What does Tulsi Gabbard’s job as director of national intelligence have to do with elections?

By Sean Lyngaas, CNN

(CNN) — After intense criticism from some election officials after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present during an FBI search of an elections office in Georgia last week, Gabbard defended her actions by pointing to a slew of intelligence laws and policies.

“My presence was requested by the President and executed under my broad statutory authority to coordinate, integrate, and analyze intelligence related to election security, including counterintelligence (CI), foreign and other malign influence and cybersecurity,” Gabbard wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers on Monday. A White House official confirmed President Donald Trump asked Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search.

But several former senior intelligence officials and election law experts told CNN that Gabbard has no legal authority over such an FBI search and that her presence in Fulton County, where federal agents took ballots from the 2020 election, risks eroding a crucial line between foreign and domestic intelligence activities instituted after Watergate.

“If you convince people that the intelligence community is playing political games domestically, it’s bad,” said one former senior counterintelligence official. “I don’t think anyone wants a reprise of the kind of stuff the Church Committee uncovered.”

That’s a reference to the mid-1970s Senate investigation into civil liberties abuses by the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency that led to new laws reining in the spy agencies.

FBI agents on January 28 executed a search warrant in Fulton County, outside of Atlanta, and seized ballots used in the 2020 election.
Georgia has long been central to Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was rigged — a claim debunked by numerous court decisions and audits.

In addition to Gabbard’s presence in Georgia, her office had previously gained access to voting machines used in Puerto Rico to probe them for security vulnerabilities, a spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Wednesday night.

In her letter, Gabbard “cites a bunch of authorities related to the activities of foreign actors, doesn’t actually tie them to any specific allegation and even says she hasn’t seen the warrant or the evidence it’s based on,” said the former counterintelligence official, who like others, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration. “So, what the hell is she doing there? It’s nonsensical unless it’s political.”

Gabbard said her office’s general counsel found her actions to be within her lawful authority, and that Trump had tasked her office with “taking all appropriate actions under my statutory authorities towards ensuring the integrity of our elections.”

The director of national intelligence oversees the intelligence community’s 17 other organizations; the director does not have the investigative authorities of law enforcement or the “operational” ones that other spy agencies have to take covert action in the field. Gabbard’s presence during a law enforcement operation is therefore baffling people who spent decades in intelligence and in elections.

“Despite the characterizations in her letter, the politically-appointed DNI has absolutely no authority or reason to be present during the execution of a warrant on a county election office,” said David Becker, an election law expert who is executive director of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“Can you imagine the uproar from Trump’s defense attorney if Biden’s DNI had been present at Mar-a-Lago during the execution of the warrant on his classified files? That defense attorney is now the Deputy Attorney General,” Becker said.

The White House on Tuesday defended Gabbard’s presence at the search. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “tapped” Gabbard “to oversee the sanctity and the security of our American elections” and that she’s “working directly alongside the FBI director.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with the president tasking a Cabinet member to pursue an issue that most people want to see solved,” she said.

But Gabbard’s “authority extends to coordinating review of potential foreign interference in elections. That doesn’t give her operational authority, and that doesn’t extend to looking at election ballots,” a former senior intelligence community lawyer told CNN.

Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, has called on Gabbard to testify before the committee under oath about her presence in Fulton County. The committee’s chairman, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, simply said “no” when asked by CNN on Tuesday for his reaction to Gabbard’s activities in Fulton County.

Emily Harding, who helped lead the Senate intelligence committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election, said lawmakers could ask some revealing questions of Gabbard.

“I’d want to ask Gabbard what foreign evidence informed the search warrant and how that was communicated to Fulton County,” said Harding, who is now a vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“First, there has to be a foreign nexus for the DNI to be involved,” she added. “If there is, that makes it an FBI [counterintelligence] case, which are among the most sensitive things the Bureau does. They don’t tell anyone what’s going on with those unless they have real hard evidence.”

In their assessment of Russia’s 2016 election influence campaign, US intelligence agencies did not weigh in on whether Moscow’s activities impacted the vote because getting involved in voter preferences is beyond spy agencies’ authorities, the ex-government lawyer added.

Then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in 2019 named an “election threats executive,” a top intelligence official to focus on foreign threats to elections. One former senior intelligence official said officials were careful to focus that role on analyzing threats rather than having any hands-on role in election infrastructure.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s “job is to inform domestic officials about foreign threats not to ensure that elections are secure, which is the job of state and local officials,” the ex-intelligence official said. “The IC [intelligence community] shouldn’t be looking at domestic elections.”

Gabbard’s role pursuing Trump’s false election fraud arguments has boosted her standing within the administration and with the president after a rocky start.

She carved out that particular lane for herself, as it has been widely reported that she and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, have had a fraught relationship. Ratcliffe has wanted no part in the elusive hunt for election fraud, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Gabbard’s tasking with “election integrity” serves the added purpose of keeping her clear of Ratcliffe, the sources said.

As the director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, Ratcliffe stood in front of the cameras to announce that Iranian and Russian operatives were meddling in the 2020 election. In the second Trump administration, that kind of announcement is less likely after the administration made cuts to programs to combat foreign influence on elections, CNN has reported.

CNN’s Zachary Cohen and Kristen Holmes contributed reporting.

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