Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard faced two days of pointed congressional questioning this week, contradicting President Donald Trump’s public account of the FBI’s Fulton County election raid and failing to produce specific evidence of foreign interference in Georgia’s 2020 election when pressed by lawmakers.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 18, Gabbard testified that Trump directed her to observe the FBI’s January seizure of 2020 ballots from a Fulton County elections warehouse — contradicting the president’s earlier claim that Attorney General Pam Bondi had sent her there.
Trump had told a National Prayer Breakfast audience in February that Gabbard went “at Pam’s insistence.” Gabbard declined to specify how Trump communicated the directive to her on the day of the search, and suggested it was possible Trump was unaware of the details behind the warrant.
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She also denied handling ballots, saying the FBI evidence truck she was photographed standing in was “empty.”
Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat who sits on the Intelligence Committee, confirmed the panel has opened a formal inquiry into Gabbard’s role in the raid. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton cut Ossoff’s questioning short when his allotted time expired.
The following day, at the House Annual Threat Assessment hearing on March 19, Rep. Jim Himes pressed Gabbard on whether she had uncovered any specific evidence of foreign meddling in Georgia’s 2020 elections. She could not provide any.
The search warrant for the Fulton County raid was based on fraud claims that courts and election officials had previously examined and rejected.
The hearings also exposed friction over the war with Iran. Gabbard omitted from her Senate opening statement the intelligence community’s assessment that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” by last year’s strikes — a portion that would have contradicted the White House’s pre-war framing of Iran as an imminent nuclear threat.
When asked why, she said her “time was running long.” She further told Sen. Ossoff that determining what constitutes an imminent threat is “not my job — only the president can determine what is and is not an imminent threat.”
The testimony came one day after Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and one of the administration’s most senior intelligence appointees, resigned over the Iran war, suggesting publicly that the administration had misrepresented the threat posed by Tehran to justify military action.
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