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.”

READ MORE: Trump ‘Hellbent’ on Punishing Americans He Still Claims ‘Stole’ the Election: Columnist

“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.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

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Amid the backdrop of an FBI raid on a Fulton County, Georgia election center and the president’s social media promotion of a call for the arrest of President Barack Obama, The Bulwark‘s Andrew Egger says President Donald Trump is “hellbent” on punishing those he claims stole the 2020 election from him.

“Trump’s assault on our elections—once unambiguously his most outrageous crime—can now only rarely recapture our attention amid so many other scandals and disasters. It has somehow become, for us, a background matter,” Egger notes. “When Trump, speaking for America on the world stage at Davos, proclaims that 2020 ‘was a rigged election’ and promises that ‘people will soon be prosecuted for what they did,’ we’re almost too numb to be scandalized.”

But scandalized or not, Egger says, it is “time to wake up.”

“Trump remains hellbent on punishing the people he somehow still believes stole an election from him once upon a time. And he seems keen on intimidating election officials—and influencing the vote—in states that will decide the congressional margins in 2026 and the presidential outcome in 2028,” Egger warns.

READ MORE: ‘Not Surrendering’: Homan Blasted After Vowing to Stay in MN ‘Until the Problem Is Gone’

That’s the issue. Trump says Egger has moved from what “was mostly a matter of arrogance and pride: He simply couldn’t accept that he’d lost to Joe Biden,” to “much higher” personal stakes.

“Wrapped in the powers of the presidency, he’s acted as a law unto himself for too long not to dread going back into private life, where long-delayed legal consequences might be lurking, waiting for him.”

The FBI, too, is “participating in his revenge effort,” which “is a terrifying demonstration of just how many guardrails he has steamrolled—or that have fallen away—since that election.”

Egger also warns that “Donald Trump is the kind of guy who tries to steal elections.”

“He’s now presiding over a Justice Department that seems primed to help him try. And we cannot permit any scandal of the moment to drive this fundamental reality from our minds.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

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President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, vowed not to surrender in his first public remarks since taking over immigration operations in Minnesota, making clear the operation is open-ended. Critics are urging the Department of Homeland Security to leave the state after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens.

“We are not surrendering our mission at all,” Homan told reporters Thursday morning. “We’re just doing it smarter.”

“I wanna be clear,” Homan stressed. “We are not surrendering the president’s mission in immigration enforcement. Let’s make that clear.”

Insisting that he has “made a lot of progress” since arriving in Minneapolis on Monday, Homan told reporters, “I’m staying until the problem is gone.”

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council responded, saying: “There isn’t a ‘problem’ that needs to be solved with the mass deployment of thousands of federal officers to Minneapolis to round up immigrants in the city. When nearly everyone who lives there is telling them to go away, claiming ‘this is for your own good’ rings hollow.”

READ MORE: ‘All Tools Necessary’: GOP Hardliners Press Trump on Insurrection Act

Homan did acknowledge, “I’m not here because…the federal government has carried this mission out perfectly,” but he did not mention Renee Good or Alex Pretti, the two Americans shot and killed by federal agents.

He said that federal officials are working on a “drawdown plan,” but did not state whether, when, or how many federal agents would be removed from or remain in Minnesota.

“The talk of deescalation was always fake news,” Reichlin-Melnick added. He charged that the Trump administration “intends to continue to make Minneapolis an example, even with a minor change in leadership. There are still thousands of DHS officers deployed there.”

“At the news conference,” The New York Times reported, Homan “dodged a question regarding how many federal immigration agents are still in Minnesota.”

“There’ve been some rotations,” he said.

“The withdrawal of law enforcement resources here is dependent upon cooperation,” Homan added, according to The Times. “As we see that cooperation happen, then the redeployment will happen.”

The Times noted that despite Homan’s remarks, “there has been little sign of major changes on the ground. Federal immigration agents appeared to press on with their aggressive operations on Wednesday, and the Trump administration’s lawyers defended their actions, describing the surge of federal agents there as a legitimate exercise of its power.”

“I’m staying until the problem is gone.”

President Trump’s border czar Tom Homan speaks at a press conference in Minneapolis.

Read more: https://t.co/c6L4q4QG2N pic.twitter.com/kwaG4AmVOD

— ABC News (@ABC) January 29, 2026

READ MORE: GOP Instability Deepens as Another Republican Candidate Calls It Quits

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