Why is Tulsi Gabbard in Georgia? Because Trump sent her
When Tulsi Gabbard went down to Georgia, the director of national intelligence turned heads.
“Why is Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid on an election office in Fulton County?” asked Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. A senior administration official told RealClearPolitics that the answer is simple: President Trump directly tasked her with the job.
“The DNI is evaluating both past and enduring vulnerabilities in election infrastructure to ensure that foreign adversaries are unable to exploit them in future election cycles,” the official said.
Spy chiefs do not typically concern themselves with matters of domestic politics, at least not so publicly. The office of the director of national intelligence was created in the aftermath of September 11th to serve as a sort of orchestra conductor for the larger intelligence community. Part of that mandate includes defending against foreign meddling in U.S. elections, senior administration officials say, by helping to coordinate the interagency response of the Justice and Homeland Security departments.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, remains consumed with the controversy in Minnesota in the wake of the killing of Alex Pretti. But the DNI also has a well-established role in defending against foreign threats to domestic elections, according to Obama and Biden-era presidential policy directives and national security memoranda.
Similarly, Trump signed an executive order in 2018 during his first term tasking the DNI with delivering an assessment of foreign threats to election security. Former President Biden issued a continuation of that order four years later in 2022. Trump renewed the order in 2025, and it remains in effect.
“We know through intelligence and public reporting that electronic voting systems have been and are vulnerable to exploitation,” Olivia Coleman, a Gabbard spokeswoman, told RCP. “President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear, and DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”
The Trump administration sees foreign interference as an urgent threat ahead of the midterms, even as the president remains intently focused on 2020, an election he still insists he won. Experts consistently say otherwise and insist there was no widespread fraud. Led by his former vice president, Mike Pence, Congress certified the results.
Trump has never conceded his last election loss. He often alleges a second consecutive term was stolen from him. It remains a top priority even as global events loom large in the West Wing. Hence the decision to deputize Gabbard to help get to the bottom of the controversy. She previously released a report last summer, including testimony from a whistleblower, that former President Obama and senior administration officials pushed flawed conclusions in a 2017 intelligence community assessment to allege falsely that Trump colluded with the Russians. Gabbard told reporters she had referred the matter to the DOJ.
During the raid Wednesday, the FBI executed a search warrant at the main election facility in Fulton County. They seized ballots from the 2020 election, FBI officials confirmed, while searching also for electronic records and voter rolls. Trump narrowly lost Georgia to Biden by less than a percentage point. A subsequent recount confirmed that the Democrat had won.
Gabbard has spent months conducting a deep dive into past elections. She has not, however, done so in secret.
During a Cabinet meeting last April, the chief spook announced, “We continue our extensive investigations around exposing the very serious issues we have related to election integrity.” Replied the president, “Thank you, Tulsi. Great job.”
Trump expects Gabbard to deliver, and a public report is expected. Officials involved in the 2020 election are not convinced, however, that she will find the results that he wants.
“That election is six years in the past,” Ken Block, a consultant who studied fraud claims on behalf of the 2020 Trump campaign but was unable to turn up evidence of widespread fraud, told the Wall Street Journal, which first broke the story of Gabbard’s trip. “There’s no undoing it. I can’t imagine there aren’t more important things to look at.”
Democrats are none too pleased with the Georgia excursion.
“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus – in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns – or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy,” Warner wrote on social media.