Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has offered up an explanation for her presence at a controversial FBI raid on voting offices in Georgia last week.
The 44-year-old raised eyebrows last week after she was spotted at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operation Center as agents seized materials, including ballots and computers, related to the 2020 election.
The appearance saw Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Hines—the top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, send a letter to Gabbard demanding an explanation.
The answer came on Monday night in a letter addressed to members of the Select Committee on Intelligence and posted to X on Monday night.
“For a brief period of time, I accompanied FBI Deputy Director Bailey and Atlanta Acting Special Agent in Charge Pete Ellis in observing FBI personnel executing that search warrant, issued by the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia pursuant to a probable cause finding,” Gabbard wrote.
“My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counterintelligence (CI), foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity.”
Contrary to the blatantly false and slanderous accusations being made against me by Members of Congress and their friends in the propaganda media, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has and will continue to take action under my statutory authorities to secure our… pic.twitter.com/eX4Kdnp8oU
— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) February 3, 2026
She also confirmed that she facilitated a phone call between some of the FBI agents who participated in the raid and President Donald Trump.
In her X post, Gabbard condemned the “blatantly false and slanderous accusations being made” against her by “Members of Congress and their friends in the propaganda media.”
Gabbard defended her decision not to brief lawmakers about possible threats to election security prior to the raid, writing that she would not “irresponsibly share incomplete assessments.”
“I will share our intelligence assessments with Congress once they are complete,” she wrote in her letter.
Despite Gabbard’s insistence that her presence at the raid was not unusual, people with knowledge of Gabbard’s meeting with FBI officials told the New York Times that her continued presence ruffled feathers “given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.”
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche also appeared unsure regarding Gabbard’s involvement in the raid, telling CNN’s Dana Bash on Monday, “I don’t know why the director was there.”
“She is not part of the grand jury investigation,” he continued, adding, “but she is for sure a key part of our efforts at election integrity and making sure that we have free and fair elections.”
A Fulton County commissioner announced that the county would be filing a lawsuit on Monday challenging the legality of the raid.
“I have asked the county attorney to take any and all steps available to fight this criminal search warrant,” Commissioner Marvin Arrington Jr. said.
“The search warrant is not proper, but there are ways that we can limit it. We want to ask for forensic accounting; we want the documents to stay in the State of Georgia under seal; and we want to do whatever we can to protect voter information.”
The president has continued to insist that the 2020 election was rigged against him, even going so far as to suggest that Republicans should “nationalize” elections and take control of the way voting is conducted.
The 79-year-old has persisted with his crusade despite its relative unpopularity; as CNN data guru Harry Enten noted on Friday, the continued rehashing of debunked claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election is “not a winner” for Republicans, citing polling from 2020 that showed 60 percent of Americans believing that Biden won the election “fair and square.” Polling conducted in 2024 found that number had increased to 62 percent.
“It was that same three in five Americans—they simply did not move,” Enten told CNN’s News Central. “Donald Trump has made the case, and the American people do not buy the case that Donald Trump has been making, no matter how obsessive he is about it.”
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