Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on Sunday questioned the possibility of President Trump interfering in the 2026 midterm elections.
Warner’s concern stemmed from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s effort to gather voting records related to the 2020 presidential election, which Trump has falsely claimed he won.
“The fact is Donald Trump cannot get over the fact that he lost Georgia in 2020, that he lost the election in 2020,” Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said during an appearance on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“My fear is now, he sees the political winds turning against him, and is he going to try to interfere in the 2026 elections? Something a year ago I didn’t think would be possible,” he continued.
Warner’s statements follow an FBI probe of a Fulton County, Ga., election hub where agents confiscated voting ballots from the 2020 election, with Gabbard on site.
Earlier in the year, she also helped authorities seize voting machines in Puerto Rico after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it received allegations of “discrepancies and systemic anomalies.”
Warner says lawmakers were not previously informed of Gabbard’s presence during the Georgia raid.
“We have asked. OK, we then subsequently found that this was not the first time she was involved in domestic activities. She went down and seized some voting machines in Puerto Rico earlier in the year. Again, we had no knowledge of that. And then the question of what she was doing in Georgia, there’s been three or four different stories since it broke,” the Virginia senator said.
“First, she said the president asked, then the president said he didn’t ask her, then he said it was Pam Bondi, the attorney general. So, we don’t have the slightest idea other than the fact that the whole thing stinks to high heaven,” he added.
Warner warned that many of the systems put in place to ward off faulty elections have been “basically disbanded,” noting funding cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI and the national intelligence director’s office.
He said there has been no evidence of foreign interference in U.S. elections but flagged concerns about the president interfering in the upcoming election.
“This was what I’m seeing from the president’s own comments about nationalizing elections and putting Republicans in charge, counter to the Constitution. We’ve seen these activities in Georgia, where, could there be some effort that suddenly gives him an excuse to try to take some of these federalization efforts?” Warner asked.
“We’ve seen ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. We focused a lot of this activity on ICE in terms of they’re going rogue in Minneapolis,” he added.
Warner continued, “But there is a very real threat without reforms at ICE that you could have ICE patrols around polling stations. … We’ve seen ICE discriminate against Latinos’ families. We’ve seen as well mixed families where someone may be legal and others not. And candidly, you don’t need to do a lot to discourage people from voting.”
