By any measure, the FBI’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, last week was extraordinary. Agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, as President Donald Trump harnessed the levers of government to not only buttress his false claims of widespread voter fraud, but also to try to build a criminal case against those he believes wronged him.
What happened the next day was in some ways even more unusual, The New York Times has learned.
Behind closed doors, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with some of the same FBI agents, members of the bureau’s field office in Atlanta, which is conducting the election inquiry, three people with knowledge of the meeting said. They could not say why Gabbard, who also appeared on site at the search, was there, but her continued presence has raised eyebrows given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.
What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said.
The president addressed the agents on speakerphone, asking them questions as well as praising and thanking them for their work on the inquiry, the three people said.
The supervisor of the squad, which investigates allegations of public corruption and civil rights violations and developed the evidence for the search, primarily fielded Trump’s queries, the people said. One U.S. official said the call was fairly short, perhaps just a minute long, and compared the conversation to a pep rally or a coach giving an encouraging halftime speech to his players. That person said the president gave no substantive direction to the investigators.
Trump personally ordered Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search, and coordinated her actions with Andrew Bailey, one of two deputy FBI directors, according to the U.S. official.
Even for a president who has radically transformed the Justice Department and the FBI by trampling over their political independence and using them as tools for personal retribution, Trump appears to be taking that kind of involvement to a new level. Rather than going to senior department or FBI officials, Trump spoke directly to the front-line agents doing the granular work of a politically sensitive investigation in which he has a large personal stake.
A White House spokesperson, Davis Ingle, defended the administration’s efforts in Georgia. “President Trump pledged to secure America’s elections, and he has tasked the most talented team of patriots to do just that,” Ingle said, adding, “President Trump has full confidence in his entire team.”
Olivia C. Coleman, a spokesperson for Gabbard, said the director of national intelligence had a “vital role” in protecting critical infrastructure and analyzing intelligence related to election security. “President Trump’s directive to secure our elections was clear, and DNI Gabbard has and will proudly continue to take actions within her authorities, alongside our interagency partners, including the FBI, to support ensuring the integrity of our elections,” she said.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment, and the FBI declined to comment on an open investigation.
Trump’s interaction is a major departure from past practice.
“It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will,” said David Laufman, who served as a senior Justice Department official in both Republican and Democratic administrations. “It’s now more clear than ever that the independence of the Department of Justice and the FBI is completely compromised and they are essentially under the direction and control of the White House.”
Last month, the president, in declaring once again that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, left little doubt about his intentions.
“People will soon be prosecuted for what they did,” he said in remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, denied that Trump had played any role in the search or that he had been briefed on the inquiry.
“I don’t believe he was involved,” he said. “This is a criminal grand jury investigation, and I can’t comment on it.”
Pressed on Gabbard’s involvement, Blanche said he did not know the reasons for her presence, but he nonetheless appeared to suggest that it was not unusual.
“I don’t know why the director was there,” Blanche said. “She is not part of the grand jury investigation, but she is for sure a key part of our efforts at election integrity and making sure we have free and fair elections. She’s an expert in that space and it’s a big part of what she and her team look at every day.”
The U.S. official said that Trump had ordered Gabbard to go to Georgia to assist with the FBI’s investigation. Other officials have said that the White House had given Gabbard far-ranging authority to hunt for voter fraud in multiple states.
Democrats in Congress have said her appearance at the search raised troubling questions, including whether it was appropriate for an intelligence official to participate in what is primarily a domestic issue.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia reiterated those worries in a statement Monday. “The involvement of the director of national intelligence in a domestic criminal matter -- far outside her statutory role -- only deepens those concerns and demands immediate scrutiny,” he said.
By speaking directly with the investigators, Trump may have provided significant ammunition to any future defense should the investigation yield criminal charges.
His conversation with the agents would probably become part of an effort to have the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Alternatively, if such a case went to trial, defense lawyers would presumably try to elicit testimony from the FBI agents who spoke to the president in the early stages of the investigation, or possibly from Trump himself.
The search itself raises serious questions. It is unclear what evidence was presented to a federal magistrate judge to establish probable cause for a search warrant for the ballots and other materials, which are now more than 5 years old.
But multiple prior investigations -- including one at the end of Trump’s first term by the same FBI office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta -- found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud.
In 2023, Rudy Giuliani, a longtime Trump ally, was ordered to pay $148 million in civil damages for defaming two Fulton County election workers, wrongfully accusing them of having tried to steal votes from Trump.
Trump narrowly lost Georgia in 2020 by about 11,000 votes, prompting an effort by him and his supporters to “find” enough votes to change the outcome. Despite his bid to undermine the integrity of the election, a manual review of the ballots confirmed the result.
In recent months, however, both the president and his administration have sought to cast fresh doubt on the 2020 results in Georgia. Before the search last week, in which agents confiscated voter rolls and scanner images in addition to ballots, senior Justice Department officials had sued to try to acquire the voter evidence that is now in the FBI’s possession.
Three weeks before the search, on Jan. 6, agents hand-delivered a letter to the Fulton County Board of Elections demanding the same materials written by Paul Brown, then the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, a county official said.
The county responded that the election board did not have custody of those records and that the bureau would have to submit an amended request to the county clerk’s office, the official said. That amended request, the official said, was quickly submitted by Paul Ellis, Brown’s chief deputy. Brown filed his resignation papers with the FBI about a week before the search warrant was executed.
It is part of a broader effort by the department to obtain voter data. Already, it has sued nearly half the states in the country for access to their voter rolls, including the private information of voters.
The search and the administration’s flood of lawsuits against states have alarmed election officials and experts, who worry that the moves are laying the groundwork for the administration to contest the results of this year’s congressional midterms.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.