-executed-a-search-warrant-at-the-Fulton-County-Election-Hub-an.jpeg?width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Trump’s deputy AG unable to explain why Tulsi Gabbard was present at politically-charged search of Georgia election office – UK Times")
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche found himself on Sunday struggling to back up the administration’s rationalization for an attempt to re-litigate the 2020 election with a raid on Fulton County, Georgia’s election offices.
And he admitted that he had no idea why Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s director of national intelligence (DNI), was present for that FBI raid carried out last Wednesday.
The questions surrounding the operation continue to mount as the administration has not explained why it is suddenly investigating the long-debunked claims about the 2020 election spread by Donald Trump and his campaign team in the wake of his defeat to Joe Biden, despite repeated assertions from federal and state experts that no evidence of widespread fraud or illegal activity was detected.
Blanche appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday as well as ABC’s This Week. In both conversations, he was unable to offer anything more than Trump’s own beliefs and whims for the new focus of the FBI, which under Joe Biden spent years prosecuting hundreds of participants in the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol, only to see them pardoned by Trump. He added that a federal magistrate judge had granted FBI agents a warrant to seize voting records from the 2020 election in Fulton County as part of a “criminal grand jury investigation.”
“I don’t know why the director was there. 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,” said Blanche of Gabbard’s involvement. He added that she “can go where she needs to go”, but could not answer what purpose the DNI was serving overseeing an FBI raid — which falls under jurisdiction of the DOJ. The presence of a DNI in the field on an operation is highly unusual.
“She is not part of the grand jury investigation,” Blanche said.
The deputy attorney general also denied on CNN that Donald Trump was directly involved with the planning or approval of the raid, but could not say whether or not the president had been briefed on it by advisers like Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“This is a criminal investigation, so it’s tightly-held, as it must be under the law,” Blanche claimed. He would not answer what potential crime was under investigation, but added: “Election integrity is of the highest importance to the American people.”
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On ABC, Blanche was pressed by George Stephanopoulos to explain the agency’s focus in the wake of its apparent effort to reopen an investigation into the 2020 election, and other politically-charged cases, such as the failed efforts to indict James Comey and Letitia James, two figures who respectively led efforts to investigate Trump’s 2016 campaign and business ventures. Blanche responded by confirming what critics of the Trump administration have complained about for months: That the Justice Department now primarily serves the president’s desires.
“If you’re going to work in this department, you are going to execute on the president’s priorities,” Blanche said, responding to Stephanopoulos’s question about the dismissals and resignations of prosecutors who have refused to be involved in the president’s revenge campaign.
He went on to deny that Trump was focused on such cases even as they have consumed his social media feed at times.
Gabbard’s appearance in Fulton County came after she was widely seen as sidelined by the president during his efforts to pressure the Venezuelan government and the raid to capture Nicolas Maduro, the country’s president, last month. The Wall Street Journal reported in January that the president has grown increasingly reliant on CIA director John Ratcliffe over the DNI for advice on key intelligence matters, despite Gabbard holding a higher position on the food chain.
As recently as 2019 the former congresswoman from Hawaii posted on her social media about her opposition to U.S. intervention in Venezuela.
Fulton County was home to one of two criminal investigations into the president after he left power in 2021 related to his efforts to stay in the White House, the other being headed up by the Department of Justice at the federal level. The first one to get off the ground, the investigation led by District Attorney Fani Willis was nonetheless derailed after Willis appointed a prosecutor with whom she was in a relationship to work on the case, and was disqualified by a judge from working on it.
Both investigations into the Trump team’s alleged efforts to persuade officials to change vote totals were abandoned after Trump was re-elected to the White House in 2024.
