Why Is Tulsi Gabbard Investigating the Wrong Georgia?

Sidelined from her real job, she chases Trump conspiracy theories instead of problems overseas.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

STAFFERS FROM THE HOUSE Committee on Foreign Affairs traveled last week to the country of Georgia, which borders Russia. There, they met with the foreign minister and the defense minister to discuss regional security, joint military exercises, and other matters of concern.

Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. director of national intelligence, also flew to Georgia. But she didn’t go to the country of Georgia. She went to the state of Georgia. There, in an unannounced trip, she joined FBI agents in an operation to seize old ballots and vindicate Donald Trump’s fantasy that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Why would the director of national intelligence ignore the country of Georgia and instead investigate the state of Georgia? Because she’s not interested in foreign threats. She’s working with Trump to conquer the people he regards as his true enemy: blue America.

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IN THE YEAR SINCE SHE TOOK OFFICE, Gabbard has been conspicuously absent from key national security deliberations. She was sidelined from discussions leading up to the bombing of Iran, invisible as Trump and other officials made a national security case for controlling Greenland, and cut out of planning for the military operation in Venezuela. White House staffers reportedly joked that her job title, regularly abbreviated to DNI, stood for “Do Not Invite.”

Instead, Gabbard has spent her time systematically undermining the United States. She has smeared the intelligence community, purged officials based on their alleged political views, slashed her agency nearly in half, and—in the name of “rooting out deep state actors”—gutted the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which monitors interference by our adversaries in American elections.

Meanwhile, at Trump’s direction, Gabbard has embarked on her own meddling in state election operations. For months, according to the Wall Street Journal, she has reinvestigated the 2020 election, looking for fraud, and has “regularly briefed” Trump. Last week, during her under-the-radar trip to Georgia, she phoned the president and arranged a conversation in which he thanked the FBI agents who had seized the ballots, tabulating machines, and other election material.

On Monday, after her cover was blown, Gabbard issued a letter defending her trip. She claimed that she had “broad statutory authority” to address “election security.” That’s rich, given that she spent much of the last year trying to discredit evidence of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

But there’s a second reason why Gabbard’s blather about protecting elections rings hollow: There is in fact, lots of evidence that recent elections in Georgia were rigged. The catch is that the rigging didn’t happen in the state of Georgia. It happened in the country of Georgia. And Gabbard, despite her job title, has shown no interest in it.

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IF YOU SEARCH the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which Gabbard controls, you’ll find documents from previous administrations that talk about Russian propaganda in neighboring Georgia, Russia’s “interventions in Georgia” and other countries, and the “erosion of [Georgia’s] democratic institutions.” Under Gabbard, however, the site has gone silent on these topics.

In October 2024, Georgia’s authoritarian ruling party claimed victory in parliamentary elections. Ostensibly, the party won 54 percent of the vote, despite registering only about 40 percent support in exit polls. International monitors condemned the election, finding “widespread irregularities,” “systematic voter intimidation,” “vote buying,” oddities in the “counting process,” and “state capture of electoral and judicial institutions.” As one report put it, “All types of administrative resources—coercive, regulatory, institutional, financial, and media—were used for the elections to ensure the ruling party’s victory.”

President Joe Biden denounced the election, and his administration sanctioned Georgian officials for their “brutal crackdowns on media members, opposition figures, and protesters.” But in a series of measures passed last March, April, and May—emboldened, in part, by Trump’s return to power—Georgia’s ruling party used its control of parliament to tighten its grip on elections and further cripple the opposition.

Meanwhile, the Georgian regime sucked up to Trump and Gabbard, exploiting its creepy alignment with their demagoguery. In March, Georgia’s foreign minister chatted up Gabbard at a conference in India. In May, in a letter to Trump, Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, wrote that Georgian officials shared the American president’s hostility to “the criminal activities of the ‘deep state.’” He told Trump, “If we look at the public rhetoric of our government and your administration, there is a complete value and ideological coexistence between our views.”

In July, when Gabbard issued a bogus report to whitewash Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Kobakhidze explained why Trump and Gabbard should be his natural allies. He noted that he and his party were, like Trump, often accused of favoring Russia. In reality, the accusation was correct in both cases. But Kobakhidze, like Trump and Gabbard, dismissed it as part of a smear campaign by the “deep state.”

Gabbard’s report said “Deep State officials” had fabricated evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf. Kobakhidze, responding to her in a statement, thanked her and hailed her as a “truth-teller.” “Tulsi Gabbard also said that a discrediting campaign against Trump was orchestrated by the ‘deep state,’” he wrote. “Labeling opponents as pro-Russian is a well-worn tactic of the ‘deep state,’” he complained, citing his own regime as an example.

Georgia’s government continued to clamp down on dissent, and in October, its ruling party swept municipal elections. Independent investigations found that the vote was corrupted by “intimidation, threats and physical assaults against civil society, opposition politicians, activists and journalists,” as well as “electoral fraud” and the exclusion of “credible election observers.”

Gabbard had nothing to say about any of this. She didn’t praise Kobakhidze, but she echoed his talking points: She defended Trump, played down the threat from Russia, and vilified skeptics who warned against appeasing Vladimir Putin. “Deep State warmongers and their Propaganda Media are again trying to undermine President Trump’s efforts to bring peace to Ukraine,” she alleged in a statement weeks after the Georgian election was exposed as a sham. She spurned the “EU/NATO viewpoint that Russia’s aim is to invade/conquer Europe,” and she claimed that proponents of that view were just trying to “gin up support for their pro-war policies.”

That statement suited Georgia’s government perfectly. Its foreign minister told reporters that Gabbard’s remarks vindicated Georgia’s “pragmatic policy” of making nice with Russia.

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THE TALE OF THE TWO GEORGIAS tells you everything you need to know about Gabbard. If she were serious about her job, she’d pay more attention to Georgia the country than to Georgia the state. If she were serious about election integrity, she’d show more interest in the country of Georgia, where election corruption is rampant and decisive, than in the state of Georgia, where it’s neither. And if she were candid, she wouldn’t suppress a whistleblower report about herself.

There’s only one reason why the director of national intelligence would go to the state of Georgia, not the country of Georgia, to investigate purported election violations. The reason is that the state of Georgia voted against Trump.

That’s the pattern in everything Trump has done: deploying troops in Los Angeles, threatening “war” in Chicago, defending street executions in Minneapolis, cutting off money for water in Colorado and transportation in New York, and defunding social services and child care in Democratic states. Sending the FBI to seize ballots in Atlanta was just another assault in his war on blue America.

And Tulsi Gabbard was there to help him win the war.