Gabbard’s role in Fulton raid highlights wild conspiracy theories fueling 2020 probe

As FBI agents executed a court-authorized search warrant at an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, Wednesday, lurking in the shadows of the operation was Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

Her participation in the raid immediately raised questions, chief among them being: Why was the country’s top intelligence officer — who usually focuses on national security threats from abroad — involved in an investigation of county-level election administration?

The answer is extremely alarming, election officials, voting advocates and Democrats say.

Fulton County has long been the top target of President Donald Trump’s multi-year, conspiracy theory-fueled campaign against the 2020 presidential election, which he lost. 

Gabbard’s appearance as the FBI raided its main election operations center suggests that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI — both of which have been commandeered by Trump loyalists — intend to allege that foreign interference led to Trump’s loss in Georgia in 2020.

Should they make that claim, the two agencies would be amplifying long-debunked, far-right conspiracy theories that Trump again recirculated Thursday in a manic slew of posts on Truth Social.

Gabbard is leading the Trump administration’s effort to re-examine the 2020 election and is indeed pursuing claims it was stolen from Trump due to foreign government interference, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing White House officials.

To that end, she has started looking at voting machines and data from swing states. She has not presented the public with any evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 vote but is expected to prepare a report on her work, according to the WSJ.

Denunciations of the FBI raid were immediate and fierce. Critics said it represented a major assault on American democracy and could preview Trump’s plans to influence the outcomes of the upcoming 2026 midterm and the 2028 presidential election.

Mark Warner (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, condemned Gabbard’s involvement.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an elections office in Fulton County?” Warner wrote on social media. 

The senator said she either found evidence of foreign interference in the 2020 election and failed to inform the congressional intelligence committees as required by federal law, or she was participating in a “political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

“Either is a serious breach of trust that further underscores why she is totally unqualified to hold a position that demands sound judgment, apolitical independence, and a singular focus on keeping Americans safe,” Warner wrote.

David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former trial attorney in the DOJ’s voting section, told reporters Thursday that Gabbard had no business attending the raid.

“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has no domestic responsibilities,” Becker said. “There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site. She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site. And so it’s incredibly troubling to see something like that.”

If Gabbard soon alleges foreign interference in the 2020 election, her claim would be deeply hypocritical. In recent years, she has attempted to downplay and rewrite history around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

As a member of Congress and presidential candidate in 2019, Gabbard called special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference “a terribly divisive crisis that could have even led to civil war” if it resulted in Trump’s indictment. She also implored people to “move forward” from the issue.

In her first year as Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard attempted to refute the conclusions reached by multiple investigations — U.S. intelligence community probes, a bipartisan Senate review, the Mueller report and the Durham report — that Russia meddled in the election and that it preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton.

Last summer, Gabbard claimed to reveal with a series of declassified documents that the FBI’s Russia probe wasn’t initiated because of actual interference. She instead claimed it was part of a “treasonous conspiracy” and “coup” that former President Barack Obama and his top intelligence officials tried to stage against Trump.

Obama and people who worked on the Senate’s investigation denounced her conclusions, which were made over the objections of officials in the CIA and other intelligence agencies, according to the Washington Post.

However, that didn’t stop Attorney General Pam Bondi from opening a criminal investigation into Obama officials and ordering a federal prosecutor to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury. The status of that probe is unknown.

Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton County election office is not the only sign that the White House intends to use the raid to push provocative false claims.

Following the search, the president and key DOJ officials amplified conspiracy theories about the 2020 election on social media. 

Trump reposted an anonymous account alleging a vast conspiracy to change votes involving five different countries, military satellites, pallets of cash, an Italian multinational defense company, CIA-developed tools and, if that wasn’t enough, “numerous other methods of fraud and manipulation.”

The president also reposted a prominent far-right account claiming that “liberals are terrified” about Gabbard’s involvement.

“EXPOSE THE FRAUD! Show the people, Trump was right,” the account posted, potentially a message meant for Gabbard.

Ed Martin, Trump’s former U.S. attorney for D.C. who now leads the DOJ’s “weaponization” taskforce as a special prosecutor, spread conspiracies while also directly commenting on the FBI’s Fulton County investigation.

Thursday morning, he posted a photo of himself with Sidney Powell, the former Trump Campaign attorney who pleaded guilty to criminal charges over her involvement in efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia.

Despite having no evidence for her claims, Powell has asserted that Trump lost the 2020 race due to a global conspiracy that involved tampering with voting machines produced by election technology companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. Both companies later sued her for defamation.

On social media Thursday, Martin implored his followers to read Powell’s 2014 book “Licensed to Lie” in order “to understand everything.” The book claims to reveal DOJ prosecutorial misconduct in the early 2010s and doesn’t pertain to elections.

Directly commenting on the FBI raid, Martin said that “months of work yields results.”

Martin’s comments on Georgia are notable, as he was previously directly involved in the DOJ’s effort to obtain the Fulton records.

Last August, Martin sent a letter to a Fulton County judge demanding to “immediately access” 148,000 absentee ballots from the 2020 election being stored in a ballot warehouse. He claimed he had opened an “investigation into election integrity here at the Department of Justice.”

Replying to one of his own posts Thursday, Martin re-uploaded a picture of his August letter.

Because the court case over access to the absentee ballots was ongoing — and the ballots were sealed by a judge — when the FBI executed a search warrant at the Fulton County election office and took possession of them, local officials have alleged that the raid was unlawful. 

After the FBI’s raid, local news outlets reported that Gabbard would provide comments but she never did. She is set to speak at an annual National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Washington D.C. Friday alongside Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

Gabbard, Bondi and Noem attending and speaking at the conference together would be unprecedented and reflective of Trump’s attempt to illegally overhaul and take control of major parts of the nation’s election systems.

The president has no constitutional authority over federal election administration, which is wholly the responsibility of states and Congress.