WTF Was Tulsi Gabbard Doing at FBI Raid of Georgia Election Office?

For some reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the FBI’s raid at an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, Wednesday.

Gabbard was photographed at the raid while boxes of documents (and ballots) seized by the bureau were being loaded onto trucks. Authorities had a search warrant for the raid related to Trump’s long-debunked allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Gabbard’s job deals with foreign intelligence, so her presence doesn’t seem to make sense.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement questioning what exactly she was doing there.

“There are only two explanations for why the Director of National Intelligence would show up at a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election,” Warner said.

“Either Director Gabbard 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.”

Gabbard may have been there in an attempt to legitimize a conspiracy theory popular in right-wing circles (and the Trump administration) that the Venezuelan government was involved in a plot to overthrow the 2020 election. The Justice Department has been investigating the false claim, debunked in a Delaware court in 2023, since November. Is the Trump administration attempting to create a case out of thin air to validate the president’s 2020 election lies?