Ex-DHS official warns 'crime might be in progress' after Trump FBI raids election office

Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during President Donald Trump’s first term, is sounding the alarm after the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia election office and removed ballots and related voting materials from the 2020 election, in what is being called an “apparently unprecedented action.”

Taylor is also warning that Trump Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “caught on camera” at the raid — a highly unusual move for the nation’s intel chief, a role that is supposed to be nonpartisan.

“This is bad. Very bad. But we don’t need to speculate wildly about why this is happening,” Taylor writes. “In an interview earlier this month, Trump openly said he wished he’d ‘seized’ ballots in the 2020 election, and he suggested he had the authority to do so. That should have rung alarm bells across the country.”

“When he laments he didn’t ‘seize’ ballot boxes after losing the 2020 election, he’s referring to a specific executive order that he thinks would justify such an act.”

“But guess what?” Taylor also wrote. “I co-wrote the order he’s talking about. He’s lying. And a crime might be in progress.”

“Trump and his lawyers, Taylor says, “have suggested that Executive Order 13848, signed in 2018, gives the president the power to intervene in elections, even to the point of seizing voting machines or ballots.”

But he insists that it does not — and warns that those involved in drafting that executive order are willing to testify that it does not.

He says the executive order was designed to make it easier to impose consequences on foreign actors who interfered in U.S. elections — but “NOT to revisit vote counts. NOT to rummage through ballot boxes. And certainly NOT to allow a president to deploy the military against local election infrastructure because he didn’t like the outcome.”

Taylor also charges that Trump is now “reinterpreting the order as some all-powerful election snooping tool.”

Trump stating that he should have seized ballots, according to Taylor, is “an admission he wanted to take an illegal act and then pretend the law would have somehow allowed it.”

He also takes aim at DNI Gabbard.

“I can’t emphasize how big of a break in custom this is (at best) and how deeply corrupt it might be (at worst),” that she was at the FBI raid on Wednesday — saying that it “stinks to high hell.”

Commenters weighed in.

The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer, a political strategist, wrote: “This is a big f — — deal, and all y’all need to act like it. ”

“When Trump’s storm troopers show up at the Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, Maricopa County, etc clerks’ offices and seize absentee ballots before they can be opened and counted, it will be too late,” he warned.

“People,” warned veteran journalist Michael Burgi, “this FBI raid on an Atlanta voting center is really dangerous. Especially when Tulsi Gabbard is lingering in the background.”