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President Trump said on Thursday that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to oversee the F.B.I. seizure and search of voter rolls in Georgia — the fourth time this week the administration has shifted its story on Ms. Gabbard’s extraordinary involvement in a law enforcement operation.
Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia raid has drawn scrutiny given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work, and because the results of Georgia’s 2020 election have been the cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s claims that the election was rigged against him.
During remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Mr. Trump said Ms. Gabbard went to Georgia at the direction of Ms. Bondi: “She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in — at Pam’s insistence — she went in and she looked at votes that want to be checked out,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Gabbard. “Why is she doing it, right Pam, why is she doing it? Because Pam wanted her to do it. And you know why? Because she’s smart.”
Mr. Trump’s explanation for Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the Georgia raid was different from his remarks on Wednesday, when he was pressed on Ms. Gabbard’s involvement in the raid during an interview with the NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas.
“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” Mr. Llamas asked the president. “I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from — it’s international cheating,” Mr. Trump said. “You have people, they say, from China trying to — let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”
A U.S. official with knowledge of the Georgia operation told The New York Times this week that Mr. Trump personally ordered Ms. Gabbard to go to Atlanta for the search, and coordinated her actions with Andrew Bailey, one of two deputy F.B.I. directors. Ms. Gabbard reportedly confirmed in a letter to Congress that she went at Mr. Trump’s request.
Ms. Gabbard oversaw the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., during which agents seized truckloads of ballots cast in 2020. During the search, Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, and he addressed F.B.I. agents who had taken part on speakerphone, asking them questions and praising and thanking them for their work.
On Tuesday, when Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, was asked why Ms. Gabbard was involved in a domestic law enforcement operation, she said the president had tasked Ms. Gabbard with election security as part of her duties.
© 2015 Mutual Fund Observer. All rights reserved.
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Comments
This will, in the long run, be a major source of their undoing.
Let us pray...
The Trump administration is working very hard to create a false narrative that elections were "rigged."
"Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team
working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told
the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there.
The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s
president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election."
"There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers.
Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill,
have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S.
after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to 'cooperate' on this lie."