ItalyGate Is Back! But The FulCo Raid Is Really About The Governor’s Race.
I was at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon when a Gold Dome staffer ran by saying, “Have you heard? The FBI raided Fulton County’s election headquarters.” Not long afterward, one of the Capitol reporters walked by and said he was headed over to see what was going on. Later that evening, while catching up on the day’s events, I stumbled across this photo:
That’s a photo of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, standing in a box truck waiting for the FBI to load it with 2020 ballots and other materials seized in the raid.
Why is the Director of National Intelligence in Atlanta overseeing the execution of a search warrant? Well, dear reader, buckle up because it’s a wild story.
I first heard about “ItalyGate” while reading Jonathan Karl’s book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. The theory is that two hackers, sitting in an Italian jail, admitted they had participated in the plot to steal the 2020 election from Trump. The story of how this claim found its way to Trump’s ears and the full extend of the wild claims are summarzied in this opinion piece in Mediaite:
According to Karl, it was Virginia businesswoman Michele Ballarin, who presented herself as a wealthy intelligence insider, that first pushed the claims Italian military satellites had remotely altered U.S. voting machines. Ballarin, who also used the names Michele Roosevelt Edwards and Michele Lyn Golden — but also went by “the princess” — made contact with the National Security Council’s then-cybersecurity director Josh Steinman through intermediaries.
According to Karl, the pair did not meet in a secure briefing room, but a grocery store parking lot in Arlington, Virginia for a clandestine rendezvous that Steinman would call “one of the most bizarre experiences of his professional life.” There, she shared her claim, which the official dismissed to a colleague as “totally crazy.”
Yet by mid-December 2020, Karl continues, curiosity around Italygate had reached the Pentagon and senior officials, who were pressed to investigate claims that two men imprisoned in Italy had confessed to hacking the U.S. election using satellite technology.
Conspiracy theorists had fixated on one of those men, Arturo D’Elia, an Italian IT specialist previously charged over cyber intrusions involving a defense contractor. Italian authorities denied any connection between D’Elia and the election, and no evidence ever emerged tying him to altered vote totals.
Karl records that none other than Kash Patel, then-chief of staff to the acting defense secretary, and now the director of the FBI, pushed Pentagon officials and then-Defense Intelligence Agency director Lieutenant General Scott Berrier to pursue the claims on January 2, 2021,, seeking to urgently dispatch US defense personnel in Rome to interview the imprisoned Italians.
After examining the allegations, Karl adds, the agency’s director reported back that “the strange story was entirely untrue,” concluding that “neither prisoner had said anything at all about interfering with the election” and that their case was “entirely unrelated to anything remotely involving the 2020 US presidential election.”
That conclusion did little to kill the theory. Inside the White House, the conspiracy was taken seriously enough to generate emails, phone calls, and repeated requests for further review. As Karl documents, then chief of staff Mark Meadows pressed senior officials across the Pentagon, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community to continue examining the theory even after it had been internally dismissed.
Meadows’s emails, released by the House Oversight Committee in June 2021, included a December 27, 2020 letter addressed to “Illustrious Mr. President” and attributed to a man named Carlo Goria of a firm called USAerospace Partners — interestingly where Ballarin was CEO. The letter laid out the Italygate conspiracy, claiming the Italian defense company Leonardo SpA had “changed the US election result from President Trump to Joe Biden” by “using advanced military encryption capabilities.”
It continued to circulate online under the hashtag #ItalyGate. According to Karl, it also found a political advocate in Maria Strollo Zack, founder of the group Nations in Action, who became one of its most visible promoters and claimed she briefed Trump on the theory during a December 2020 dinner at Mar-a-Lago.
President Trump a few days ago, posted this Tweet on his Truth Social account:
It seems that ItalyGate is the hook Gabbard needed to involve herself, as DNI Director, in the hunt for 2020 fraud and to get back in the President’s good graces (she’s been practically invisible since expressing opposition to Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities).
As these events unfolded, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was more to the story. The various conspiracies and theories about the 2020 election receded from the headlines long ago. A shrinking number of hardcore devotees keep hope alive at the monthly State Board of Elections meetings, aided by several members of the Board, but the general public is much more concerned about inflation, the economy, and other more pressing matters. Why was Fulton County raided now, in January of 2026?
I think this raid has more to do with the 2026 GOP primary for Governor than relitigating 2020, and here’s why:
1) The stolen election true believers will never change their minds,
2) The anti-Trump forces will never change their minds that the election wasn’t stolen, and,
3) Independents don’t care about 2020; they care about inflation and the economy.
Thus, no matter what Gabbard finds or doesn’t find in these ballots, no minds will change. However, everyone who has followed Georgia politics for more than one election cycle knows that the Fulton County elections office is a mess. Will Gabbard find mistakes, blunders, mismanagement, and the like? Absolutely! Can and will this information be hurled at a pair of Republican candidates for Governor? Absolutely!
You may think I’m crazy, but I have company. Yesterday, AJC columnist Patricia Murphy wrote:
Looking back at the aftermath of the 2020 elections, Trump ran into unexpected roadblocks in all four of those offices when Gov. Brian Kemp, then-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Attorney General Chris Carr and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, all Republicans at the time, refused to defy court orders or flout state laws to help him overturn the election results in his favor. Now each of those offices is up for grabs, and the winners will run the state and oversee elections in 2028.
Incredibly, the 2026 elections now feature Duncan, Raffensperger and Carr all running against each other to replace Kemp, along with Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who has already won Trump’s endorsement for governor and said on Wednesday, “Fulton County Elections couldn’t run a bake sale.”
Watch how each 2026 candidate responds to the FBI raid this week and you’ll know how they’ll likely react in office in 2028 if Trump is back in Georgia again, maybe running for the third term he likes to joke about or to push for his vice president to be president — or maybe one of his sons.
Watch also for the possibility that Trump could be building his cases against the men in Georgia who defied him in 2020 and could be derailed in 2026 by federal charges against them from a Trump Department of Justice.
The raid Wednesday night wasn’t about recounting the 2020 election results yet again. It was about planning ahead for who will be in charge when the next elections come around.
Trump isn’t running in 2028. But, she and I agree that Trump is likely to use this election office raid against his Peach State enemies.
The crisis continues.
