The Return of a Dangerous Trump Conspiracy Theory

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey enter a command vehicle, as the FBI seizes 2020 election ballots at a Georgia election center on Wednesday. Mike Stewart/AP

My fellow citizens, I’m here to report to you that your president is bonkers.

Okay, many of you know that. Donald Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his connection to reality is tenuous. But to his credit—if we must—his ability to create and live in a distortion field free of facts has worked out quite well for him. His malignant narcissism had been good for his career. His other pathologies have helped him win the immense power he needs to compensate for his paranoia, profound insecurity, and cognitive decline.

Still, every once in a while, we are presented with a reminder of how truly bananas the most powerful man in the world is. That happened this week.

Trump is once again crazily pursuing his obsessive delusion that the 2020 election was stolen from him. On Wednesday, the FBI raided an election center in Fulton County, Georgia (a.k.a. Atlanta). The agents seized ballots from the 2020 contest, as well as voter rolls, ballot images from scanning machines, and tabulator tapes. The search warrant indicated this was pursuant to an investigation of the destruction of voting records and voter fraud. Oddly, the prosecutor for this case is not the US attorney for Georgia but an interim US attorney in Missouri who’s been an active election denier.

Clearly, Trump has tasked the Justice Department and FBI to find—or manufacture—proof of his baseless claim that he won the 2020 election. Georgia was at the center of his post-election conniving to overturn the election results. (Remember the call he made to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when he pressured him to “find 11,780 votes”—the amount Trump needed to overcome Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the Peach State.) Trump was indicted for that scheming—and escaped prosecution because prosecutor Fani Willis was booted from the case after it was revealed she had a romantic relationship with a special prosecutor she had hired. Following her dismissal, the case collapsed.

In pursuit of his white whale, Trump had FBI agents taken off other assignments—perhaps investigating human trafficking, violent crimes, or financial fraud—to chase after this conspiracy theory of election fraud. Curiously, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present at the raid in Atlanta.

Why would the nation’s top intelligence official be involved in this? Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, wondered and released a statement:

There are only two explanations for why the Director of National Intelligence would show up at a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election. Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus—in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees “fully and currently informed” of relevant national security concerns—or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for the office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.

Either is a serious breach of trust that further underscores why she is totally unqualified to hold a position that demands sound judgment, apolitical independence, and a singular focus on keeping Americans safe.

The day after the raid, the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard “has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election” and that she’s leading the effort to reexamine the contest and look for potential crimes. This is not a job for the DNI, who’s supposed to oversee the sprawling intelligence community of 17 different agencies to ensure the president receives the best intelligence for all the tough decisions he must make (not that Trump bases his decisions on intelligence).

Gabbard’s official responsibilities fill a work week. So she must be abandoning some of those duties to play Konspiracy Kop for Dear Leader. Given that Gabbard was recently embarrassed by news reports disclosing she had been kept out of the loop during the Venezuela operation—with administration officials joking that DNI stood for Do Not Invite—her involvement in this caper could be a play to return to the good graces of the Mad King.

The DNI, though, might have a role in this sort of an investigation, if there were a foreign intelligence angle–as imagined as that might be. And that brings us back to Trump being a loon.

On Wednesday, he reposted on his (money-losing) Truth Social platform a post from an anonymous X account called The SCIF, which identifies itself as a “digital operator” and “intelligence researcher.” (A SCIF is a secured room or area impervious to electronic eavesdropping in which government officials can discuss top-secret matters.) The SCIF summed up a loopy conspiracy theory knocking around the fringe corners of MAGA for more than five years that’s been embraced by QAnon nutballs and that has been promoted by Maria Zack, a Georgia-based lobbyist. Here’s how The SCIF described it:

Maria Zack testified about the stolen 2020 Election operation connected to Obama when he diverted $400 million from the infamous pallets of cash sent to Iran, funneling through the Dubai Embassy to operatives in Italy and Merrill Lynch in Geneva, Switzerland.

In return, Italian officials at Leonardo SpA [a high-tech company specializing in aerospace] used military satellites to help hack U.S. voting machines, flipping votes from Trump to Biden using CIA-developed tools like Hammer and Scorecard. Along with numerous other methods of fraud and manipulation.

China reportedly coordinated the whole operation, providing the tech backbone and bribes to corrupt Americans. The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet. This is the global election fraud cartel and the real threat against American democracy and the rest of the world.

Got all that? Obama, Dubai, Italy, Switzerland, China, the CIA, the FBI, and unnamed corrupt Americans cooked up a scheme using satellites to switch votes from Trump to Biden. This ridiculous theory was dubbed Italygate, and it has been debunked (as if a debunking was really necessary) by Reuters and USA Today. Is it the purported involvement of theses foreign actors in a ludicrous plot that not even writers for a James Bond film would dare propose that has drawn Gabbard into this mother of all wild goose chases? Her office ain’t saying.

It’s no longer surprising that Trump amplifies rubbish like this. But we should not become inured to Trump’s affinity for and encouragement of such conspiratorial insanity. It ought to be frightening to all outside the MAGA cult.

