Gabbard’s account, delivered in a letter to top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, provides the first detailed explanation for why the director of national intelligence was in attendance at an FBI operation that Democratic officials questioned as primarily a law enforcement matter rather than an intelligence function. The FBI search occurred at the election hub in Fulton County, Georgia, last week and involved agents with a warrant, according to the letter.
In the letter, Gabbard said she attended because Trump asked for her to be there. She also said she accompanied senior FBI officials “under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security,” language she used to describe the basis for her involvement.
Gabbard acknowledged that she helped arrange what she described as a brief phone call between Trump and the FBI agents who carried out the search. She wrote that, during the visit to the FBI field office in Atlanta, she “thanked the FBI agents for their professionalism and great work” and “facilitated a brief phone call for the President to thank the agents personally for their work.” She added that “He did not ask any questions, nor did he or I issue any directives,” according to the letter.
Her disclosure came as her presence at the Georgia election facility raised immediate questions from Democratic officials, who focused on the mismatch they saw between the national intelligence director’s typical role and a warrant-backed FBI activity. Gabbard’s letter did not say why Fulton County specifically was singled out, and she said she had not seen the warrant that investigators submitted to a judge for approval.
The search itself added to a pattern of attention on Fulton County, which votes heavily Democratic, where Trump has repeatedly alleged without evidence that voter fraud in 2020 cost him his Georgia loss to President Joe Biden. The letter also said Gabbard has been central to Trump administration efforts to cast doubt on intelligence community conclusions about Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 campaign, a reference that Democratic officials said increased concerns about what the Georgia operation could be used to support.
In her letter, Gabbard suggested that election systems could face foreign interference. She cited intelligence she said showed that electronic voting systems “have been vulnerable to exploitation” and that vulnerabilities could enable manipulation of votes, while also saying the purpose was to determine whether there has been foreign or other “malign interference” and whether vulnerabilities exist in election infrastructure for future elections.
The letter did not outline any new explanation for the underlying legal basis of the FBI search, but it placed the emphasis on her role in coordinating and analyzing election-security-related intelligence. Gabbard’s account also aligned with a report earlier Monday from The New York Times that she helped arrange a call between Trump and FBI agents, where a direct line between the president and rank-and-file investigators was described as uncommon.