(WASHINGTON) — In the hours after FBI agents seized 2020 election ballots from an elections facility in Georgia on Wednesday, President Donald Trump posted a series of thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election — and the 2016 election too.

Fulton County officials said Wednesday that the FBI seized original 2020 voting records while serving a search warrant at the county’s Elections Hub and Operations Center. The FBI said they were conducting court-authorized activity at the facility, but said they would provide no further information.

Late Wednesday night, the president reposted to his social media platform a claim that Italian military satellites had been used to hack into U.S. voting machines to flip votes from Trump 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.”

That was just one of a flurry of posts and reposts by Trump making discredited claims about the 2020 election, 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 development comes after Trump has repeatedly made baseless claims that there was voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically in Georgia, that contributed to his election loss. 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 is 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.”

In addition to being baseless, the 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 Sydney 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.

In 2023, Powell pleaded guilty to state charges of conspiracy to commit “intentional interference with performance of election duties” in Georgia and agreed to serve six years of probation and to pay a $6,000 fine.  

And now it appears that Sidney Powell is back. 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’?”

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(SANTA MONICA, Calif.) — Federal officials opened an investigation after a Waymo self-driving vehicle struck a child near an elementary school in California, resulting in minor injuries.

The incident occurred on Jan. 23 in Santa Monica, within two blocks of an elementary school during school drop-off hours, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The vehicle was being operated by its automated driving system and there was no safety operator in it at the time, according to the agency.

The child “ran across the street from behind a double parked SUV towards the school and was struck by the Waymo AV,” the NHTSA said in a statement.

Other children and a crossing guard were in the area at the time, as well as several double-parked vehicles, the agency said.

“Our technology immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle,” Waymo said in a statement, adding that the autonomous driver “braked hard, reducing speed from approximately 17 mph to under 6 mph before contact was made.”

After the vehicle made contact, the child stood up and walked to the sidewalk, according to Waymo. The company said it called 911 and the vehicle “remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene.”

Waymo reported that the child, whose age was not released, sustained minor injuries, according to the NHTSA.

Waymo said it reported the incident to the NHTSA the day it occurred and will “cooperate fully with them throughout the process of its investigation.”

The investigation will look into whether the self-driving vehicle “exercised appropriate caution given, among other things, its proximity to the elementary school during drop off hours, and the presence of young pedestrians and other potential vulnerable road users,” the NHTSA said.

Waymo and the NHTSA did not release any details on where the vehicle was traveling and if it had any passengers at the time of the collision.

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(NEW YORK) — A Minnesota man allegedly tried to break Luigi Mangione out of jail in New York, law enforcement sources told ABC News.

Mark Anderson, 36, was charged Thursday with impersonating a federal agent after authorities said he showed up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn claiming to be an FBI agent with a court order to release Mangione, sources said.

Mangione is being held at MDC-Brooklyn while he awaits federal and state trials for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Anderson allegedly approached the intake area inside the MDC and claimed he had paperwork “signed by a judge” authorizing the release of a specific inmate, according to the criminal complaint. The complaint does not name Mangione, but law enforcement sources told ABC News that is who Anderson was seeking.

When Bureau of Prisons personnel asked to see Anderson’s credentials, federal prosecutors said he showed them a Minnesota driver’s license and “threw at the BOP officers numerous documents.”

Anderson said he had weapons in his bag, and inside the bag was a barbecue fork and a pizza cutter, according to the criminal complaint.

Anderson is expected to appear in court later on Thursday.

Meanwhile, Mangione is due in court on Friday; the judge overseeing his federal case may decide if the death penalty will remain a sentencing option if he’s convicted. 

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