By any measure, the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., last week was extraordinary. Agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, as President Trump harnessed the levers of government to not only buttress his false claims of widespread voter fraud, but also to try to build a criminal case against those he believes wronged him.
What happened the next day was in some ways even more unusual, The New York Times has learned.
Behind closed doors, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with some of the same F.B.I. agents, members of the bureau’s field office in Atlanta, which is conducting the election inquiry, three people with knowledge of the meeting said. Neither could say why Ms. Gabbard, who also appeared on site at the search, was there, but her continued presence has raised eyebrows given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.
What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure. Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said.
The president addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion.
The supervisor of the squad, which investigates allegations of public corruption and civil rights violations and developed the evidence for the search, primarily fielded Mr. Trump’s queries, the people said. One U.S. official said the call was fairly short, perhaps just a minute long, and compared the conversation to a pep rally or a coach giving an encouraging halftime speech to his players. That person said the president gave no substantive direction to the investigators.
Mr. Trump personally ordered Ms. Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search, and coordinated her actions with Andrew Bailey, one of two deputy F.B.I. directors, according to the U.S. official.
A White House spokesman, Davis Ingle, defended the administration’s efforts in Georgia. “President Trump pledged to secure America’s elections, and he has tasked the most talented team of patriots to do just that,” Mr. Ingle said, adding: “President Trump has full confidence in his entire team. D.N.I. Gabbard and F.B.I. Director Patel are working together to implement the president’s election integrity priorities, and their work continues to serve him and the entire country well.”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment. The F.B.I. declined to comment on an open investigation.
Even for a president who has radically transformed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. by trampling over their political independence and using them as tools for personal retribution, Mr. Trump appears to be taking that kind of involvement to a new level. Rather than going to senior department or F.B.I. officials, Mr. Trump spoke directly to the frontline agents doing the granular work of a politically sensitive investigation in which he has a large personal stake.
Last month, the president, in declaring once again that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, left little doubt about his intentions.
“People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” he said in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, denied that Mr. Trump had played any role in the search or that he had been briefed on the inquiry.
“I don’t believe he was involved,” he said. “This is a criminal grand jury investigation, and I can’t comment on it.”
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Pressed on Ms. Gabbard’s involvement, Mr. Blanche said he did not know the reasons for her presence, but he nonetheless appeared to suggest that it was not unusual.
“I don’t know why the director was there,” Mr. Blanche said. “She is not part of the grand jury investigation, but she is for sure a key part of our efforts at election integrity and making sure we have free and fair elections. She’s an expert in that space and it’s a big part of what she and her team look at every day.”
The American official said that Mr. Trump had ordered Ms. Gabbard to go to Georgia to assist with the F.BI.’s investigation. Other officials have said that the White House had given Ms. Gabbard far-ranging authority to hunt for voter fraud in multiple states.
Democrats in Congress have said her appearance at the search raised troubling questions, including whether it was appropriate for an intelligence official to participate in what is primarily a domestic issue.
By speaking directly with the investigators, the president may have provided significant ammunition to any future defense should the investigation yield criminal charges.
His conversation with the agents would probably become part of an effort to have the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Alternatively, if such a case went to trial, defense lawyers would presumably try to elicit testimony from the F.B.I. agents who spoke to the president in the early stages of the investigation, or possibly from Mr. Trump himself.
The search itself raises serious questions. It is unclear what evidence was presented to a federal magistrate judge to establish probable cause for a search warrant for the ballots and other materials, which are now more than five years old.
But multiple prior investigations — including one at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term by the same F.B.I. office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta — found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud.
In 2023, Rudolph W. Giuliani, a longtime Trump ally, was ordered to pay $148 million in civil damages for defaming two Fulton County election workers, wrongfully accusing them of having tried to steal votes from Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump narrowly lost Georgia in 2020 by about 11,000 votes, prompting an effort by him and his supporters to “find” enough votes to change the outcome. Despite his bid to undermine the integrity of the election, a manual review of the ballots confirmed the result.
In recent months, however, both the president and his administration have sought to cast fresh doubt on the 2020 results in Georgia. Before the search last week, in which agents confiscated voter rolls and scanner images in addition to ballots, senior Justice Department officials had sued to try to acquire the voter evidence that is now in the F.B.I.’s possession.
Three weeks before the search, on Jan. 6, agents hand-delivered a letter to the Fulton County Board of Elections demanding the same materials written by Paul Brown, then the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, a county official said.
The county responded that the election board did not have custody of those records and that the bureau would have to submit an amended request to the county clerk’s office, the official said. That amended request, the official said, was quickly submitted by Paul Ellis, Mr. Brown’s chief deputy. Mr. Brown filed his resignation papers with the F.B.I. about a week before the search warrant was executed.
It is part of a broader effort by the department to obtain voter data. Already, it has sued nearly half the states in the country for access to their voter rolls, including the private information of voters.
The search and the administration’s flood of lawsuits against states have alarmed election officials and experts, who worry that the moves are laying the groundwork for the administration to contest the results of this year’s congressional midterms.
Alan Feuer and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York.
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