As Atlanta FBI raid showed, Trump is raring to meddle in the 2026 midterms
In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Kash Patel — then-chief of staff at the Pentagon and now director of the FBI — issued one of the more bizarre directives in the history of U.S. intelligence.
Patel wanted the Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate a wild conspiracy theory then gaining traction in QAnon chat rooms: that Deep State actors at the CIA had used Italian military satellites to hack U.S. voting machines to flip votes from the 45th president, Donald Trump, to the 46th president, Joe Biden.
“It was bats--- crazy,” Patel’s boss, then-acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, later said about the Italian satellite hacking claims.
But Miller, nevertheless, joined Patel in ordering the Pentagon’s intelligence office to investigate the matter for a simple reason: then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had requested the probe, hoping it would somehow yield fresh ammunition for the president’s relentless campaign to block Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021, thus allowing Trump to stay in office.
The request to investigate what was dubbed “Italygate” went nowhere, of course. As Daniel Klaidman and I wrote in our book, “Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election,” just a few days after getting the order, Lt. General Scott Berrier, the then-director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, reported back that the whole matter was hogwash — or, as he put it in his clinical bureaucratic language, there is “no legitimacy to this.”
Still, the episode is illustrative of a consistent theme in the efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubts about election results that don’t go their way. Throw enough claims of foreign “manipulation” and “tampering” against the wall, no matter how outlandish or ridiculous, and eventually some of them might stick — at least enough to give Trump grounds to declare a national emergency and direct the U.S. military or law enforcement agents to show up at the polls on Election Day, potentially even seizing voting machines and ballots.
‘National security’ became an excuse to interfere
Whether Trump would actually go through with such a drastic (and blatantly unconstitutional) step is anybody’s guess. But there is little doubt that the Trump administration has been methodically preparing to lay the groundwork for federal intervention in the 2026 elections for more than a year.
And while doing so, they have returned to their 2020 playbook, once again ginning up phony “investigations” of groundless conspiracy theories about nefarious foreign actors meddling with election results.
As The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other news outlets have reported, a central player in these efforts was Kurt Olsen, a former Navy SEAL who served as one of Trump’s “Stop the Steal” lawyers in 2020 and was later sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for filing “unequivocally false” claims in a court suit on behalf of fellow election denier Kari Lake.
Last year, Olsen renewed his efforts to undermine the 2020 election results, urging the office of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s then-director of national intelligence, to take possession and examine voting machines from Puerto Rico.
At the time, Olsen was focused on vindicating another hoary claim floated by Trump’s lawyers in 2020 — that the Venezuelan socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro had planted secret algorithms in U.S. voting machines that manipulated vote tallies to favor the Democrats.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s examination of the Puerto Rican machines found no such evidence — a failure that Olsen, according to a recent Reuters report, blamed on Deep State actors at the CIA for withholding crucial documents. But he and Gabbard were far from through.
Last January, Gabbard flew down to Atlanta — at Trump’s direction — to participate in the FBI search of Fulton County ballots from the 2020 election as agents hauled off more than 600 documents. As overseer of the U.S. government’s 17 intelligence agencies, Gabbard had no legal authority to be involved in domestic law enforcement operations. But when challenged by congressional Democrats, Gabbard repeatedly invoked the foreign menace to explain her presence in a remarkable four-page letter to Congress last Feb. 2.
Her participation in the FBI raid was a matter of “national security” prompted by the “risks posed by foreign powers to election infrastructure,” Gabbard wrote. It was pure misdirection, to put it mildly. One week later, on Feb. 10, in response to a lawsuit, the Justice Department released the FBI’s 22 page “probable cause” affidavit to justify the search — and it said not a word about the bureau uncovering evidence of any foreign tampering in Fulton County ballots.
Foreign influence claims lack key context
Trump’s most dramatic move came last July when he gave a TV speech on election integrity blaming “shocking vulnerabilities” in the country’s electoral system on another foreign target: the Chinese government who, he asserted, were responsible for the “largest compromise of election data in history.”
The White House released documents that did indeed show the Chinese had acquired basic voter data on hundreds of millions of Americans — much of which had already been posted on state public websites.
But what Trump failed to mention was the other declassified documents that provided crucial context: While the acquisition of voter data rolls may have been a precursor for influence operations or basic intelligence collection, “there is no reporting to suggest that China” had taken any steps even “trying to compromise voting infrastructure or interfere with mail-in ballots,” the National Intelligence Council wrote in a classified October 2020 report.
The irony of Trump’s obsession is that he was actually the main beneficiary of the most significant foreign intervention in U.S. politics in decades: the Russian government’s multifaceted efforts to influence the 2016 election, including hacking Democratic Party and Clinton campaign emails and then releasing them through WikiLeaks in an effort to embarrass Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy.
But hypocrisy may be the least of Trump’s transgressions. Should he indeed try to use the foreign threat as grounds to interfere with this year’s midterms or somehow challenge the results, he will be facing an army of critics, lawyers and ultimately judges who will no doubt conclude, to paraphrase what the former DIA chief Berrier said about “Italygate,” there is no legitimacy to any of this.
Michael Isikoff is a veteran award-winning investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek and Yahoo News. He wrote this guest opinion column for the AJC.
On Oct. 29, “Politically Georgia: The Final Tally,” a three-part podcast series from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Pulitzer Center, premieres, examining how Georgia became the epicenter of the fight over election administration, public trust and democracy. You can listen here.
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