‘The Trust Has Been Absolutely Destroyed’
The email that federal law enforcement sent this week to the nation’s top election administrators would have been routine just a few years ago. “Your election partners,” the Tuesday missive from FBI Election Executive Kellie Hardiman read, “would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss preparations for the cycle.”
But multiple secretaries of state who received the document told us they viewed it as a threat, given recent events. The FBI had just seized 2020 election materials in Georgia, and President Trump had announced his desire to “nationalize” elections, a state responsibility under the U.S. Constitution. The Department of Justice has sued more than 20 states to obtain their election rolls, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is conducting an investigation of U.S. voting technology. The upshot is that a yearslong partnership between state and federal authorities—in which the feds have provided assistance on election security and protected state and local voting systems from threats—is now in danger of falling apart. Instead of “partners,” some state authorities now view federal officials involved in election efforts with deep suspicion.
“The trust,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told us, “has been absolutely destroyed.” The sentiment is not confined to Democrats. Some state-level Republican election officials, who, like others interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to speak freely, said that federal officials’ activities involving elections have become so unusual that they are starting to question the federal officials’ competency and motives. These state officials wonder whether the feds are trying to do what Trump has accused others of doing: rig an election.
With just more than eight months before midterm elections, Trump has already said that he will accept the results only “if the elections are honest,” and has mused that “we shouldn’t even have an election” given that the midterms typically result in defeats for the president’s party. He has called for the greater use of identification at all polling places, a ban on mail voting, and a prohibition on certain types of voting equipment. Inside the White House, his obsession with disproving the results of the 2020 election, which he lost, has led to the creation of a standing working group that meets regularly to coordinate federal efforts to investigate past elections and reform future election processes.
The result is a breakdown in the state and federal partnership that has long facilitated the nation’s elections. After a White House official, Jared Borg, told secretaries of state to expect a Cabinet-level briefing at a conference in Washington last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard failed to appear, according to Lawrence Norden, the vice president for elections and government at the Brennan Center for Justice, who attended the briefing. Days later, the election leaders received the email from Hardiman, a career official, who had appeared at the conference to discuss the more traditional roles the FBI plays in assisting election administrators, including investigations of threats to state and local election officials.
“It was very standard FBI stuff about their role in elections,” Norden told us. “In another time, this would not have raised any eyebrows.”
But Trump’s demands that his law-enforcement agencies chase election conspiracies could animate attempts to contest the 2026 election results should Democrats take control of the House, Senate, or both, election officials and experts said. The images of federal authorities seizing ballots in Georgia could reinforce the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and deepen suspicion about the legitimacy of elections. Experts say there is little indication that federal courts will allow Trump to dictate to states the methods or administration of elections. But officials are preparing for legal battles in the coming months, and say the courts will need to hold the line on federal interference.
“It’s kind of like Donald Trump saying to the prime minister of Greenland, ‘I’m your partner,’” the Democratic election attorney Marc Elias told us. “Saying this has been done in the past is cold comfort when Donald Trump is saying, in the Oval Office, that states are his vassals.”
Trump won reelection in 2024 without ever conceding his defeat in 2020. From the start of his second term, his senior team launched tandem efforts to rectify the imagined injustice of a rigged vote. The first focused on executive actions and legislative efforts to change the way elections are conducted in the future, a project that has so far yielded little progress. Federal judges have rejected Trump’s demands that states impose new identification rules and threats to withhold federal funding to states that don’t change their voting systems or voter-registration forms.
The second effort, which has begun to come to light in recent weeks, focused on using federal investigative power to find evidence that would confirm Trump’s belief about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. These investigations began as largely exploratory projects, seeking evidence to confirm what the president and some of his advisers have long believed about the possibility of past fraud. Many state governments have resisted efforts by the Department of Justice to obtain raw voting records, although some have cooperated.
One DOJ official characterized the seizure in Fulton County as a recalibration in strategy that resulted from the president’s frustration. “The White House has tried to get these ballots from day one,” this person said, referring to voting records in Georgia and other states that Trump lost in 2020.
[Read: “It’s a five-alarm fire”]
Trump immediately offered support for the operation, and even got on the phone with FBI agents in Atlanta and with Gabbard to thank them for their efforts. “Now they’re going to find out the true winner of that state,” Trump said this week about the search, before making clear that there was only one right answer. “If there was cheating, which there was, but if there was cheating, it should be found, because we can’t let it happen again.”
Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said in a letter to Congress that Trump did not ask questions during the phone call and she and the president did not issue directives to FBI agents. She has launched a separate investigation of election-infrastructure vulnerabilities, which involved collecting voting equipment from Puerto Rico. Intelligence officials typically keep their distance from domestic law-enforcement matters. But in a February 2 letter to Congress, Gabbard said her work was being conducted under her statutory authority to “analyze intelligence related to election security, including counter-intelligence, foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity.” Gabbard attended the seizure in Fulton County, she said, at the request of Trump.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche both praised and appeared to try to minimize Gabbard’s role in recent public appearances. He told Fox News on Monday that “first of all, she wasn’t at the search; she was in the area where the search took place. She’s not part of this investigation.” He said on January 30 that Gabbard’s presence in Atlanta “shouldn’t be questioned.” But those close to the White House reluctantly acknowledge that she has managed to deliver—or create the perception that she has delivered—what the president wants. “Gabbard is the only one who has actually pulled it off,” one official said. While speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump congratulated Gabbard on her performance.
