Politics

Gabbard’s role at Georgia FBI raid angers Dems, puzzles election officials

Published

5 months ago

January 30, 2026

Democrats, election experts and even some members of the Trump administration expressed alarm and bewilderment about why Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene as the FBI raided a Georgia election office that has been at the center of Donald Trump’s debunked claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was photographed late Wednesday outside the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta, Georgia, as the FBI executed a search warrant to seize ballots and other records related to the 2020 election.

As DNI, Gabbard has no domestic law enforcement authority and is not typically involved in criminal investigations, a reality that alarmed many Democrats on Capitol Hill — and even puzzled some Trump officials.

“My constituents in Georgia and I think much of the American public are quite reasonably alarmed in asking questions after the director of national intelligence was spotted bizarrely and personally lurking in an FBI evidence truck in Fulton County, Georgia, yesterday,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) said during an unrelated Senate hearing Thursday morning.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Gabbard was investigating the 2020 election, and has regularly briefed Trump and other administration officials about her search. “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key lead role in this important effort,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told The Journal.

Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for Gabbard, confirmed the DNI was on the scene in Atlanta. She did not immediately respond to follow-up inquiries about her reported probe of the 2020 vote.

Despite concerns raised by Democrats, Gabbard appears to be taking on a more expansive public role in American elections. On Thursday, White House aide Jared Borg told a group of election officials that Gabbard — alongside Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi — is set to address the winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State on Friday.

Trump has long fixated on unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in Georgia in the aftermath of the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden. He has continued to falsely suggest that the election was stolen since returning to the White House, including in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Gabbard in an emailed statement. “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases and election infrastructure,” he wrote. “She has and will continue to take action on President Trump’s directive to secure our elections and work with our interagency partners to do so.”

Trump spent much of the morning amplifying claims that the Georgia vote was rigged on Truth Social, and even called attention to Gabbard’s role in Wednesday’s raid.

Gabbard’s role remains confusing to some in the administration. Two current Justice Department officials and one Trump administration official said they were also puzzled by Gabbard’s presence in Fulton County. “It remains a mystery to me why she would need to be there,” said the administration official, who, like others interviewed, was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Sen. Mark Warner, (D-Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, argued on X Wednesday that there “are only two explanations” for Gabbard’s presence in the raid.

“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 the 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,” he wrote.

Warner and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) wrote to Gabbard Thursday to request briefings for both panels about the legal basis, scope, and justification of her participation in the raid.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who before entering Congress was California’s chief election official, told a panel at NASS on Thursday that Gabbard’s presence at the raid should be a reminder about “the urgency of the situation.”

“I guess they’re still searching for 11,000 more votes,” he quipped, referencing a call Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after losing the 2020 election. “But it should be a reminder — or a wake up — that this can happen at any point once again between now and this coming November.”

Gabbard’s appearance at the raid led some Democrats to believe she wanted to be there to claim credit for it publicly.

“When the head of a department participates in something, it’s about PR, not about process and the law,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) told Blue Light News. “If they have evidence, they want evidence and they have a valid warrant, and you let the professionals go in and do that.”

While Gabbard has veered in and out of the good graces of Trump during her tenure as DNI, she appeared to hit a high point last summer when she alleged that senior U.S. intelligence officials under then-President Barack Obama were guilty of treason because they had fabricated intelligence about Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Trump said last week that individuals who played a role in that year’s vote will soon be prosecuted.

David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, told reporters on Thursday that Gabbard’s Georgia appearance only sparks more concerns that the raid “is an attempt to fuel false claims and disinformation.”

“There is no reason for the director of national intelligence to be in any kind of voting site,” he said. “She has neither the authority nor the competence to assess anything in that voting site. And so it’s incredibly troubling to see something like that.”

Mo Ivory, a Fulton County commissioner, said Thursday that federal officials took 700 boxes of ballots and “ancillary” materials from the 2020 election. The county’s attorney, she said, is “working with a group of local and national lawyers” to formulate a legal response.

The first DOJ official said the ballots are now being stored at an FBI facility in Winchester, Virginia.

Spokespeople for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did not respond to requests for comment. In 2020, Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s pressure campaign to “find” enough votes to flip the state’s election for him.

The two DOJ officials said the FBI received a heads up that Gabbard would be on site for the raid. They said her participation did not bother FBI Director Kash Patel or other bureau officials.

Democrats, however, worry more broadly that the raid could have a chilling effect on future elections.

“The facts are clear, Trump lost, and he has to accept that and move on with his life,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said in an interview. “And everyone in his administration should do the same, instead of terrorizing election officials and interfering with our work to simply just prepare for the midterm elections.”

Erin Doherty and Andrew Howard contributed to this report.

Politics

Iran set to progress at World Cup

Published

37 minutes ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Iran’s adventure through a World Cup beset by geopolitical complexity and logistical complications will likely continue after the team landed a frenetic 1-1 draw against Egypt. The high-stakes encounter kicked off hours after a tenuous peace between Washington and Tehran was threatened by American strikes on Iranian military installations along the Strait of Hormuz. Read the full story from Seattle by Sasha Issenberg and Sophia Cai here.