By reposting such hogwash, Trump affords The SCIF and this crap credibility. And it’s unnerving that this X account—whoever and whatever may be behind it—is an information source for the president of the United States.

The SCIF—as you never would guess—is the peddler of many bizarro ideas. I took a dash through the account’s timeline and discovered that The SCIF believes Pizzagate was real; claims the Biden-Harris administration “trafficked” 450,000 children across the Southern border; asserts the CIA conducts “dark child trafficking operations” linked to a satanic cult and runs “blackmail operations connected to high-profile elites and politicians”; says a “regime change operation” is now underway in the United States due to the skullduggery of USAID, the CIA, and the National Endowment for Democracy; questions whether Osama bin Laden was killed in the 2011 raid on his compound; promotes the claims that there was a second shooter who fired at Trump at the Butler, Pennsylvania, campaign rally and that Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy were “involved in the hit”; insists nefarious secret societies run the world; and backs the disproven conspiracy theory that Democratic National Committee aide Seth Rich, not the Russians, stole the leaked Democratic emails and documents in 2016.

All of that is from posts this account has put up just in the past two weeks.

Trump reportedly does not spend much time on briefings from the intelligence community, but he reads and amplifies posts from The SCIF. His acceptance of this persona’s hokum—especially the notion that all those countries (and an Italian spy satellite firm!) schemed against him—is another troubling indicator of clinical paranoia, cognitive impairment, or both.

It’s easy to scoff at the FBI raid in Georgia or dismiss Trump’s legitimization of an anonymous cracked conspiracist as just more of his crazy-uncle inanity. But this is serious stuff. Ranting about the 2020 election during his recent rambling speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump said, “People will soon be prosecuted for what they did. It's probably breaking news, but it should be. It was a rigged election." He seems committed to abusing the Justice Department (once again) to settle that score and rewrite recent history with rigged criminal prosecutions.

Perhaps more important, the raid on the Fulton County election center might be part of preparations for an attempt to interfere in the coming midterm elections. It could be a prelude to a plan to seize ballots and voting machines in November. At the same time, the Trump administration is moving to obtain the private voter rolls of states. Amid the recent chaos in Minnesota, Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded the state hand over its voter list to the Justice Department, and she’s been pressuring other states to do the same. That could give the Trump administration the ability to challenge the registration of voters in key districts.

Trump in the White House reposting rando conspiracy kooks, Gabbard skulking about in Atlanta, Bondi pressuring states to hand over key voter information—all of this is weird and disturbing. The president may not be playing with a full set of clubs. But the consequences are damn serious. He and his crew are looking to turn his deranged beliefs into the basis for criminal prosecutions and, while doing that, prepping to manipulate the coming election. Trump’s addiction to irrational conspiracism is not merely a personal foible deserving ridicule. It’s a threat to the nation.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Tragedy can bring out not the best but the worst in some people. That certainly was evident following the horrific murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. In the last Our Land issue, I highlighted some of the false and defamatory comments uttered by Trump administration officials about this ICU nurse gunned down by CBP agents in Minneapolis. So the judges decided not to include those statements in this week’s contest. But there were plenty of other terrible remarks in the wake of that shooting.

One came from an unidentified ICE agent in Minnesota, who told an observer/protester: “You raise your voice, I erase your voice.”

That seemed like a threat, and it shows that all the talk from Trump administration officials justifying the use of lethal force against protesters who get out of line has trickled down to the guys with guns on the ground. This thug received the message loud and clear.

As part of a half-hearted effort to clean up the mess in Minneapolis, Trump withdrew Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino and dispatched border czar Tom Homan to the Twin Cities. At a much-anticipated press briefing on Thursday morning, Homan did not say anything of substance about the killings of Renée Good and Pretti. He justified ICE’s surge in Minneapolis and St. Paul and acknowledged no wrongdoing on the agency’s part. He said this: “I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop. I said in March if the rhetoric doesn't stop, there is gonna be bloodshed. And there has been. I wish I wasn't right. I don't want to see anybody die."

It takes plenty of chutzpah for someone who works for Trump to complain about rhetoric. And here was Homan blaming the “rhetoric” of protesters for the unjustified and possibly illegal use of deadly force against Pretti and Good. He wasn’t blaming the victims in the way that Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem did immediately after the shooting, baselessly calling Pretti a “terrorist.” But what Homan did came close.

By the way, who has a problem with rhetoric? As journalist Radley Balko noted, Homan need look no further than his bathroom mirror. In February, he declared, “I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me." In March he said, "Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely." In July, referring to a Democratic member of Congress, he commented, “I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room.”

MAGA commentator Megyn Kelly stunned the judges with her supersize callousness. On her YouTube show, she proclaimed, “I know I’m supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don’t.”

Her argument was that anyone who interferes with law enforcement deserves what happens to them: “He was there with a loaded gun looking to cause trouble for the Border Patrol agents. And the trouble came back on him...Personally I am so sick of this bullshit.” I find it hard to imagine being this awful and cruel. But that sells in MAGA. Kelly’s YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. Her shows tend to draw an audience of 150,000 or so viewers on the platform.

