‘It’s a Five-Alarm Fire’

By Sarah Fitzpatrick & Yvonne Wingett Sanchez

Friday, January 30, 2026

 

For years, they defended American elections from all threats, foreign and domestic. But this week, veterans of federal law enforcement were forced to look on as the U.S. electoral system came under assault from an unlikely source: the government they served.

 

David Laufman once oversaw counterintelligence investigations for the Justice Department and held senior positions in the Bush, Obama, and first Trump administrations. On Wednesday, he watched images of FBI agents searching an election-office warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, confiscating ballots and other materials in the latest escalation of Donald Trump’s five-year quest to prove, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him. The episode felt particularly ominous to Laufman—a crossing of a sacred line, and an indication that the administration won’t stay within the guardrails that have kept American voting systems free of political interference.

 

“There could be few more well-trod hallmarks of authoritarianism than control over electoral processes to get the results that the ruler wants,” he told us.

 

The agents in Fulton County loaded hundreds of boxes of sealed records onto waiting semitrucks. Nationwide, election officials who are busy preparing for the midterm vote in November, and for primaries much sooner, told us they felt alarmed about what the search signaled, and feared possible federal efforts to skew the 2026 results. Some compared it to a hostile takeover, or an occupation, or a scene that they thought they would only ever see in foreign countries.

 

“It’s a five-alarm fire,” one Republican election official from Arizona told us. Like others, he spoke on the condition of anonymity, out of concern for his personal safety.

 

The most disturbing part, for the people we spoke with—including officials who describe themselves as strictly apolitical, who have spent careers resisting partisan pressure—was not just that the federal government seized state election records. It’s what the episode revealed about the relationship among the Justice Department, the intelligence community, and the president.

 

Three officials familiar with planning for the operation told us that the push for the Fulton County search originated in Washington—initially from the White House, later from the Justice Department—and that it happened “much faster” than those involved had anticipated. The president had publicly boasted last week while in Davos that election-related prosecutions were coming.

 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey were both at the scene of the search and ballot seizure. Current and former law-enforcement officials told us that such a senior-ranking presence was unusual and a problem. Gabbard’s job is supposed to be focused on foreign threats—not meddling in swing-state elections years after the fact.

 

In response to detailed questions, an FBI official described the characterizations of the current and former officials we spoke with as “wrong almost entirely across the board” and insisted that it was not unusual “for leadership to be on-site for operations like this.”

 

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Gabbard and Bailey were sent to the scene in Fulton County to provide oversight of the operation. “President Trump and his entire team are committed to ensuring a U.S. election can never, ever be rigged again. Director Gabbard is playing a key role in this important effort,” Leavitt said in a statement.

 

Of course, no credible evidence has ever emerged that the 2020 election was rigged in Georgia. But Trump was indicted—twice—for trying to overturn the results. The cases were shelved after he won in 2024, but the underlying facts remain the same: Trump pressured Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss. Trump’s most ardent supporters have never given up believing his disproven claims that the election was rigged against him, and that proof of widespread fraud will be found if they just look hard enough.

 

Laufman told us that the Wednesday episode reflects a new reality for law enforcement. The greatest threat to the legitimacy of U.S. elections, he said, now comes “not from abroad, but from the leadership of our own government.”

 

“It’s wrenching to say that,” he told us. “But it’s true. It’s true.”

 

***

 

At a Cabinet meeting in August, Trump asked Gabbard about supposed evidence related to “how corrupt the 2020 election was.” The intelligence director promised she would soon brief him, adding, “We are finding documents literally tucked away in the back of safes and random offices.”

 

Gabbard has occupied a tenuous space in the second Trump administration. But she has managed to stay in Trump’s good graces by focusing on the issues that matter most to the president—even when they run far afield from her traditional duties. Several former officials said they could not recall an instance since the creation of the DNI’s office when a sitting director had come anywhere near the physical execution of a federal search or seizure, much less a politically fraught operation involving ballots cast by American citizens.

 

Democrats from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees wrote to Gabbard yesterday demanding a briefing on her role and an explanation for why Congress had not been briefed about any foreign nexus in the Georgia investigation—if one existed. “Your recent actions raise foundational questions about the current mission of your office, and it is critical that you brief the Committees immediately as part of your obligation to keep Congress fully and currently informed,” the members wrote.