Politics

The “Pride Match” that wasn’t

Published

2 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

SEATTLE — As a lesbian who was born in Egypt, Noha Mahgoub could have chosen to dress for what local organizers branded a “Pride Match” in colors associated with either her sexual orientation or her country of origin. The 43-year-old Democratic legislative aide — one of the top staffers in Washington state government — chose the latter, arriving in a red Egyptian national team jersey, a black hat emblazoned with YALLA and red-white-and-black tricolor facepaint.

“I’ve seen Pride shirts, I’ve seen Pride face paintings,” she observed from a concourse minutes before national anthems began echoing around Lumen Field. “It’s been really great, but I’m seeing a lot more Egypt and Iran and people cheering for their countries and singing their songs.”

Indeed, despite FIFA’s announcement that rainbow flags would be permitted in the stadium, few were visible as the match began. Instead, the stands rippled with the colors of the two Middle Eastern countries on the field, including many of the pre-revolutionary lion-and-sun flags that FIFA has attempted to ban under a stadium code of conduct that prohibits political displays.

Mahgoub had seen Egypt’s national team in person only once before, as a child while the team was angling to qualify for the 1990 World Cup. Since then, Mahgoub and her family relocated to Washington state, where she said the local Egyptian-American community has become enlivened by new arrivals coming to work at Seattle-based tech companies.

“You know how it is, you start calling everybody your cousins — a lot of cousins that I wasn’t related to,” Mahgoub said. “Well, I think a lot of them are here.”

Politics

Why Belgium’s prime minister isn’t cheering on the Red Devils

Published

5 hours ago

June 27, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Ah, Belgium. The country of fries, chocolate, Kevin De Bruyne and, some might say, chronic political division.

Beyond Brussels, a mighty international melting pot, the country is split between Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Wallonia and a small German-speaking community. Those linguistic divisions are mirrored in its politics: Belgium has separate party systems on either side of the language border, as well as a highly devolved federal structure that gives significant powers to its regions.

Today, Belgian politics is as fragmented as ever. It took 234 days to form a federal government after the June 2024 election (yes, you read that right). The delay was driven largely by the fact that no camp came close to winning a majority, forcing months of negotiations between parties with sharply different ideological and linguistic bases.

Flemish nationalism has also become a growing force, shaped by two right-wing nationalist parties: the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), which wants to transform Belgium into a looser confederal state and ultimately give Flanders far greater autonomy, and the far-right Vlaams Belang, which openly campaigns for Flemish independence.

So, you might think the 2026 World Cup would offer Belgium’s leader a rare opportunity to rally and unify the country behind a shared national symbol, right?

Wrong.

Prime Minister Bart De Wever, who hails from the N-VA party, has expressed almost no public support for the Red Devils, Belgium’s national soccer team.

That contrasts with leaders in nearby countries that also qualified for the World Cup. The leaders of the Netherlands, Germany and France have all publicly backed their squads, whether on social media or through public appearances.

The reason may be simple: De Wever just doesn’t care for the sport.

A Belgian official told Blue Light News: “The prime minister is not a soccer fan, so he doesn’t seek to project that image publicly. To do otherwise would not be authentic.”

Flemish media have indeed reported that the prime minister has little interest in soccer. In a podcast appearance a few years ago, he said the sight of people “going totally crazy in a group in the stands” left him feeling “ice cold.”

But politics is likely part of the story too. De Wever has led the Flemish nationalist N-VA since 2004. Throughout his political career, he has argued that Flanders should have far greater autonomy and that Belgium should evolve into a confederal state. For a politician with that background, overt displays of Belgian national unity probably don’t come naturally, and in fact contradict emphasis on Flemish autonomy.

This is not the first time the N-VA’s relationship with the Red Devils has attracted attention. In 2015, after Belgium reached No. 1 in the FIFA world rankings, Francophone Socialist Party leader Laurette Onkelinx asked the Chamber of Representatives to applaud the team. All parties joined in, except the N-VA.

During Euro 2016, the N-VA had to deny it instructed ministers and MPs to avoid publicly celebrating the Red Devils so as not to appear too Belgian, after rumors circulated in Belgian media.

One of De Wever’s few comments about this year’s World Cup concerned Belgium’s official tournament song. His complaint: It did not contain a single word of Dutch.

“My staff have confirmed to me that not a single word is sung in Dutch. That is, to put it mildly, not elegant,” he said, in keeping with his ideologies of promoting Flanders, when asked about the song during a parliamentary committee hearing.

Sport is often treated as a vehicle for national unity. In New Zealand, Belgium’s opponent in today’s match, elite teams have successfully woven elements of Māori culture into their sporting traditions, most famously through the prematch haka, which has helped create a shared cultural identity that connects Māori and non-Māori New Zealanders.

In Belgium, however, this World Cup has not yet become that kind of unifying project. At least not from the very top.