Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony before a Senate committee Wednesday raised a host of questions about the extent of President Donald Trump’s involvement in the FBI’s extraordinary raid on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, this January.
In comments to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Gabbard, the top U.S. intelligence official, again said that Trump directed her to participate in the Fulton County raid, echoing her written disclosure to Congress last month.
But she offered shifting justifications for her participation and refused to detail whether or how Trump had prior knowledge of the FBI’s search in order to direct her to travel to the county.
One elections expert described Trump’s clear involvement as deeply troubling.
“The president is not in the chain of command on the execution of individual search warrants, should not be in the chain of command on the execution of individual search warrants,” David Becker, the executive director of Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former Department of Justice (DOJ) Civil Rights Division attorney, said in a briefing with reporters Wednesday.
“The fact that he clearly knew about it before its execution raises real questions for the president about how he knew about it, who he heard it from, and why he thought it was appropriate to start sharing that this search warrant was going to be executed prior.”
Fulton County has been a leading target of Trump’s ongoing effort to challenge his loss in the 2020 election, and the raid allowed the FBI to take possession of original ballots and other materials from the election.
Gabbard has emerged as a key player in President Donald Trump’s campaign to relitigate past elections and attempt to control future ones. Her comments Wednesday — which often contradicted Trump and the DOJ’s previous accounts of her involvement — emphasized the president’s personal interest in the raid.
Questioned by Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) about what authority permitted her attendance, Gabbard said she wasn’t a direct participant but was only observing the raid.
“I did not participate in a law enforcement activity. Nor would I, because that does not exist within my authorities,” she claimed. “I was at Fulton County, sir, at the request of the president and to work with the FBI to observe this action that had long been awaited. I was not aware of what was in the warrant or not in the warrant.”
Gabbard added Trump specifically told her to “go and observe the FBI’s activities on this issue.”
Warner then pressed her on how Trump could have directed her to Fulton County without knowing about the impending raid.
“I’m not aware that the president knew about a [search warrant] before it was served,” Gabbard said.
“Then why was he sending you to Fulton County?” the senator asked.
“This occurred the day the FBI had it approved — their warrant approved — by a local judge and they began to execute this,” she said.
When Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) asked whether the director of national intelligence has the authority to oversee the execution of criminal warrants, Gabbard claimed she was present because she has “oversight on election security.”
She also said she did not handle any of the seized materials, but did enter an FBI evidence truck that she claimed was empty.
Gabbard’s election investigation
On the president’s orders, Gabbard has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election, particularly focusing on long-debunked claims it was stolen from Trump due to foreign government interference with voting machines.
Gabbard’s involvement in the raid immediately raised alarm bells, suggesting that her office may be attempting to allege that foreign tampering led to Trump’s loss in Georgia in 2020 — a long debunked, far-right conspiracy theory the president has routinely amplified.
The raid was backed by a search warrant, but court proceedings later revealed that the affidavit behind it was largely based on disinformation and debunked voter fraud claims pushed by anti-voting activists.
The affidavit also did not mention allegations of foreign interference, raising further questions about why the director of national intelligence, who generally focuses on national security threats from abroad, would be involved in a county-level election issue.
Gabbard’s account undercut both Trump’s and the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) explanations for her involvement.
Trump said Gabbard took part in the search at the insistence of Attorney General Pam Bondi “to look at votes that want to be checked out from Georgia,” while the DOJ initially said her presence was just a matter of coincidence.
The New York Times reported last month that a day after the raid, Gabbard met with some of the same FBI agents who carried out the search. During the meeting, Gabbard called Trump, who personally thanked the agents for their work and asked them questions about the investigation.
After the raid, Gabbard defended her involvement in her letter to Congress, saying her office has been “actively reviewing intelligence reporting and assessments on election integrity since I took office.”
“As I publicly stated on 10 April 2025, there is information and intelligence reporting suggesting that electronic voting systems being used in the United States have long been vulnerable to exploitation that could result in enabling determined actors to manipulate the results of votes being cast with the intent of changing the outcome of an election,” Gabbard claimed.
While foreign adversaries did conduct cyber operations against the U.S. before and during the 2020 election, federal agencies — including the U.S. intelligence community — concluded that “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.”
In addition to her participation in the Fulton County raid, Gabbard’s office recently obtained voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for security vulnerabilities, according to Reuters. That probe was based on claims that Venezuela had hacked machines, an assertion long pushed by election deniers and far-right influencers.
Far-right conspiracy theories
Gabbard’s probes into foreign interference come as far-right anti-voting figures with close ties to the White House have been working on an executive order that aims to allow the president to seize control of elections by declaring a national emergency.
An early draft of the order obtained by Democracy Docket last month claims the emergency is necessary because of foreign interference with U.S. election infrastructure and empowers the president to ban voting machines and implement several other blatantly unconstitutional measures.
Both Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel said in Wednesday’s hearing they did not have knowledge of the draft order.
Trump has also signaled that he may soon issue another elections-related executive order. Just like his previous attempt to unilaterally control elections, any future order will likely be swiftly challenged and blocked by federal courts.
Alongside her investigations into false claims of foreign tampering with voting machines, Gabbard has embarked on an effort to downplay and rewrite the history around Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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 — despite U.S. intelligence community probes, a bipartisan Senate review, the Mueller report and the Durham report all concluding Russia attempted to interfere in the election with the goal of sabotaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Instead, Gabbard claimed the FBI’s investigation was part of a “treasonous conspiracy” and “coup” that former President Barack Obama and his top intelligence officials tried to stage against Trump.
Citing her claims, Trump said Obama and other former officials were guilty of treason, a crime punishable by death. The DOJ also opened a criminal investigation into Gabbard’s allegations. The status of that probe is unknown.
