Georgia lawmakers express alarm to see Tulsi Gabbard at FBI elections office raid

Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about why Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s director of national intelligence, was “lurking” in Fulton county on Wednesday while FBI agents carted off boxes of 2020 election documents.

Gabbard visited an elections hub in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, on Wednesday as the FBI executed a search warrant for records related to the 2020 election. The warrant sought all ballots from the 2020 election in the county, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls, according to a warrant obtained by the Guardian.

“My constituents in Georgia – and I think much of the American public – are quite reasonably alarmed and asking questions, after the director of national intelligence was spotted bizarrely and personally lurking in an FBI evidence truck in Fulton county, Georgia, yesterday,” said the senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat. “I encourage all of us on a bipartisan basis to pursue the facts as quickly as possible to understand whether the office of the director of national intelligence is straying far outside of its lane.”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, described Gabbard, a former representative and army veteran known for adhering to widely debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, as “totally unqualified” to be one of the nation’s spymasters, citing her presence in Georgia during “a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election” as evidence.

Gabbard only had two reasons to be there, Warner said: either she “believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus – in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns – or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy”.

Tulsi Gabbard arrives as the FBI conducts a ‘court-ordered search warrant’ in Union City, Georgia, on 28 January. Photograph: Erik S Lesser/EPA

An unnamed senior administration official told CNN today that foreign threats to election integrity justified her presence, saying: “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, & election infrastructure. She has & will continue to take action on President Trump’s directive to secure our elections & work with our interagency partners to do so.”

Gabbard has not personally explained her reasons for being at the warrant operation at a warehouse in Georgia. But she is reportedly compiling research reexamining the 2020 election on behalf of the White House and Trump, an activity that would normally be outside the scope of her office.

Gabbard’s staff told news reporters at the Fulton county elections offices that she would make a statement on Wednesday evening, but never did. Photographers captured her at the site amid the moving trucks for boxes of five-year-old documents.

The seizure has roiled Democratic lawmakers in Georgia, who are calling for an explanation.

“The 2020 election has been litigated,” said the representative Nikema Williams of Atlanta in a letter to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, sent on Wednesday. “By continuing to raid election locations in Georgia, the Department of Justice (DOJ), this raid serves to intimidate Fulton county voters and election officials, rather than to further any legitimate law enforcement aim.”

Representative Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from California on the House permanent select committee on intelligence, called for an explanation in an interview on Thursday with CNN.

“It’s extremely unusual that the DNI [director of national intelligence] would be present for this type of domestic operation, and it’s something that the intelligence committee should investigate right away, should exercise its oversight power and bring Tulsi Gabbard in to the committee to explain exactly what happened,” he said.