President Donald Trump may have undermined potential criminal prosecutions after an FBI raid of an elections office in the Georgia county where he was indicted, according to a new report.
The New York Times reported Monday that the president had ordered Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to assist in the FBI operation last week in Fulton County, and the spy chief then met with agents who had seized truckloads of 2020 ballots and called Trump, who spoke with the investigators himself.
"What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure," the Times reported. "Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said. The president addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry, according to three people with knowledge of the discussion."
The squad supervisor primarily fielded the president's questions, and one U.S. official told the newspaper the call was perhaps a minute long and compared his message to a pep talk or a coach's halftime speech. That source said Trump gave no substantial directions to the investigators but had personally ordered Gabbard to join the search and coordinated her actions with FBI deputy co-director Andrew Bailey.
"Even for a president who has radically transformed the Justice Department and the FBI by trampling over their political independence and using them as tools for personal retribution, Mr. Trump appears to be taking that kind of involvement to a new level," the Times reported. "Rather than going to senior department or FBI officials, Mr. Trump spoke directly to the frontline agents doing the granular work of a politically sensitive investigation in which he has a large personal stake."
"By speaking directly with the investigators, the president may have provided significant ammunition to any future defense should the investigation yield criminal charges," the report added.
Any defendant who might potentially be charged in the case – and Trump signaled in his Jan. 21 speech in Davos there would be charges – would likely present his phone call to FBI agents as evidence of vindictive prosecution, and defense lawyers would probably call for the agents and even Trump himself to testify at trial.
"The search itself raises serious questions," the Times reported. "It is unclear what evidence was presented to a federal magistrate judge to establish probable cause for a search warrant for the ballots and other materials, which are now more than five years old.
"But multiple prior investigations — including one at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term by the same FBI office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta — found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud," the report added.