Democratic senators question national intelligence head’s fitness for office after overt, unexplained appearance

Democratic lawmakers are raising questions about why Tulsi Gabbard, the president’s director of national intelligence, was “lurking” in Fulton county on Wednesday while FBI agents carted off boxes of 2020 election documents.

Gabbard visited an elections hub in Fulton county, home to Atlanta, on Wednesday as the FBI executed a search warrant for records related to the 2020 election. The warrant sought all ballots from the 2020 election in the county, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls, according to a warrant obtained by the Guardian.

“My constituents in Georgia – and I think much of the American public – are quite reasonably alarmed and asking questions, after the director of national intelligence was spotted bizarrely and personally lurking in an FBI evidence truck in Fulton county, Georgia, yesterday,” said the senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat. “I encourage all of us on a bipartisan basis to pursue the facts as quickly as possible to understand whether the office of the director of national intelligence is straying far outside of its lane.”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the senator Mark Warner, of Virginia, described Gabbard, a former representative and army veteran known for adhering to widely debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, as “totally unqualified” to be one of the nation’s spymasters, citing her presence in Georgia during “a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election” as evidence.