WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has instructed the CIA and other spy agencies to provide intelligence about the 2020 election to a former campaign lawyer who led efforts to try to overturn that year’s election, a U.S. intelligence official and a person with knowledge of the matter said on Tuesday.
The administration last year hired Kurt Olsen, who more than five years ago took part in the “Stop the Steal” campaign that promoted baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, to investigate the 2020 election.
“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 official said in an emailed statement.
The Wall Street Journal first reported last year on the hiring of Olsen, saying he was seeking intelligence reports from U.S. spy agencies. Politico first reported that the president had directed intelligence agencies to cooperate with Olsen’s efforts.
Asked about Olsen’s role, a White House official said: “President Trump has the authority to provide access to classified material to individuals as he deems necessary. The entire Trump administration is working together to ensure the integrity of U.S. elections.”
The White House did not respond to questions about whether Olsen was focusing solely on the 2020 election or possible security threats to future elections.
Olsen does not have a background working in the intelligence world. But the press secretary for the Office of the Director National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, said: “Every individual who is granted access to classified information goes through an extensive background investigation, including record checks and personal interviews, with a trained investigator to ensure that the individual is trustworthy and does not pose a threat to national security.”
Trump’s decision to provide potentially sensitive intelligence to Olsen coincides with concerns raised by Democrats in Congress and legal experts that his administration is seeking to revive claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election to justify the president’s calls for the federal government to assert control over ballot counting in the upcoming midterms.
The FBI recently conducted a search of an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia, and seized ballots from the 2020 election.
According to court documents released on Tuesday, the search of Fulton County’s election hub originated from Olsen. The FBI also seized voter records from Georgia in the raid, according to the documents.
The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was present at the Fulton County search, an unprecedented step for the country’s top-ranking intelligence official. And last year, Gabbard’s office obtained and examined electronic voting systems in Puerto Rico, looking for security vulnerabilities, NBC News reported. Olsen was not involved in the ODNI’s examination of electronic voting systems in Puerto Rico, according to Gabbard’s press secretary.
Democrats in Congress and former national security officials have accused Gabbard of blurring the line between foreign intelligence gathering and domestic law enforcement by traveling to Georgia for the FBI raid. But Gabbard has defended her role, saying her position requires her to ensure U.S. elections are secure and free from foreign interference. She has not said if there is intelligence suggesting a foreign adversary tried to manipulate ballot counting in Georgia.
After the 2020 election, in which Joe Biden defeated Trump, the White House pressed the Justice Department to challenge the election results before the Supreme Court, based on unsubstantiated claims of fraud. Olsen, who was acting as a private lawyer for Trump at the time, also urged Justice Department officials to file a legal brief with the high court to challenge the results, according to documents released in 2021 by the House Oversight Committee. The Justice Department refused.
Last year, a federal court upheld sanctions against Olsen in a case involving Republican Kari Lake’s unsuccessful legal challenge to her electoral defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race. A three-judge panel ruled 2 to 1 that Olsen and another lawyer had made “false, misleading and unsupported factual assertions” when they argued that Arizona’s electronic voting system failed to protect voters’ rights.
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blasted the administration’s move to give Olsen access to intelligence reporting.
“Handing the keys to our intelligence agencies to an election denier in pursuit of Donald Trump’s long-disproven conspiracy theories is a dangerous misuse of government power that threatens national security,” Warner said in an email statement on Tuesday.
“If true, this is yet another example of Director Gabbard being willing to put at risk some of our most sensitive sources and methods just to curry political favor with the president,” the senator said.
Warner and the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, Sen. Alex Padilla of California, called on Gabbard on Tuesday to schedule an intelligence briefing for lawmakers on election security issues.
