Even if we remove Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from the equation, the fact that the FBI recently executed a search warrant on an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, is itself a serious controversy.
The raid was an obvious extension of Donald Trump’s ongoing crusade related to his 2020 election defeat, and there was no justifiable reason for federal law enforcement agents to seize ballots and voting records, effectively serving as a vehicle for the president’s discredited conspiracy theories.
What precipitated such bizarre developments? The answer involves a name that’s become a lot more common. MS NOW reported:
The FBI’s search of a Georgia campaign office and seizure of material on the 2020 presidential election was prompted by a referral sent by a former campaign lawyer for President Donald Trump, according to an affidavit that was among the documents related to the search unsealed Tuesday. […]
According to the filings, the probe originated from ‘a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, Presidentially appointed Director of Election Security and Integrity.’
Right around the time this information reached the public, the CIA confirmed that Trump had personally ordered the intelligence agency to share information with Olsen. “The President has asked Mr. Olsen to look at intelligence related to the 2020 election and the agency is ensuring that he has the access necessary to do his work,” a CIA spokesperson told MS NOW.
For a lawyer whom most Americans have never heard of, this guy’s name is suddenly popping up quite a bit.
Olsen might seem like a relatively obscure figure, but the lawyer spoke with Trump three times over the phone on Jan. 6, 2021. In fact, call logs from the White House show that Olsen spoke to the president at 8:34 a.m. ET, a few hours before Trump rallied with supporters at the Ellipse. According to information collected by the bipartisan congressional Jan. 6 committee, Trump spoke with Olsen twice after the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, but before then-Vice President Mike Pence reconvened the joint session of Congress.
What’s more, in the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a crackpot lawsuit intended to invalidate state election results that Republicans didn’t like. The Texan was aided by a special counsel he’d brought in: Olsen.
In 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court sanctioned attorneys for Kari Lake, who ran a failed Republican gubernatorial race a year earlier, ordering them to pay thousands of dollars for repeating “unequivocally false” election claims in court. Among those penalized? Olsen. Four months ago, however, the election denier took on a new job: The lawyer joined the Republican administration as a “special government employee” who would focus on the president’s 2020 defeat. Now, evidently, he’s Trump’s “director of election security and integrity,” accessing highly sensitive intelligence, despite concerns that he has no idea what he’s doing, and helping deploy the FBI to seize ballots and voting records in the Atlanta area. In other words, most people couldn’t pick Olsen out of a lineup, and given his background, common sense suggests he shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House. Nevertheless, he appears to have positioned himself as one of the most important lawyers on Team Trump. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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