Even if we were to remove Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from the equation altogether, the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta as part of Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade related to his 2020 election defeat would still be awfully tough to defend.
There’s no credible reason for federal law enforcement to seize these election materials, which have already been thoroughly scrutinized, just as there’s no reason for the FBI to act as a vehicle for the president’s discredited conspiracy theories. What’s more, as The New York Times noted, there are also related concerns about whether this “might also be a harbinger of things to come, signaling Mr. Trump’s growing willingness to use the vast powers of federal law enforcement to intervene in election matters in the lead-up to the critical 2026 midterms, which will determine the extent of his authority for the remainder of his second term.”
But that Gabbard, eager to work her way back into the White House’s good graces, personally participated in the raid in Georgia, adds a scandalous element to a burgeoning controversy. As a Politico report summarized:
Democrats, election experts and even some members of the Trump administration expressed alarm and bewilderment about why Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene as the FBI raided a Georgia election office that has been at the center of Donald Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
The administration’s official line is that the DNI “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.”
That might sound vaguely reasonable — except as Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, explained, if Gabbard had reason to believe Georgia’s ballots had been compromised by foreign actors (a highly dubious idea, to be sure), it’d be incumbent on her to bring those concerns to the attention of Congress’ intelligence committees — which she has not done.
If she doesn’t have reason to believe Georgia’s ballots were compromised by foreign actors, then she had no business showing up at Fulton County’s election offices.
As NBC News explained, “Accompanying FBI agents on a raid is unprecedented for the chief of U.S. intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign adversaries. In her role overseeing the country’s spy agencies, Gabbard is prohibited by law from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Her predecessors took pains to keep their distance from Justice Department cases or partisan politics.”
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that the DNI’s appearance in Fulton County was part of a larger pattern of efforts:
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday.
Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said.
If the Journal’s report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, is correct, it would suggest that Gabbard has spent the past several months less focused on her actual job — providing the president with accurate intelligence related to potential national security decisions — and more focused on Trump’s ridiculous conspiracy theories about his 2020 defeat.
This dovetails with Gabbard’s efforts last year related to Trump’s Russia scandal, which culminated in the DNI throwing around words such as “treason” while issuing evidence-free findings that proved baseless.
Who, if anyone, did the job of the DNI while the former congresswoman chased conspiratorial mirages is unclear.
Democrats on Congress’ intelligence committees have demanded a briefing on Gabbard’s antics, though she has yet to respond to their directive. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
