The FBI has "substantiated" some major irregularities in how votes were counted in Georgia's largest urban area in the aftermath of the 2020 election and is probing whether those failures were intentional efforts to violate federal election law, according to a bombshell affidavit unsealed by a federal court on Tuesday.

FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans first filed the affidavit last month to establish probable cause for a raid that seized about 700 boxes of Georgia 2020 elections ballots from a storage warehouse in the Atlanta area, after getting a referral from Trump Whote House election integrity czar Kurt Olsen.

The affidavit included information gleaned from FBI interviews with about a dozen unnamed witnesses recounting various allegations that dated back to the disputed 2020 election in Georgia in which Joe Biden was narrowly declared the winner over Donald Trump.

"Some of those allegations have been disproven while some of those allegations have been substantiated, including through admissions by Fulton County," Evans wrote. "This warrant application is part of an FBI criminal investigation into whether any of the improprieties were intentional acts that violated federal criminal laws."

Many of the substantiated allegations were previously reported by Just the News over the last five years based on its review of ballot records.

Evans' affidavit, dated Jan. 28, cited five major areas of irregularities under investigation, including that:

• Fulton County has admitted that it does not have scanned images of all the 528,777 ballots counted during the Original Count or the 527,925 ballots counted during the state's first recount, a major loss of evidence.
• Fulton County has confirmed that during the Recount of votes, some ballots were scanned multiple times. "Ballot images made available in response to public record requests show ballots with unique markings duplicated within the ballot images," the affidavit said.
• During the Risk Limiting Audit, auditors counting the votes by hand reported vote tallies for batches inconsistent with the actual votes within the batch. "The State’s Performance Review Board reported that Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the Risk Limiting Audit," the affidavit said.
• Auditors assisting in the Risk Limiting Audit reported counting purported absentee ballots that had "never been creased or folded, as would be required for the ballot to be mailed to the voter and for the ballot to be returned in the sealed envelope
  requiring the voter’s signature for authentication."
• On the day of the deadline to report the Recount results, Fulton County reported a recount totaling 511,343 ballots, 17,434 ballots fewer than the original count. "The following day, Fulton County then reported a total of 527,925 ballots counted," the affidavit noted.

You can read the unsealed affidavit below: 

Just the News reported in 2021 that a contractor sent to Fulton County to observe voting on behalf of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had chronicled widespread confusion, mistakes and irregularities in the vote count, a fact the affidavit cited. Gov. Brian Kemp also referred Fulton County for investigation for miscounting ballots based on information from Just the News.

Despite the concerns, Raffensperger insisted none of the problems affected the outcome of Biden defeating Trump in the state.

But one of the witnesses in the FBI affidavit, identified as Witness 4, was a top lieutenant to Raffensperger and acknowledged to the FBI he was unaware of some the corroborated irregularities and admitted they were possibly problematic.

"The Director of Elections for the Georgia Secretary of State in 2020, was not aware of physical ballots not matching the number of ballot images. Wit. 4 said a discrepancy like that would be problematic but did not know if anyone went back and checked that," the affidavit said.

"Wit. 4 said during the hand count, they did not audit for issues like image discrepancies. He said the images are just duplicates. It would be more concerning if there was discrepancies between physical ballots and voter count. The concern is less about the images and more about the ballots and voter count," it added.