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tulsi gabbard
'Beyond Crazy': FBI Summons State Election Officials to Secretive Meeting After Trump Threat to ‘Nationalize’ Midterms
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who received the invite, said that what the president is "trying to do is really disrupt the midterm election.”
Feb 06, 2026
State election officials were left unnerved after being summoned by the FBI to a mysterious conference to discuss "preparations" for this year's midterm elections, which President Donald Trump has recently called for Republicans to "nationalize" in violation of the Constitution.
On Tuesday, election officials in all 50 states received an email from Kellie M. Hardiman, who identified herself as an “FBI Election Executive.”
Hardiman said the officials were invited to a call on February 25 with “your election partners” at the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC).
The email, obtained via a public records request by Matt Berg of Crooked Media, did not specify the purpose of the meeting other than to say it was "to prepare for the 2026 US midterm elections."
Hardiman added that the FBI and other agencies "would like to invite you to a call where we can discuss our preparations for the cycle, as well as updates and resources we can provide to you and your staff.”
At the end of the email, she reiterated, "We look forward to speaking with you in support of the 2026 midterm elections."
Berg said he contacted the FBI for comment, to which a spokesperson responded: "Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”
The email has heightened fears that the Trump administration is meddling in the midterms or planning to do so; he has suggested on multiple occasions that the elections should be “canceled” outright. Republican strategists are reportedly increasingly worried that the GOP could lose control of both the US Senate and the House.
Although the Constitution plainly states that elections are to be run by state governments, Trump earlier this week said Republicans should "nationalize" elections and “take control of the voting in at least 15 places" led by Democrats.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar told Berg he'd never heard of a conference call like this. He said he wrote back to Hardiman: “Is this real? Given what’s occurred over the last two weeks, I am concerned.”
“I was just like, ‘What is this?’ It’s the strangest thing in the world that the FBI is reaching out to us and trying to coordinate election security,” Aguilar said. "It's never happened in the past. The casualness which they did… it was just beyond crazy.”
A former DOJ official told Berg that while it is normal for the department to monitor elections, the email and conference call were highly unusual: “I can’t imagine why it would be coordinated in that way," he said.
Another official who received the email told NBC News that the message was “unusual and unexpected."
Speaking of Hardiman, the official said, “No one has heard of this person—and we’re all wondering what an 'FBI Election Executive' is." NBC reported that a LinkedIn page for Hardiman showed she was appointed to the position seven months ago.
The inclusion of the Department of Homeland Security as one of the election "partners" is also noteworthy, given the recent suggestion by Trump ally Steve Bannon that the president will "have ICE surround the polls," referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The agency has increasingly acted as a sort of paramilitary force for Trump in the localities where it's been deployed, most recently in Minnesota.
After federal agents killed three US citizens and provoked furious protests, Trump offered to withdraw agents from the state, but only if it turned over its voting rolls to the federal government.
At Trump's apparent direction, the FBI raided an election hub in Atlanta last week to seize materials from the 2020 election to further his already disproven claims that his loss to former President Joe Biden was the result of fraud.
And earlier this week, it was reported that back in May, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard sent a team to Puerto Rico to seize voting machines in an effort to investigate another outlandish Trump claim that they were hacked by Venezuela. Sources with knowledge of the investigation told Reuters that no evidence of that conspiracy was uncovered.
“It’s unconstitutional for the president to do what he wants to do,” Aguilar said. “We understand that what he’s trying to do is really disrupt the midterm election, because the ‘26 election is critical to the ‘28 election.”
Aguilar said officials in Nevada are “constantly preparing and strategizing" for whatever Trump might attempt and said, “We have to prepare for that litigation at a moment’s notice, and we will be prepared in Nevada to push back."
Danny Miller, an attorney who has worked for Renew Democracy and Democracy Forward, expressed fear about Trump's coordination of federal law enforcement agencies to patrol elections, given that he has already supported one violent attempt to overturn his loss in 2020.
"Trump will try to do something far worse than January 6th before all is said and done," Miller said. "It’s up to civil society to use all the tools of democracy to stop him."
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'Wyden Siren' Sounds Anew as Senator's Cryptic Letter Hints at CIA Wrongdoing
"When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening," said one observer.
Feb 05, 2026
Sen. Ron Wyden "only talks like this when the spies do something *real* bad."
That's how journalist Spencer Ackerman reacted Thursday to a letter from the Oregon Democrat to Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe expressing alarm over unspecified CIA activities, as observers noted Wyden's history of heads-up previews of government wrongdoing.