 

The administration has sought to push back against claims that her involvement was inappropriate. “As DNI, she has a vital role in identifying vulnerabilities in our critical infrastructure and protecting against exploitation,” a spokesperson said, adding that Gabbard would continue “to support ensuring the integrity of our elections.”

 

Despite Trump’s insistence to the contrary, previous investigations have failed to turn up evidence that Georgia’s ballots were ever compromised. Two former cybersecurity and intelligence analysts who had taken part in multiple audits and reviews of the 2020 election in Fulton told us there was zero indication that the county’s electronic voting systems had ever been breached, including by foreign adversaries.

 

Attorney General Pam Bondi has quietly appointed the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus, to investigate “election integrity” cases in jurisdictions nationwide, two officials told us. Albus—not a prosecutor from the local U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Georgia—is the Justice Department official listed on the Fulton County search warrant that was approved by a federal magistrate judge on Wednesday. (Albus’s new role was first reported by Bloomberg.)

 

DOJ personnel have conducted a range of interviews over the past year as part of their sprawling probe, and the number of interviews intensified in recent weeks, according to two people familiar with the matter. Interviews have taken place in Georgia and other states. Interviewees have provided thousands of pages of documentation to the authorities. Albus declined to comment.

 

Multiple people familiar with the matter said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia had no substantive role in the Fulton search or in the investigation from which it stemmed. Albus, they said, contacted the local office earlier this month, but did not share the affidavit or other substantive information about the scope or target of the investigation at the time. A spokesperson for the office did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Three officials familiar with the search warrant told us that the initial version presented to Fulton County election officials Wednesday morning did not contain the necessary information to lawfully begin the search—what one person called a “defect.” A revised warrant was later issued by a federal magistrate judge. Current and former officials said the need for revision reflected both the apparent haste with which the operation came together and the lack of institutional knowledge at a hollowed-out Justice Department that has lost thousands of employees since Trump started his second term.

 

Officials also pointed to what they perceived as suspicious leadership changes at the FBI’s Atlanta field office in the days before the search. Last week, during the period in which the DOJ and the FBI were actively preparing for the large-scale seizure, the special agent in charge left the bureau. The departing supervisor, Paul W. Brown, was among the last remaining special agents in charge who had also served in leadership roles under the Biden administration, according to two people familiar with the situation. Nearly all the others have been systematically forced out or replaced under the Trump administration. An FBI spokesperson, Benjamin Williamson, told us that Brown had “retired.” A spokesperson for the DOJ declined to comment.

 

Former FBI officials said the personnel change in the lead-up to the search—as well as the presence of Gabbard and Bailey on-site—suggested a high degree of involvement from Washington in matters that are typically handled by the local office.

 

“You’ve got all the alarm bells going off that this is political as opposed to legitimate,” Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence, told us.

 

***

 

Those who have spent years pushing false claims of election fraud in Fulton County took credit for the FBI’s operation on social media and claimed that they had spoken with the Department of Justice in recent months. “I am over here dancing in my kitchen! When I talked to the DOJ in September, I asked them to come down here and talk to me and a number of other analysts,” Mark Davis, a prominent Georgia Republican, posted on X. “Well, we got our wish, and more. And now we see the fruit of five years of work! Thank God!”

 

Several local officials and others who had been involved in monitoring the 2020 presidential election said they suspected that the FBI’s action was related to the recent circulation of a 263-page report prepared by activists who have long maintained that the 2020 vote was rigged. The document states that it was prepared for the Georgia State Election Board and is dated January 6, 2026—around the time that Albus and others began making preparations for law-enforcement action in Fulton, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.

 

“What they’re saying is ‘Buckle up, buttercup,’ because they’re coming after us,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, told us. “We’ve got to do our damndest to get ready.”

 

In Michigan, Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck, a Republican, told us he couldn’t help but take the actions in Georgia personally. The FBI search, he said, “should invite extraordinary scrutiny.”

 

“I think about what that would mean when it comes to defending our elections from any and all threats,” he told us. “And we would never want that threat to be our own federal government.”

 

Bondi and Gabbard had been in discussions to appear at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference this week in Washington, D.C. Secretaries told us they were eager to press them for answers about the search in Georgia that federal authorities have, so far, refused to provide. In the end, neither showed up.