Democratic senators called Thursday for a briefing on why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard joined an FBI search of the Fulton County, Georgia, elections office related to the 2020 presidential election.
“What the heck is she doing on the FBI serving a domestic warrant? If this doesn’t concern the heck out of every American, it sure as hell should,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is requesting the briefing from Gabbard’s office.
“This is a person who has got no business interfering in elections and to, frankly, follow up on President Trump’s obsession about the fact that he lost in 2020, that he lost the state of Georgia,” Warner, D-Va., added. “So [I] would like to see the underlying basis for the war in the first place, but to see her, you know, skulking around in a baseball cap [in] the picture that was posted, you never thought you could make this stuff up.”
FBI agents searched the county elections office near Atlanta on Wednesday and seized 700 boxes of materials related to the 2020 election, county officials said. Gabbard was seen at the site dressed in black and wearing a baseball cap and a long coat.
The search comes amid lingering political tensions over President Donald Trump’s repeated, unfounded claims that the 2020 election was rigged — particularly in Georgia, a state where he narrowly lost.
After those election results were tallied, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that January. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Trump said. Raffensperger, whose office manages Georgia’s elections and certifies the results, said that multiple audits had confirmed that Joe Biden had won the state.
Fulton County Chairman Robb Pitts said in a press briefing on Thursday that the county complied with the search warrant after being advised by its attorneys.
Pitts emphasized that the county “has nothing to hide” and said the Trump administration’s focus on the county’s elections process is about “intimidation and distraction, not facts.”
The Trump administration said in a statement to MS NOW that 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.”
The statement added, “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.”
Ebony Davis is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW based in Washington, D.C. She previously worked at CNN as a campaign reporter covering elections and politics.