Tulsi Gabbard went down to Georgia — and no one in the Trump administration wants to take credit

The Trump administration is no stranger to shifting and inconsistent explanations. It’s not so much that the right hand and the left hand don’t seem to know what each other is doing, but that they often don’t seem to be in the same building.

But even by its standards, the administration’s ever-evolving explanations for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s controversial presence near an FBI search of a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office last week have been bizarre.

Gabbard’s presence turned heads, given her purview generally involves coordinating US intelligence agencies and their efforts overseas, not domestic matters or law enforcement.

It’s been a little more than a week since Gabbard was pictured at the search. And we’re on at least the sixth – and arguably seventh – different explanation for it, with no one seeming to want to take credit for sending her.

When CNN asked Trump last Thursday why Gabbard was there, he suggested he was well-apprised of the situation and that his spy chief was playing a key role.

“She’s working very hard on trying to keep the election safe. And she’s done a very good job,” Trump said. “And they, as you know, they got into the votes, you got a signed judge’s order in Georgia. And you’re going to see some interesting things happening.”

But a day later, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche sought to put more distance between Gabbard and his department’s investigation.

When asked about the situation at a press conference about the Jeffrey Epstein files, Blanche appeared somewhat testy about the subject.

“She happened to be present in Atlanta,” Blanche said, initially making it sound like a coincidence.

But when a reporter pressed Blanche on it, he allowed that “we are working together as an administration on election integrity-type issues.”

Blanche then told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday, “I don’t know why the director was there.”

Then he told Fox News on Monday night: “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.”

But soon after Blanche’s Fox interview, Gabbard on Monday night posted a letter to congressional Democrats that indicated she was quite involved in the matter.

Outlets including CNN had reported that she had actually put Trump on the phone with FBI agents the day after the search – a controversial move given the possibility of political influence.

Gabbard in her letter said that her “presence was requested by the President.”

While Blanche had said she wasn’t actually at the search itself, Gabbard said she had “accompanied” top FBI officials “in observing FBI personnel executing that search warrant.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said that Trump had “tapped” Gabbard “to oversee the sanctity and the security of our American elections” and said she is “working directly alongside the FBI director.”

Despite Gabbard saying Trump had “requested” her presence – suggesting he was playing a role in the investigation – the president in an interview Wednesday spun a different tale.

“I’m not involved in it,” Trump told NBC News, “but they are inspecting and checking the ballots.”

Then NBC’s Tom Llamas asked much the same question Trump was asked six days prior: Why was Gabbard at the search of an elections office in Georgia?

But Trump’s answer this time was different.

“I don’t know,” he began.

Trump then suggested Gabbard’s presence made sense given the prospect of “international cheating.”

But the next morning – Thursday – Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast indicated Gabbard’s presence owed to a new figure entirely: Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“[Gabbard] took a lot of heat, because she went at Pam’s insistence,” Trump said. “She went in and she looked at votes, that want to be checked out, from Georgia.”

“The media asked, ‘Why is she doing it?’ Right, Pam?” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it, and you know why? Because she’s smart.”

Version 6 – Gabbard’s office says it was both Trump and Bondi

Gabbard’s office clarified later Thursday that both Trump and Bondi were involved in sending Gabbard.

“There’s no contradiction,” Gabbard spokeswoman Olivia Coleman told CNN. “As the President said, he asked for Director Gabbard to be there. Attorney General Bondi also asked for her to be there. Two things can be true at the same time.”

Another spokeswoman posted the same statement on X.

But then the post disappeared. (Gabbard’s office did not respond to an inquiry as to why.)

And when Leavitt was asked at a White House briefing the same day whether Trump had asked for Gabbard to be there, she avoided the question, instead citing Trump’s NBC interview.

And by Friday, Bondi likewise declined to confirm the Gabbard’s team’s claim about Bondi’s role, saying only, “She was there, we are inseparable. That’s all I can say.”

And when Leavitt was asked at a White House briefing the same day whether Trump had asked for Gabbard to be there, Leavitt avoided the question. She instead claimed that Trump had answered the question in his interview with NBC – when he had actually pleaded ignorance.

Not all of these explanations are mutually exclusive. But taken as a whole, they’re really difficult to square with one another.

At the very least, it’s a rather shocking and rapid evolution of the official explanation, in the course of one week’s time.

Let’s list just a few of the inconsistencies:

• 
  Trump has gone from describing why Gabbard was there, in some detail, to saying he didn’t know why she was there.
  
• 
  Gabbard said Trump sent her, but Trump really seemed to want to say it was Bondi’s idea – saying it three times. Today, Gabbard’s office still seems more keen to say that Trump sent Gabbard than the White House does.
  
• 
  Despite Trump saying Bondi sent her, Bondi’s own deputy (Blanche) spent days saying he didn’t know why Gabbard was there and distancing her from the grand jury investigation.
  
• 
  While Blanche said Gabbard was not part of the investigation, Gabbard said Trump had sent her to observe the search, and Leavitt said Gabbard has been “working directly alongside the FBI director” on election security.
  
• 
  Despite Gabbard’s office saying Thursday that Trump had confirmed he asked for Gabbard to be present, Trump never actually said that himself. In fact, he said just a day earlier that he didn’t know why Gabbard was there – in the actual comments Leavitt cited.
  

Leavitt on Thursday afternoon downplayed questions about the matter.

“I’ve seen a lot of the media in this room get very caught up in the semantics of why Tulsi Gabbard was there,” Leavitt said. “I will tell you why, and the president agrees with this: Because election security is essential to national security.”

We can only surmise the reasons for these inconsistencies. But a very logical one is that it’s not terribly helpful for it to be known that Gabbard is involved, and it’s even less helpful for it to be known that Trump is.

After all, that raises the appearance that any possible prosecutions that come out of this investigation are political – and could even face motions to dismiss the cases for vindictive prosecution.

It also just seems to be the case that nobody particularly wants to be responsible for this – or at least, nobody besides Gabbard and her team. Her office has actually made a photo of her in Fulton County its banner on X. (She might view her pursuit of these matters as a chance to ingratiate herself to Trump, after some signs that she had been marginalized.)

Gabbard’s team aside, Trump and Leavitt seem to be mostly pushing it off on the Justice Department, while DOJ has downplayed her role.

Blanche’s comments especially – and arguably his testiness on the subject – made pretty clear that he’d prefer Gabbard not be viewed as playing a role in what his department is doing. Bondi likewise emphasized that FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey was “taking the lead” on the matter.

So what we’ve seen since then is a bunch of administration officials trying to account for all of it – while dealing with the infamously volatile and often-discordant commentary of their boss.