At a televised Cabinet meeting last August, President Donald Trump turned to his top intelligence official, noting that she had evidence of “how corrupt the 2020 election was,” and asked when she’d produce it.
“I will be the first to brief you once we have that information collected,” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard replied.
Gabbard, who coordinates the nation’s 18 spy agencies, has put “election integrity” and holding former government officials accountable for alleged election interference among her priorities.
Trump has long maintained that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was rigged. U.S. national security officials at the time said they found no evidence of widespread fraud and numerous courts rejected claims of election irregularities as unfounded.
Though her office traditionally focuses on foreign intelligence and adversaries, Gabbard’s unexplained appearance at a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, on Wednesday while the FBI was executing a search warrant revealed the extent to which her office has been involved in a domestic criminal investigation. Photographs confirming her presence stunned lawmakers, who on Thursday called for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to urgently brief them on the matter.
“My constituents in Georgia, and I think much of the American public, are quite reasonably alarmed in asking questions after the director of national intelligence was spotted bizarrely and personally lurking in an FBI evidence truck in Fulton County, Georgia, yesterday,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) said Thursday at an intelligence committee hearing for Trump’s nominee to head the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd. Ossoff questioned whether ODNI “is straying far outside of its lane.’’
“Director Gabbard recognizes that election security is essential for the integrity of our republic and our nation’s security. As DNI, she has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation. … President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear, and DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections,” said ODNI press secretary Olivia Coleman.
The FBI declined to comment.
There are “only two explanations” for why Gabbard was in Fulton County on Wednesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) said at the hearing.
One is that she believes there’s a “legitimate foreign intelligence nexus,” he said, in which case Gabbard “violated her legal obligation to keep the intelligence committees fully and currently informed,” or she is attempting to insert the intelligence community into what Warner called “a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.’’
Asked for comment, White House spokesman Davis Ingle said: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure. She has and will continue to take action on President Trump’s directive to secure our elections and work with our interagency partners to do so.”
Gabbard established a task force last year to tackle priorities such as ending the “weaponization” of government against Americans, an effort that critics claim is both unorthodox and dangerously politicized. The Director’s Initiatives Group set about investigating a number of Trump’s executive orders, including one aimed at holding former government officials accountable for election interference and another on protecting the integrity of U.S. elections.
Former senior U.S. intelligence officials called Gabbard’s participation in the FBI action unprecedented, and out of line with her office’s legal authorities.
ODNI was established by a 2004 law that gives the agency neither an operational role nor law enforcement functions, said one of the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. While the ODNI may share intelligence with the FBI on issues such as countering foreign espionage, it has no authority to participate in domestic law enforcement operations.
“Election security for ODNI is about foreign influence, not about U.S. state election processes,” the former official said.
Retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who led both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and is a former senior ODNI leader, called Gabbard’s appearance in Georgia “unbelievable.”
“She has no responsibility for that, at all,” Hayden said.
ODNI lacks operational authorities, including those meant to identify vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, said a second former senior U.S. intelligence official. “You can require assessments of what sectors are vulnerable to foreign adversary threats, but you can’t do the actual vulnerability scanning — especially on domestic networks,” said the former official.
An ODNI official, citing specific provisions in the law, indicated that Gabbard is using her authorities to target foreign election interference. “The DNI is evaluating both past and enduring vulnerabilities in election infrastructure to ensure that foreign adversaries are unable to exploit them in future election cycles,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the office’s legal authorities.
While there have long been conspiracy theories regarding foreign influence on the result of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, no evidence has surfaced and Gabbard has provided none publicly.
Despite White House support, Gabbard has found herself outside the inner circle of Trump’s national security advisers, taking a back seat to CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Trump has occasionally expressed his frustration at Gabbard’s actions, and she played virtually no role either in planning for the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities or the operation that seized Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
A copy of the warrant obtained by The Washington Post said the Fulton County search was part of a criminal investigation into possible violations of two federal laws: one regarding the retention and preservation of election records by state officials and the other criminalizing efforts to defraud voters from an impartially conducted election. The warrant authorized agents to seize all physical ballots from the 2020 election, voting machine tabulator tapes, images produced during the ballot count and voter rolls from that year.
Fulton County elections chief Sherri Allen said at a news conference Thursday that federal agents took 700 boxes of records. County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts said at the news conference that local officials can “no longer be held responsible” for the seized materials.
“Once they left that facility last night in those FBI trucks, I don’t where they are now. I don’t know what they’re doing with them,” Pitts said. “Are they opening the boxes? Are they stuffing other ballots into there? I have no clue.”
Pitts noted concern that Wednesday’s warrant could be a pretext to take over Fulton County’s elections — a multiyear goal of Republicans in the state. “We will not give one inch to those who seek to take control of our elections,” he said. “We will fight this in court with every resource we have.”
Wednesday’s search was unusual in other respects. The warrant listed Thomas Albus — the recently confirmed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri — as the prosecutor overseeing the matter, instead of the U.S. attorney in the Atlanta area, Theodore Hertzberg.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently appointed Albus to a special role within the Justice Department investigating nationwide election integrity, said a person familiar with the decision who was not authorized to speak publicly. Neither Albus’ office nor Hertzberg’s immediately returned requests for comment Thursday.
In addition to Gabbard, FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey was present at the Fulton County warehouse where the warrant was executed, a sign of the priority the bureau has placed on the investigation.
Bailey, a former Missouri attorney general, was named to the FBI’s No. 2 post last year in an unusual move that saw him split the job’s responsibilities with then co-deputy director Dan Bongino.
Unlike Bongino, who resigned earlier this month, Bailey has kept a relatively low profile, though has previously endorsed Trump’s conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged. While running for reelection as attorney general last year, Bailey claimed “the left stole that election,” referring to the 2020 presidential race.
Gabbard, Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem are expected to speak at a meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday. In most states, the secretary of state is the top election official, and by federal law states are responsible for running federal elections.
Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.
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