WTF Was Tulsi Gabbard Doing at FBI Raid of Georgia Election Office?

For some reason, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was at the FBI’s raid at an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, Wednesday.

Gabbard was photographed at the raid while boxes of documents (and ballots) seized by the bureau were being loaded onto trucks. Authorities had a search warrant for the raid related to Trump’s long-debunked allegations of fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Gabbard’s job deals with foreign intelligence, so her presence doesn’t seem to make sense.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, issued a statement questioning what exactly she was doing there.

“There are only two explanations for why the Director of National Intelligence would show up at a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election,” Warner said.

“Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

Gabbard may have been there in an attempt to legitimize a conspiracy theory popular in right-wing circles (and the Trump administration) that the Venezuelan government was involved in a plot to overthrow the 2020 election. The Justice Department has been investigating the false claim, debunked in a Delaware court in 2023, since November. Is the Trump administration attempting to create a case out of thin air to validate the president’s 2020 election lies?

MAGA is using a new clip of an earlier interaction between Alex Pretti and federal agents in Minnesota to justify him being shot 10 times while defenseless.

In the video that emerged Wednesday evening, Pretti is seen yelling at agents in an SUV before kicking the vehicle’s taillight as it begins to drive away. Then four agents get out of the vehicle and tackle him to the ground before releasing him. It is unclear what happened immediately before and after the clip. Eleven days later, he was killed.

President Trump posted the video of Pretti on Truth Social without comment. Donald Trump Jr. posted the clip as well, with the caption “just a peaceful legal observer?!?!?”

“LEFTIST HOAX DESTROYED. New video shows Alex Pretti violently attacking federal officers and destroying federal law enforcement vehicles. His firearm is fully visible in the footage,” right-wing commentator Benny Johnson wrote. “This video PROVES that Alex Pretti was not an ‘innocent bystander’ or ‘legal observer.’ He was a violent agitator and psychopath hellbent on attacking federal law enforcement. Another left wing hoax destroyed.”

Disgraced former New York City Mayor and Trump stooge Rudy Giuliani used the clip to suggest that “[Pretti] and his female activist accomplice seemed to be executing a classic ‘rearrest,’ they were trained to do, when he got himself shot.?” It is unclear what Giuliani is even talking about, as it is clear from the video of Pretti’s killing that he was protecting a woman from agents while being pepper-sprayed in the face.

“Alex Pretti was itching for another confrontation with Border Patrol, whom he’d been stalking, harassing and terrorizing,” Megyn Kelly chimed, lying through her keyboard. “HE had been victimizing THEM. His felonies are on tape. He was reckless, and it cost him his life. Find another poster boy, illegal-loving Leftists.”

The pathetic argument quickly received a lot of blowback.

“Federal agents shot him ten times after disarming him, Megyn,” liberal podcaster Jon Favreau responded. “If you’d like to live in a country where the punishment for kicking a taillight is a public execution, you’re free to leave America. No one is buying your bullshit. You’ve lost the country on this one. Go juice your audience numbers with some other rage bait.”

It’s hard to fathom just how morally bankrupt you have to be to use a video of Pretti kicking a car—just days after agents murdered Renee Good—to determine that he’s a “violent agitator and psychopath” who deserved those 10 bullets. These are the same people who think January 6 insurrectionist Ashley Babbitt is some kind of martyr. And don’t ever forget—the Trump administration’s first response to Pretti’s killing was to slander him as a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.”

An FBI operation to capture former Olympian turned suspected cocaine trafficker Ryan Wedding in Mexico has shaken relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbor.

Last week, the U.S. deployed the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team to Mexico to capture Wedding, who once was protected by the powerful Sinaloa cartel. But that was supposed to be kept secret, especially since Mexican law prohibits foreign law enforcement officers from being physically present in operations on Mexican soil, let alone take part in raids and arrests.

On Friday, however, FBI Director Kash Patel announced the joint operation publicly on X. “Our FBI HRT teams executed with precision, discipline, and total professionalism alongside our Mexican partners to bring Ryan James Wedding back to face justice,” he wrote, sending shock waves through Mexico.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum scrambled to perform damage control, as foreign intervention in Mexico is politically toxic. She said that there was no U.S. involvement in the operation and that U.S. agents in Mexico are limited by law.

