by Trump and his supporters. At a Trump campaign press conference in November 2020, lawyer Sidney Powell infamously claimed that voting machines had been rigged using software that was "created at the direction of Hugo Chavez." This was an especially extravagant claim because Chavez, the former leader of Venezuela, had died three years earlier.

As it turns out, Sidney Powell is back in the spotlight. In a post on X Thursday morning, DOJ official Ed Martin posted a picture of himself with Powell, writing, "Good morning, America. How are ya'?" This comes as no surprise, given that Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims about voter fraud and election interference.