The involvement of the intelligence community reflects the president’s frustration with senior Justice Department officials and others he perceives as obstructing his agenda or being insufficiently loyal. “Justice has just sat on things for months,” an official told us. “It boggles the mind that they wouldn’t just take the ballots!” The official insisted that Trump “should have gotten them on the first day of his term.” This person said the president and his allies have concluded that “if there was a true Trump prosecutor, it would have already been done.”
One indication of the push for more deferential leadership at the DOJ is the elevation of the Missouri prosecutor Thomas Albus to oversee election investigations nationwide. Albus and his team have quietly conducted interviews, collected tens of thousands of pages of documents, and carried out other efforts in multiple states in recent months, according to people familiar with the probes.
Albus has a pedigree as a longtime member of what has been referred to as the “Missouri conservative movement”—a group of current and former senior Republicans who have used the state’s power and resources to try to overturn the 2020 election. The group includes Ed Martin—the DOJ’s pardon attorney and the former head of its “Weaponization Working Group’’—as well as Senator Eric Schmitt, who led a group of Republican attorneys general in litigation efforts focused on the 2020 vote. Albus, who declined to comment for this story, is seen as more “reliable” than others at the DOJ by people close to the president, one person told us. The DOJ declined to comment.
Gabbard has led a separate effort involving personnel from numerous law-enforcement agencies, including the DOJ and the FBI, to arrange the “voluntary turnover” of electronic voting machines from Puerto Rico to her department. An ODNI spokesperson said that the agency “found extremely concerning cyber-security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections” from the materials taken from Puerto Rico. A person briefed on the operation said the focus was on machines used in the 2020 election. A spokesperson for the ODNI said that the actions were not about any specific election. The efforts were “about assessing for vulnerabilities” in voting systems to help improve security for all elections, this person said.
So far, Gabbard and the ODNI have stopped short of alleging they have found evidence of foreign interference in prior elections. Some current and former officials believe that her efforts are intended to introduce enough doubt to lay the foundation for future fraud claims, or possibly provide a basis for the federal government to take over election administration in certain places. The location and chain of custody of the seized voting materials from Fulton are tightly guarded secrets. Officials at the DOJ and the ODNI will not say where federal authorities took the materials, or if they even remain in Georgia. Fulton officials have gone to court to try to reclaim the materials, arguing that the federal government is violating rules intended to ensure the integrity of ballots and a clear chain of custody. “Fulton County can no longer be held responsible for what happens to any items contained in those boxes that relate to the 2020 election,” Robb Pitts, the chair of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, told us. “I don't know who has those 700 boxes now, nor do I know what they’re doing with them.”
[Read: The real election risk comes later]
Some election administrators fear that the efforts will erode public confidence in elections and could create a legal predicate for more aggressive moves by Trump later this year. Cleta Mitchell, a Republican activist who has advised Trump in the past, has argued that a federal election takeover would be possible after the president declares a national emergency based on a threat to the “sovereignty” of the country. Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Trump, has been rallying the president’s supporters to demand military deployments to polling places this fall.
“You have got to call up the 82nd and the 101st Airborne on the Insurrection Act. You’ve got to get around every poll,” Bannon said this week on his online show, War Room. “We will not accept anything less.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt distanced the president from Bannon’s comments this week, saying the administration had no plans to send immigration enforcement to polling places. Inside the West Wing, top advisers to the president have also resisted any plans for a “nationalization” of voting processes, despite Trump’s suggestion that the federal government could “take over the voting” in “15 places.” His focus, his advisers say, is on legislative changes to voting procedures, reforms that are permitted by the Constitution but face Democratic resistance in the Senate.
“President Trump pledged to secure America’s elections, and he has tasked the most talented team of patriots to do just that,” the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told us in a statement. “The President’s team, including DNI Gabbard and FBI Director Patel, are working together to implement the President’s election integrity priorities, and their work continues to serve him and the entire country well.”
On Thursday, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters that “it appears there may be a coordinated effort to try to interfere in the ’26 midterms. They may even start to interfere in, prior to, in the primaries, or in a state like mine, where they may have—we may have—a statewide referendum on redistricting.” The ODNI declined to respond.
At a minimum, elections officials face the renewed burden of defending the credibility of voting systems that have repeatedly proved themselves in recent years. Some Republican campaign consultants have warned that the effort could backfire on their own midterm efforts by decreasing turnout among the president’s base and increasing turnout among Democrats.
“There is certainly going to be an influence campaign to undermine confidence in the election,” Norden, of the Brennan Center, told us. “Those are the things that we need to be preparing for.”
Elections officials told us they are now getting ready for interference from both foreign adversaries and the White House. Several said they are still deliberating whether to show up to the FBI-hosted meeting scheduled for February 25. Others said they will attend but not speak out of concern that their information could be turned against them. The FBI declined to make its election executive available for an interview and noted to us that the invitation to meet with Hardiman and other federal officials is not out of the ordinary.
State officials are readying for intense scrutiny by federal authorities. Authorities in one state told us they have retained outside legal counsel in case federal officials seek 2020-related materials, and are drafting legislation to try to make it harder for the U.S. government to do so. Georgia election officials told us they have been working overtime to consult with criminal attorneys. Some Republican election chiefs said they were trying to avoid engaging with federal officials at all, and some said their trust with federal officials was situational.
In Maricopa County, Arizona, anxieties are so high that county officials are contacting employees who worked on the 2024 presidential election—which Trump won—to determine whether they have records on their private electronic devices that should be preserved to comply with a DOJ litigation hold they received last year, three people told us. The county’s request to employees came amid fears that county officials—who weathered years of violent threats and harassment after Trump’s 2020 loss—could be accused by federal prosecutors of obstruction of justice.