“I’m not going to get into a debate with the FBI director, nor do I want there to be a conflict,” Sheinbaum said at a press conference Tuesday. “What they, the U.S. authorities, told the Mexican authorities is that it was a voluntary surrender.” She pointed to a picture Wedding posted to his Instagram account at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico announcing that he was turning himself in.

Wedding’s lawyer Anthony Colombo disputes that account, saying that Wedding was handcuffed by FBI agents and transported to California.

“He was arrested, he didn’t surrender,” Colombo told The Wall Street Journal, adding, “If the U.S. government is unilaterally going into a sovereign country and apprehending somebody, you can understand the concern that sovereign entity might have.”

Tensions between Mexico and the U.S. are high, considering Trump’s threats to levy tariffs and take military actions against the country, ostensibly to combat drug trafficking. Mexico has sought to placate Trump in some ways, increasing border security, placing tariffs on Chinese goods, and sending drug lords on planes to U.S. custody without the normal extradition process, possibly breaking laws.

Patel’s rash decision to post about Wedding’s arrest online doesn’t help the situation right now. It opens Sheinbaum up to political attacks in Mexico and makes the U.S.-Mexico relationship even shakier. Under Trump, though, American law enforcement is playing fast and loose with not just the law but diplomatic relations.

The president’s decision to wield U.S. troops against American cities has cost taxpayers a pretty penny.

A report published Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the numerous deployments cost Americans nearly $500 million over the last year.

Since June, the Trump administration has dispatched National Guard personnel or active-duty Marine Corps personnel to six cities across the country: Los Angeles, Washington, Memphis, Portland, Chicago, and New Orleans. All but New Orleans, which saw troops deployed at the tail end of the year, were included in the CBO estimation.

“The factors CBO used to estimate the costs of deployments in 2025 suggest that continuing the ongoing deployments at their size as of the end of 2025 would cost $93 million per month,” the office said in a statement. “More generally, deploying 1,000 National Guard personnel to a U.S. city in 2026 would cost $18 million to $21 million per month, depending mainly on the city’s cost of living.”

Donald Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members over 2025 to “protect federal government personnel and property.” Ultimately, he exclusively targeted Democratic cities for what he described as fostering a crime-riddled hellscape, though the data he used to justify such claims were often outdated or just plain incorrect.

Red states—Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio—lent significant assistance, sending hundreds of their respective National Guard members to assist in his occupations.

To tally up the total cost, the CBO examined military pay, benefits, and health care, as well as the costs for lodging the active-duty personnel while they were away from their home stations.

Food costs were also calculated, as were transportation costs “to move personnel from their home stations to their deployments and back again, as well as costs to transport personnel between their lodging and their assigned location each day.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi has started sharing the names and photographs of protesters arrested in Minneapolis—in violation of Department of Justice rules.

Bondi took to X Wednesday to share the names and photographs of 16 protesters who had been arrested for allegedly assaulting, resisting, or impeding federal law enforcement agents. “We expect more arrests to come,” she warned.

DOJ policy expressly prohibits releasing mug shots of defendants charged with federal crimes, unless releasing their photo would serve a “legitimate law enforcement function.” Not only did Bondi’s posts fail to serve a clear law enforcement function, they were blatantly intended to have a chilling effect on protesters’ expression of their First Amendment rights.

Notably, these protesters have only been arrested—not convicted. And somehow, the public still hasn’t been told the names of the federal agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti.

Among those Bondi posted about was Nasra Ahmed, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen who said she was wrongly detained by ICE for two days, that one federal agent called her a racial slur, and that she suffered a concussion after officers pushed her to the ground.

Bondi’s escalating antics come as immigration agents have repeatedly failed to provide sufficient evidence that demonstrators in Minnesota have committed actual crimes, such as assault, when trying to obtain warrants for arrest.

There is mounting evidence that suggests federal law enforcement has lost the plot on what protesters “impeding” their work actually looks like. Federal agents have aggressively approached citizen ICE watchers simply monitoring their operations, threatening to arrest them—or worse. And former FBI agents have complained of watching ICE officers in Minnesota arrest protesters who appear to be using their First Amendment rights to taunt or yell at federal officers, according to MS NOW.

There’s also evidence that federal agents don’t know what assault looks like—or that they don’t care. Last year, when ICE pursued felony assault charges against anti-ICE protesters in Los Angeles, inaccurate and misleading testimonies from law enforcement officers unraveled multiple cases.