(Zero Hedge)—Last month, FBI agents executed a search warrant in Union City, Georgia, marking a sharp escalation in scrutiny surrounding Fulton County’s handling of the 2020 election. The FBI has now reportedly substantiated major irregularities in vote counting from Fulton County, Georgia, during the 2020 election and is now investigating whether those errors were deliberate violations of federal law.
An affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Hugh Raymond Evans last month, which was unsealed Tuesday, lays out five categories of confirmed problems in Fulton County’s handling of ballots, raising questions that have simmered for over five years since Trump and his allies raised questions about the election in Georgia and other states where irregularities were alleged.
According to a report from Just the News, Evans filed the affidavit last month to establish probable cause for a raid that seized around 700 boxes of ballots from an Atlanta-area storage warehouse. The investigation stemmed from a referral by Kurt Olsen, President Trump’s election integrity czar. Evans interviewed roughly a dozen unnamed witnesses about allegations tied to the contested Georgia race, where Joe Biden edged out Trump by less than 12,000 votes in the official results.
“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.”
Fulton County admitted it lacks scanned images of all 528,777 ballots counted during the initial count and of the 527,925 ballots tallied during the state’s first recount.
County officials also confirmed that during the recount, some ballots were scanned multiple times. Ballot images obtained through public records requests show identical markings appearing on duplicated images.
During the Risk Limiting Audit, hand counters reported vote totals for batches that didn’t match the actual votes inside those batches.
According to the affidavit, “The State’s Performance Review Board reported that Secretary of State investigators confirmed inaccurate batch tallies from the Risk Limiting Audit.”
Then there’s the matter of the pristine absentee ballots.
Auditors assisting in the Risk Limiting Audit reported counting supposed 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.”
The timeline adds another wrinkle.
On the deadline day to report recount results, Fulton County initially declared a total of 511,343 ballots—17,434 fewer than the original count. By the next day, that number had jumped to 527,925. Thousands of ballots, more than Joe Biden’s margin of victory, had simply appeared overnight.
“If these deficiencies were the result of intentional action, it would be a violation of federal law regardless of whether the failure to retain records or the deprivation of a fair tabulation of a vote was outcome determinative for any particular election or race,” Evans said.
“Many of the claims made in the affidavits were previously vetted by the Georgia State Election Board and through litigation,” reports Fox News Digital. “Trump and his lawyers at the time lost all of their cases after judges found they either did not have standing to bring the lawsuits or that the allegations lacked merit.”
For years, officials insisted the 2020 process was sound, dismissing concerns as conspiracy theories.
What remains unclear is whether the problems resulted from incompetence, chaos, or intent.
That’s the question the FBI is now trying to answer. For those who spent the last five years arguing that Georgia’s election administration deserved scrutiny, the affidavit offers a measure of vindication.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.