‘I Hope They Take Each Other Down!’: Trump Freaks Out, Tries to Sacrifice Bondi in Gabbard Screwup — Then the Screenshot He Never Saw Coming Blows Up His Whole Story
By the time President Donald Trump began offering his version of events, the damage was already spreading. A swirl of half-answers and competing accounts about a federal raid in Georgia had left his administration talking over itself, with Trump content to let confusion do the work and his officials absorb the fallout.
What he appeared not to grasp was that one of them had already locked in the evidence, setting a trap that would soon blow apart his carefully improvised story.
At the center of the kerfuffle are inconsistent explanations for why Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present at the FBI search of Fulton County’s election offices on Jan. 28.
Trump said on Feb. 4 he didn’t know why she was there, then blamed Attorney General Pam Bondi the next day — even as Gabbard’s own written account says the president personally ordered her to go, a claim that undercut Trump’s attempt to shift blame.
During the raid, agents seized hundreds of boxes containing scanned ballots and other election materials tied to the 2020 election. Gabbard’s presence during the search raised alarms among Democrats and local officials, who framed the move as retaliation for Trump’s election loss and questioned why the nation’s top intelligence official was anywhere near a domestic criminal investigation.
Then on Thursday morning at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said on camera Gabbard was there because Bondi wanted her to be.
“She took a lot of heat two days ago because she went in, at Pam’s insistence, she went in, and she looked at votes that want to be checked out from Georgia,” Trump said. “They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’ Right, Pam? ‘Why is she doing it?’ Because Pam wanted her to do it.”
That explanation clashed directly with what Trump said just a day earlier in a one-on-one interview, when NBC News anchor Tom Llamas asked him why Gabbard was present in the first place. “I don’t know,” Trump said. “But a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating.”
Later, when asked to clarify Gabbard’s involvement, Bondi essentially pleaded the Fifth.
“That’s interesting, because DNI Gabbard and I are inseparable,” she said on Feb. 6 from the podium. “We are constantly together. … we constantly talk, we collaborate as a cabinet. We’re all extremely close, know what each other, what we’re doing, at all times, pretty much, to keep not only our country safe, but our world safe. … And that’s, I’m not going to talk about any other details of that matter right now because Georgia is a very important issue to us. She was there. We’re inseparable. That’s all I’ll say.”
Social media observers said Bondi, who had been speaking at DOJ news conference about an unrelated arrest while flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Piro, was twisting herself in knots.
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“She doesn’t know how to respond to the question, wasn’t prepared….you can see the pressure,” one person wrote on Threads.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election after multiple reviews have confirmed that President Joe Biden defeated Trump in Fulton County and statewide in Georgia.
Gabbard has since offered a far more specific account — and one that points squarely back at Trump.
In a letter to Democratic lawmakers, she wrote that her presence was not incidental or suggested by someone else, but ordered from the top. To advance efforts to “safeguard” election integrity, Gabbard said Trump “specifically directed my observance of the execution of the Fulton County search warrant.”
Her office has insisted there was “no contradiction” between the different explanations. “Two things can be true at the same time,” Gabbard spokesperson Olivia Coleman told Axios, saying both Trump and Bondi asked her to attend.
Democrats were unconvinced. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called on Gabbard to testify under oath, saying she “needs to explain why she believed it was appropriate to involve herself in a domestic criminal investigation.”
On Monday, Gabbard had responded publicly on X, posting screenshots of her letter to lawmakers and reiterating that her presence “was requested by the president.”
In the letter itself, addressed to Warner and Rep. James Himes, Gabbard laid out a detailed legal and procedural defense of her actions, arguing that election security falls squarely within her purview.
The letter’s explicit claim — that Trump personally directed her to observe the search — drew widespread disapproval online. Critics contrasted her account with Trump’s haphazard remarks, calling the explanations irreconcilable.
One critic wrote, “LMFAO, he was ON SPEAKERPHONE with Tulsi AT the raid, congratulating everyone! That dog won’t hunt.”
Another commenter piled on: “ I hope they take each other down. Blow it all up.”
Another mocked, “They’re about to start snitching on each other!” while also observing that they, “Can’t keep their lies straight cause they tell so many.”
Others shared video clips of Trump’s remarks. One post called him a “pathological liar.”
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Independent journalist Aaron Rupar reacted to Trump’s broader comments about Georgia by writing, “Trump sounds like a complete lunatic talking about Fulton County, suggesting China may have rigged the 2020 election for Biden and that’s why Tulsi Gabbard is involved.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the focus on Trump’s words as selective. “I was in the room for that NBC interview [sic], and he just said exactly what I told you which is election security is essential to national security,” she said. “We need to ensure that our elections are free and are fair and are free of foreign interference. And he spoke about how Ms. Tulsi Gabbard is involved in that effort.”