Which brings us to the victor this week and back to Trump, who escaped the mercy rule usually applied to him by our judges. He topped Kelly in horribleness after Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whom he has relentlessly demonized, was attacked at a town hall meeting by an assailant who sprayed an unidentified liquid at her. (It turned out to be apple cider vinegar.) Asked about the frightening incident, Trump huffed, “I don’t think about her. I think she’s a fraud. I really don’t think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her.”

How can a person be so free of even an iota of grace? Trump’s racist denouncements of Omar have placed her life at risk. After all his assaults on her—depicting her as an enemy of the United States and a crook and declaring she ought to be sent back to Somalia—it’s no surprise a deranged man took this action. This winning entry suggests that was Trump’s intent.

After a federal agent murdered Alex Pretti, a GoFundMe page was set up for his family. Donations poured in, including a $10,000 gift from billionaire hedge fund guy Bill Ackman. That seemed like a decent move, right? But let’s remember that Ackman was a Trump supporter, and Trump is the reason why Pretti is dead. During the 2024 election, Trump vowed to launch a mass deportation campaign, and it was pretty damn obvious that an effort to round up 11 million people would require police-state tactics. So folks like Ackman helped make this happen.

By the way, Ackman also gave $10,000 to a fund for Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renée Good. He says he tried to make a contribution to Good’s family but the GoFundMe site closed before he could.

It sure looks like Ackman is trying to be generous. But given that he’s worth $9.3 billion, his $10,000 gift, percentage-wise, is the equivalent of one dollar for a millionaire. Ten thousand dollars is not enough to wipe blood off anyone's hands—let alone those of a multibillionaire.

Linda Jack shared an appropriate quote for this week:

"A government that is allowed to break the law during an emergency will create an emergency to break the law."—attributed to Alexander Hamilton. It has been this administration's SOP since day one, an economic emergency to justify tariffs, a border emergency to justify ICE terrorism, a drug abuse emergency to rationalize extra-judicial killings in Venezuela and the capture of Maduro. The one true unaddressed emergency is the dismantling of our government and democracy.

The internet tells me that there is no confirmation of who originated that aphorism. It sometimes is attributed to Thomas Jefferson. But whoever said it first, that’s the right sentiment for the moment. Trump has always looked to—or tried to trigger—chaos and emergencies for political advantage. We’re still waiting to see if the current one will finally cause him real political harm.

Edward Erikson responded to my recent piece on the growing list of impeachable offenses committed by Trump:

Regarding your recent article on the mounting list of impeachable offenses that Trump is racking up, I wanted to make sure you were aware of Free Speech For People's campaign called Impeach Trump Again. They are a team of constitutional lawyers that I work with who are keeping a detailed account—it's up to 26 grounds.

And it will grow, I bet.

John Swinton sent a similar note:

In a recent column, you hoped someone is keeping track of Trump administration offenses. I believe Devin Stone, from Legal Eagle, is doing so. Around December 1, 2025, I asked Claude (Anthropic AI) to compile this list from a transcript. The cutoff date of November 20, 2025. At the time, I had the notion that Democratic attorneys general might find it useful in filing a civil RICO lawsuit, but I neglected to follow through. 

John shared the list Claude generated. It had 185 entries. Clearly, not all the transgressions on this roster are impeachable offenses. But they do provide a trip down a terrible memory lane that includes the pardon of the January 6 rioters, proceeding with border wall construction without congressional approval, freezing hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, firing independent commissioners, lackadaisical enforcement (at best) of corruption, and so much more.

Jim Chalfant replied to the recent issue on the decimation of USAID:

It’s a travesty that the press (what’s left of it) has essentially ignored the damage that the destruction of USAID has caused and will cause going forward. Any thoughts about how grassroots organizations can raise the collective consciousness about this? Right now, we are all trying our best to counter the depravity of ICE, but the long-term consequences of losing what USAID did so effectively will be monumental, as you so eloquently stated.

Thanks for the kind words about my eloquence, James. The annihilation of USAID is a travesty. I keep waiting for the mainline churches to say something. They should be speaking out and taking action. Does anyone see that?

Iris Vander Pluym emailed:

While the slashing-and-burning of USAID was happening, I recall seeing a lot of reporting about the loss of U.S. "soft power." I didn't see any in-depth analysis of the consequences of this, perhaps because it is difficult to quantify such things. Still, it occurred to me that the impacts of the end of USAID could ripple across time and generations in so many unforeseen ways—none of them good.

You're right. It is hard now to see where those ripples will lead. But we already know that the loss of life is huge, and the loss of respect and admiration for the United States in many areas of the world will resonate for a long time.

J. Moler had a succinct point:

I strongly suspect that there was a racial factor in the decision to cut all that aid.

I wouldn't bet against that.

“Moxie, where you going?”
“I’m heading home. It’s too damn cold.”
“But you didn’t do all your business.”
“Tomorrow is another day.”