President Donald Trump's spy chief Tulsi Gabbard has set off alarms among former intelligence officials and election law experts by attending an FBI raid of an election facility in Georgia.
The director of national intelligence and the White House confirmed the president had dispatched her to Atlanta for the search, but intel veterans and legal experts questioned her authority to take part in the raid and erased the barrier between foreign and domestic intelligence activities set up after Watergate, reported CNN.
“If you convince people that the intelligence community is playing political games domestically, it’s bad,” said one former senior counterintelligence official. “I don’t think anyone wants a reprise of the kind of stuff the Church Committee uncovered.”
That was a U.S. Senate select committee in the mid-1970s that probed civil liberties abuses by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency and led to reforms that Gabbard has been accused of violating by taking part in the search that resulted in the seizure of ballots and other records from the 2020 election that Trump has falsely claimed was stolen from him.
“Despite the characterizations in her letter, the politically-appointed DNI has absolutely no authority or reason to be present during the execution of a warrant on a county election office,” said election law expert David Becker, who is executive director of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. “Can you imagine the uproar from Trump’s defense attorney if Biden’s DNI had been present at Mar-a-Lago during the execution of the warrant on his classified files?"
Gabbard's office has also gained access to voting machines used in Puerto Rico to study them for vulnerabilities, a spokesperson confirmed, and the DNI insisted she's authorized to conduct cybersecurity probes for possible foreign or malign interference in Trump's election loss more than five years ago, but experts are dubious.
"[Gabbard] cites a bunch of authorities related to the activities of foreign actors, doesn’t actually tie them to any specific allegation and even says she hasn’t seen the warrant or the evidence it’s based on,” said the former counterintelligence official. “So, what the hell is she doing there? It’s nonsensical unless it’s political.”
A former senior intelligence community lawyer concurred, saying Gabbard was authorized to coordinate such an investigation but not take over operational authority or view election ballots, and Democratic lawmakers have called on her to testify about her presence in Fulton County, but Republicans seem unlikely to sign off on that.
“I’d want to ask Gabbard what foreign evidence informed the search warrant and how that was communicated to Fulton County,” said Emily Harding, who helped lead the Senate intelligence committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.
“First, there has to be a foreign nexus for the DNI to be involved,” Harding added. “If there is, that makes it an FBI [counterintelligence] case, which are among the most sensitive things the bureau does. They don’t tell anyone what’s going on with those unless they have real hard evidence.”
U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia did attempt to influence the 2016 election but did not say whether those activities impacted the vote, and a former senior intelligence official told CNN that officials took care back then to focus on analyzing threats rather than take any hands-on role in election security.
"[Gabbard's] job is to inform domestic officials about foreign threats not to ensure that elections are secure, which is the job of state and local officials,” the ex-intelligence official said. “The IC [intelligence community] shouldn’t be looking at domestic elections.”
