Why we should worry that Trump's spy chief was spotted at an FBI raid of an election office

The incident is beyond suspicious. In fact, it’s a real-time flag of potential corruption — and the president's ambition to rig the coming elections.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was caught on camera participating in an FBI raid on a local election office in Fulton County, Georgia yesterday. This is bad. Very bad. But we don’t need to speculate wildly about why this is happening. Donald Trump told us the other week — and you may not have noticed. Let me explain.

In an interview earlier this month, Trump openly said he wished he’d “seized” ballots in the 2020 election, and he suggested he had the authority to do so. That should have rung alarm bells across the country. I wrote about it two weeks ago here.

For anyone who didn’t read that piece — here’s the bottom line up front: Trump doesn’t have those powers. And I would know. I helped write the executive order he’s talking about.

When he laments he didn’t “seize” ballot boxes after losing the 2020 election, he’s referring to a specific executive order that he thinks would justify such an act. Trump and his lawyers have suggested that Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018, gives the president the power to intervene in elections, even to the point of seizing voting machines or ballots.

Too bad for them, the people who wrote that order — myself included — are willing to publicly testify to the fact that it does NO SUCH THING. Here’s what I wrote about it:

I co-drafted the order alongside experts from DHS, DOJ, the Intelligence Community, and other agencies. The central idea was to make it easier for a president to impose real consequences on foreign actors who interfered in U.S. elections. NOT to revisit vote counts. NOT to rummage through ballot boxes. And certainly NOT to allow a president to deploy the military against local election infrastructure because he didn’t like the outcome.

What’s ironic is that Trump was annoyed we put the executive order in front of him. He didn’t want to sign it. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But it probably has something to do with the fact that he didn’t want to punish Russia, certainly not for trying to help him win elections.

In any event, he’s now conveniently reinterpreting the order as some all-powerful election snooping tool. It is not. But you don’t need to take my word for it. You can read the order yourself. What’s more, I really think you should. Because in the wake of Trump’s comments this week, it sounds like at some point he’s going to trot out this argument again, claiming he has the power to Hoover up ballots across America wherever he doesn’t like the outcome of an election.

To repeat: the order was written in response to foreign interference in the 2016 election and designed to make it easier for a president to impose sanctions on foreign actors who meddle in U.S. elections. It does NOT confer domestic law-enforcement authority; it does NOT override state and local control of elections; and it does NOT authorize the seizure of voting machines by the National Guard, or anyone else for that matter. As I made clear in the piece —

…the order goes out of its way to do the opposite. It stresses the need to “maintain an appropriate separation between intelligence functions and policy and legal judgments” and emphasizes insulation from political bias. Indeed, the order explicitly states that nothing in it creates new rights or benefits or alters existing legal authorities — and certainly not a new “right” for presidents to go rummaging about in ballot boxes to see who you voted for or to slip a few extra ballots inside with a checkmark next to his name.

So when Trump says he “should have” done something like seize ballots, that isn’t him recounting a lawful option that he prudently declined. That’s an admission he wanted to take an illegal act and then pretend the law would have somehow allowed it.

In particular, I want to call your attention to these words from the order: “an appropriate separation between intelligence functions and policy and legal judgments.” EO 13848 was explicit that the nation’s spy agencies needed to tread lightly on this issue because they have no role in the administration of elections, other than to prevent foreign bad guys from doing things like trying to hack the vote.

So what on earth is Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard doing at an FBI raid of a local election office?

Well, if you ask me, it appears that Trump’s claim of power to “seize” ballots has gone from an errant presidential fantasy… to some kind of actual directive… to a real-life raid carried out before our eyes. And all of it, potentially, resting on the flimsiest legal justification.

We don’t yet know all the details. But what we do know is that FBI agents executed a search warrant at the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operation Center in Georgia, seeking records tied to the 2020 election, which includes ballots, voter rolls, and other election materials. You don’t need to be a law-enforcement analyst to see what’s going on. This action was obviously tied to the broader effort driven by Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about that election.

What made this scene more extraordinary — and deeply troubling — was that the nation’s spy chief chose to personally be there. I can’t emphasize how big of a break in custom this is (at best) and how deeply corrupt it might be (at worst), not to mention a signal of what’s to come. The Director of National Intelligence is responsible for overseeing foreign espionage, not spying on Americans or mucking around in their ballot boxes.

Put another way, this is not normal.

Top lawmakers are worried, too. Sen. Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is already sounding the alarm loudly. He warned that either Gabbard believes there’s some foreign intelligence nexus justifying her presence (in which case she’s violated her legal obligations) or she’s dragging the intelligence community into a domestic political stunt to legitimize conspiracy theories.

From the footage and reporting, it looked like the baseball-cap-clad Gabbard didn’t want to be seen at the raid. For good reason. This stinks to high hell. If I were on one of the Congressional oversight committees, I’d announce an investigation TODAY into this situation and subpoena the Director of National Intelligence to explain her presence and what directives she was carrying out.

In the meantime, it’s critical to remember: administration of elections is not a federal responsibility. The Constitution places that authority with the states. If the federal government is actually carrying out the president’s wishes to seize election information to relitigate his baseless 2020 claims, then there may very well be violations of state law happening here. Right before our eyes.

Hopefully state and local prosecutors around the country are paying attention. Fortunately, I know a group of folks who probably are. Yesterday, top prosecutors around America announced the Fight Against Federal Overreach. And it looks like they might have another issue to take on.

Your friend, in defiance,