Updated: Tulsi Gabbard Drags U.S. Intelligence into Trump’s Election Fraud Campaign

The DNI has no authority to conduct domestic law enforcement, raising questions about her involvement in bizarre Georgia probe

Tulsi Gabbard at the Fulton County Election Center

WHEN A SQUAD OF FBI AGENTS marched into a Fulton County Georgia election office on Wednesday and started seizing ballots from the 2020 election, they were accompanied by a cabinet official who almost nobody would have expected: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The FBI search for ballots that were cast six years ago in Georgia’s most populous county was, if nothing else, a dramatic escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to vindicate the president’s belief—against a mountain of evidence to the contrary—that the 2020 election was stolen from him, with Fulton County, which encompasses the city of Atlanta, ground zero of the imagined fraud.

But Gabbard’s presence at a domestic law enforcement operation over which she has no authority was puzzling and even startling, provoking a firestorm of criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill as well as former U.S intelligence officials.

After describing the FBI raid as “an event that should scare the hell out of all of us,” Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a post on X: “This complete Trump loyalist somehow popping up on a FBI raid— what the heck was she doing?”

It’s “outrageous [and] a significant abuse of power,” said Steven Cash, a former CIA and DHS intelligence official and now executive director of The Steady State, an organization of more than 380 former top national security officials and intelligence officials.

“DNI has no law enforcement powers and certainly no mandate to assist in the continued Presidentially directed fraud,” Cash said in an email to SpyTalk. “We have seen this often from the DNI—pretending to be the KGB.”

The CIA, nominally subordinate to Gabbard’s office, which coordinates the work of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, is explicitly prohibited from conducting domestic operations.

Although ODNI technically has a broader mission to integrate domestic intelligence with foreign collection and operations, Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia search was widely seen as highly unusual, if not improper. Her presence at the FBI search was “unbelievable,” Michael Hayden, a former CIA and NSA director who served as a senior ODNI official in its early years, told The Washington Post. “She has no responsibility for that at all.”

A senior administration official, who asked not be identified by name, insisted to SpyTalk that Gabbard had every reason to be present at the search given that she has “a pivotal role in election security…including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.” (The official, however, declined to respond to a follow up question as to whether Gabbard was merely observing the search or participating in a substantive way.)

Perhaps most revealing, though, the Trump official essentially confirmed that Gabbard was acting on President Trump’s instructions. Gabbard “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,” the official said.

To be sure, Gabbard’s decision to show up for the search comes at a tenuous moment for the embattled intelligence director. Her standing at the White House and within the Trump Cabinet is increasingly cloudy. After playing a prominent and outspoken role in backing Trump’s anti-election fraud jihad —asserting at one point last summer that President Obama and his deputies had massaged and made up intelligence as part of a “years long coup” against President Trump—Gabbard seemed to drop from the scene in recent months, presumably sidelined for her longstanding public opposition to overseas military adventures, stances that appear not to have gone down well with a president who, during his first year in office, bombed Iran, attacked Venezuela and threatened to seize Greenland.

“Do Not Invite”

Gabbard was frozen out of planning for this month’s U.S. operation to seize Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, prompting some White House aids to joke that “DNI” really stands for “Do Not Invite.”

In that sense, Gabbard’s presence at the FBI raid could be seen as an attempt to get back into Trump’s good graces. And it seemed to have paid immediate dividends. Throughout Wednesday night and into the early hours of Thursday morning, Trump posted and reposted incessantly about the Georgia search, recycling wild conspiracy theories that some of his allies had been promoting for years, such as the claim that Italian satellites had been used to hack U.S. voting machines, switching vote tallies from Trump to Joe Biden.

“China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” one Trump post reads. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” Read another: “This is only the beginning. Prosecutions are coming.”

Then, Thursday night, speaking at an event to promote a new documentary about his wife, Trump was asked a reporter what Gabbard was doing at the Georgia election center. “She’s working very hard on trying to keep the election safe—and she’s done a very good job,” the president replied. “And, as you know, they got into the votes with a signed judge’s order in Georgia, and you’re going to see some interesting things happening,”

Trump’s remark must have been music to Gabbard’s ears, in addition to suggesting she was more than a passive observer to the FBI search.

Gabbard has been struggling to get back in Trump’s good graces (AFP)

Certainly, Gabbard had started out last year on the right foot, assembling an entire team of intelligence officials known as the DIG, or the Director’s Initiative Group, that declassified reams of secret records and emails purportedly backing up the DNI’s claims that Obama officials “manufactured” intelligence in order to create the “Russia hoax” tying Trump to the Kremlin during the 2016 election. .

Although nothing in the declassified records remotely supported the idea that Obama officials had “manufactured” intelligence to thwart Trump, Gabbard, along with CIA director John Ratcliffe, made criminal referrals to the Justice Department, a move that immediately prompted Attorney General Pam Bondi to order investigations based on them. That has since led to a grand jury investigation in south Florida targeting Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and others.

But whether Gabbard has any evidence to back up her and Trump’s insistence that foreign powers manipulated vote counts in Fulton County—presumably the basis for the DNI’s presence—is an entirely different question. Multiple government reports have rejected the idea of foreign interference that altered vote totals in the 2020 election.

“We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the office that Gabbard now leads stated in a post-mortem on the presidential election that was released in March 2021.

At the same time, ODNI drew a distinction between foreign powers manipulating vote counts, of which it found no evidence, and foreign influence campaigns to sway voters through social media and other means, of which it found plenty. The Russians, much like they did in 2016, promoted “misleading or substantiated allegations” against President Biden in order to help Trump while the Iranians carried out their own “multi-pronged covert influence campaign” authorized by Supreme Leader Khomeini and including cyber operations, in order to hurt Trump and help Biden, the ODNI report said.

“I have no idea why Gabbard would have been there” in Georgia, said one former high ranking national security official, who asked not to be identified by name. “The intelligence community at the time already concluded there was no foreign interference in the 2020 election.”

“This is one of the many strange things” happening inside the intelligence community under President Trump, the former official said—and getting stranger by the day.

Michael Isikoff is co-author, with Daniel Klaidman, of Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said an exchange between Gabbard and Trump about the Fulton County search occurred at a televised cabinet meeting Thursday. Those remarks were actually last August. The piece has been updated with Trump’s remarks about Gabbard Thursday night. It’s also been updated with a quote from former CIA and NSA Director Michael Hayden, a senior ODNI official in its early years.