“I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today, in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities,” Wyden, who is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in the letter. “Thank you for your attention to this important matter.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner “shares many of the concerns expressed by Sen. Wyden in his letter, and in fact he has expressed them to... Ratcliffe himself," according to a spokesperson for the Virginia Democrat.
This is how Sen. Ron Wyden clues the public into activity that he finds extremely alarming. He does a press release about a letter he sent to the director of the CIA that basically says, 'I want to make sure you saw the classified letter I sent early today.' www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...
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— Kashmir Hill (@kashhill.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 1:53 PM
Wyden told HuffPost Thursday that “the reason I sent the public letter is that is all that I’m allowed to say publicly, and I’m gonna leave it at that.”
“I said what I did for a specific reason," he added. "I wrote it for a specific reason. That’s all I can say.”
Wyden has a storied history of issuing cryptic warnings about classified government or intelligence misdeeds before they are disclosed to the public, going back to the Obama administration's secret reinterpretation of the PATRIOT Act in 2011.
The senator also warned about a withheld 2015 Department of Justice legal opinion on cybersecurity, Section 702 surveillance during the first Trump administration, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) use of bulk administrative subpoenas to collect millions of Americans’ financial records during the Biden administration, and more.
Techdirt blog editor Mike Masnick calls it the "Wyden Siren": "The pattern repeats. Wyden asks a specific question about surveillance. The intelligence community answers a slightly different question in a way that technically isn’t lying but is designed to mislead. Wyden calls them out. Eventually, the truth comes out, and it’s always worse than people assumed."
"The track record here is essentially perfect," Masnick added. "When Wyden sends a cryptic letter or asks a pointed question suggesting something concerning is happening behind the classification curtain, something concerning is absolutely happening behind the classification curtain."
Masnick continued:
So what’s happening at the CIA that has Wyden sending a two-sentence letter that amounts to “I legally cannot tell you what’s wrong, but something is very wrong?"
We don’t know yet. That’s the whole point of classification—it keeps the public in the dark about what their government is doing in their name. But Wyden’s letter is the equivalent of a fire alarm. He’s seen something. He can’t say what. But he wants there to be a record that he raised the concern.
"Given the current administration’s approach to, well, everything, the possibilities are unfortunately vast," Masnick said. "Is it about domestic surveillance? Something about current [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] Tulsi Gabbard? International operations gone sideways? Some new interpretation of the CIA’s authorities that would make Americans’ hair stand on end if they knew about it? We’re left guessing, just like we were guessing about the PATRIOT Act’s secret interpretation back in 2011."
"But here’s what we do know: Ron Wyden has been doing this for at least 15 years," Masnick added. "And every single time, he’s been vindicated. The secret programs were real. The abuses were real. The gap between what the public thought was happening and what was actually happening was real."
"The Wyden Siren is blaring," he added. "Pay attention."
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Tulsi Gabbard Hit With Whistleblower Complaint So Classified It Needs to Be Locked in a Safe: Report
The attorney representing the whistleblower called it "confounding" that it took Gabbard’s office eight months to send a disclosure to Congress.
Feb 02, 2026
A whistleblower last year filed a complaint against US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard whose contents are so sensitive that the complaint itself has reportedly been locked in a safe.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the complaint was filed in May, and it set off "a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint."
The Journal's sources say that the complaint is so classified that no one in the US Congress has even laid eyes on it, as disclosure of its contents could cause "grave damage to national security."
A letter written by Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower's attorney, to Gabbard in November accused her office of trying to block the complaint from reaching members of Congress by failing to provide guidance about how it should be handled while minimizing national security risks.
Gabbard's office told the Journal that it is working to get the issue resolved but that it is taking time because of the sensitive nature of the complaint, which it dismissed as "baseless and politically motivated."
However, Bakaj told the Journal that he doesn't believe Gabbard's office is making a good-faith effort to disclose the complaint to Congress.
“From my experience, it is confounding for [Gabbard’s office] to take weeks—let alone eight months—to transmit a disclosure to Congress,” he said.
The Journal was not able to verify the contents of the complaint against Gabbard, and Bakaj told the paper that its contents are so highly classified that he has not been allowed to view it.
Whistleblower Aid, the nonprofit legal organization where Bakaj serves as chief legal counsel, called on Monday for Congress to open an investigation into Gabbard "for hiding high-level intelligence... for nearly eight months," as well as for "her attempts to bury a whistleblower disclosure about her own actions," as required by US law.
National security attorney Mark Zaid, who co-founded Whistleblower Aid, praised the organization's work in representing the whistleblower and declared in a social media post that Gabbard and her office "have a lot of explaining to do."
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