Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval, working separately from a justice department investigation even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week.
Her presence at the raid drew criticism from Democrats and former intelligence officials, who questioned why the country’s top intelligence officer with no domestic law enforcement powers would appear at the scene of an FBI raid.
But Gabbard, whose role ordinarily focuses on overseeing the intelligence agencies, has played only a minimal role in the criminal investigation, according to three administration officials. “She’s doing her own thing,” one of the officials said.
The parallel investigations into the 2020 election underscore the extent to which it has returned as a priority to the president. And Gabbard being sent to the raid showed the interest on voting machine manipulation claims that Trump has cited as evidence the election was stolen.
The review led by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), authorized on the basis that it is assessing election integrity, has been focused for months on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.
As part of that effort, Gabbard has been briefing Trump and senior White House advisers every few weeks. Officials said Trump directed her to travel to Fulton county, Georgia, so she could observe the FBI executing a search warrant on Wednesday.
The raid itself was overseen by Andrew Bailey, the deputy FBI director, who was also sent by Trump to Georgia. A copy of the search warrant cited possible violations of federal laws governing the preservation of election records and the procurement of false ballots or voter registrations.
The warrant authorized agents to seize sweeping amounts of voter data from Fulton county, including all physical ballots from the 2020 election, voting machine tabulator tapes, images produced during the ballot count and voter rolls from that year.
The target of the criminal investigation was not immediately clear. Spokespeople for the justice department and the FBI did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the investigation or Gabbard’s role.
The episode comes as Trump continues to focus on the 2020 election, nearly six years after losing to Joe Biden. The ODNI review has elevated Gabbard’s standing after she was sidelined from several national security decisions, including to capture Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president.
The ODNI review was initially overseen by the Director’s Initiatives Group, or Dig, a taskforce that Gabbard established within her agency, which focused on vulnerabilities with voting machines used in the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But Dig was dissolved late last year after it misidentified the person who placed pipe bombs outside Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the January 6 Capitol riot, the person said. In December, the justice department charged a different individual over the pipe bombs.
Gabbard has continued the ODNI review even as the justice department has proceeded with its criminal investigation. The specific lines of inquiry the ODNI is pursuing could not be learned, but it was not looking at Fulton county machines until the FBI raid occurred, the person said.
The ODNI review remains within Gabbard’s statutory authority, officials said, citing executive orders extended by Biden in 2022 and Trump in 2025, which task the director of national intelligence (DNI) with assessing foreign interference in federal elections.
In a statement, Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for the DNI, said the office “knows through intelligence and public reporting that electronic voting systems have been and are vulnerable to exploitation”.
“President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear,” she added. “DNI Gabbard has and will continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”
Even so, officials said the ODNI is not expected to get direct access to evidence in the criminal investigation. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported Gabbard was reviewing the 2020 election and the New York Times reported Gabbard patched Trump through on her cellphone to FBI agents after the raid.
On Tuesday morning, Georgia’s Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, inquiring into Gabbard’s presence at the raid.
The letter from the senator Raphael Warnock and Lucy McBath and Nikema Williams, representatives who both serve part of Fulton county, asks “whether the Trump administration is investigating a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus, which would legally require immediate congressional briefing”.
Gabbard has spent outsized time on political projects for Trump. Most recently, she has been involved in a separate effort promoting claims that Barack Obama and senior officials sought to create a false narrative that Russia had attempted to help Trump’s 2016 campaign.
An Obama spokesperson called the effort “bizarre”, noting that a bipartisan Senate report had affirmed the findings of US intelligence agencies that Russian interference in 2016 was intended to benefit Trump while harming his rival, Hillary Clinton.
George Chidi contributed reporting
