The Trump administration’s election incursion, unlike its haphazard “excursion” in Iran, has been meticulously organized. For more than a year, administration officials have advanced a careful, multifront assault in an effort to impose new rules for November’s midterm balloting.
Planning began soon after Donald Trump took office in January 2025. Officials mapped multiple paths forward, through White House executive orders, redistricting drives in key states, congressional legislation and, most worryingly, investigations by intelligence agencies.
Far from concealing this effort, the president has boasted about it. In a February podcast with Dan Bongino, former deputy director of the FBI, Trump urged that “Republicans should say … we should take over the voting … nationalize the voting,” because of what he claimed were “crooked” state-run elections. Trump has suggested the federal restrictions he wants can guarantee victory for his party. “For 50 years, we won’t lose a race,” he said in Feb. 19 speech in Rome, Georgia.
“One thing we should have learned about Trump is that he doesn’t hide his intentions,” cautions Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia), vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Warner has repeatedly warned fellow Democrats about the danger of Trump’s election-control campaign — and he has focused especially on the role played by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Intelligence agencies are supposed to stay out of politics unless they find a “legitimate foreign intelligence nexus” of interference. Trump himself has ranted for nearly a decade about the intelligence community’s investigation of Russian subversion in the 2016 presidential election (accusing Obama administration officials of “treason”). Now Gabbard is searching for evidence of foreign meddling that election watchers are concerned might provide a pretext for federalization of election security in November.
Gabbard’s role burst into prominence on Jan. 28 when she was photographed at an FBI raid to seize election records in Fulton County, Georgia. But her investigation has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a year. It’s been a regular theme at Cabinet meetings, where she tells Trump how she’s advancing his agenda.
On April 10, 2025, Gabbard told Trump she was leading a probe of voting machines. “We have evidence of how these electronic voting systems have been vulnerable … to exploitation to manipulate the results of the votes being cast,” she advised Trump and the Cabinet. She said her effort “drives forward your mandate to bring about paper ballots.”
The next month, Gabbard’s office helped seize voting machines in Puerto Rico to examine if they had been manipulated. The machines are still stored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at a “secure facility,” Gabbard said in House testimony this month.
Oddly, an early portent of that action came in a June 14, 2024, post by her Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he was still an independent presidential candidate. Kennedy jumped on an AP report to claim there had been “hundreds of voting irregularities” on the island and urged use of paper ballots everywhere.
To analyze the Puerto Rico machines and other alleged voting irregularities, Gabbard’s agency hired Mojave Research, a company that specializes in using artificial intelligence and other tools for highly classified work. The company says in its 2026 “capability statement” that its missions had included “securing national election infrastructure for the ODNI.”
At an August 2025 Cabinet meeting, Trump pressed Gabbard for a progress report on her election investigations, saying he understood she had gathered evidence of “how corrupt the 2020 election was” and enthusing, “You’ve found some interesting things, Tulsi!”
Gabbard’s team worked with an Arizona lawyer named Kurt Olsen, whom Trump appointed to coordinate the election security effort. Olsen has been a longtime Trump advocate. He pushed Trump’s 2020 “Stop the Steal” campaign so aggressively that an Arizona federal court penalized him for “false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” about voting machines and other issues, a ruling upheld by a federal appeals court.
Olsen’s probe drove the FBI’s Fulton County raid this January. The bureau’s warrant affidavit noted the “criminal investigation originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.” The FBI seized about 700 boxes of election records.
Gabbard’s presence at the raid stunned Democrats, who saw it as an improper intelligence intrusion into domestic politics. Gabbard responded in a Feb. 2 letter to Warner and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, James Himes (Connecticut): “My presence was requested by the President,” who had “tasked ODNI with taking all appropriate actions … towards ensuring the integrity of our elections.” She didn’t mention that a few days before the raid, Trump had needled her about the election probe in a meeting on Syria: “You go do that, you get it done.”
Gabbard stressed the threat of foreign meddling in her letter to Warner and Himes: “We must understand whether there has been foreign or other malign interference in our elections.” When Warner pressed her at a hearing this month if she had uncovered evidence of such interference in Georgia, Gabbard didn’t cite any. Foreign hacking of voting machines is a legitimate worry. But the answer is to stop the foreigners, not limit American voters.
Trump’s other pathways to federal intervention in November’s voting haven’t yet succeeded. Courts have blocked his March 2025 executive order to require proof of citizenship and other measures for voting. Republican redistricting efforts in Texas and Florida have been roughly matched by Democratic ones to redraw lines in California and Virginia. And Congress seems unlikely to pass Trump’s Save America bill to impose voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page was unimpressed, writing: “Why the SAVE America Act … Won’t.”
Trump’s elections “Hail Mary” could be a new executive order being advocated by activists that would use alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 election to declare a national emergency allowing federal rules on voting, according to reporting from The Post. But what’s the evidence? A 2021 ODNI investigation of the 2020 balloting stated flatly: “China Did Not Attempt to Influence Presidential Election Outcome.”
How the worm turns. Trump has spent nearly a decade denouncing investigations of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Now his team is searching frantically for evidence of Chinese or other foreign meddling that might justify a takeover of the midterms. Democrats have seen the assault waves coming. Their best defense is to turn out such a big vote in November that it’s Trump-proof.
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