At Wednesday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Senator Mark Warner pressed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard on the fact that her 2026 Annual Threat Assessment contains no mention of foreign election interference for the first time since 2017. Warner treated this as a scandal, evidence that the intelligence community has been muzzled by the Trump administration. Gabbard deflected, saying the assessment “matches the prioritization of threats.” Warner shot back, sarcastically, “I would draw the conclusion there must be no foreign threat to our elections in 2026.”
It’s probably the right conclusion. The evidence for foreign interference in U.S. elections was always thin, the response to it was wildly disproportionate, and the infrastructure built to “counter” it did far more damage to American democracy than the interference itself ever did. As I testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government in March 2023, and again in November 2023, the “foreign interference” narrative became the predicate for a domestic censorship operation of extraordinary scope, one that Alex Gutentag and I have spent three years documenting at Public, and which we named the Censorship Industrial Complex. Removing the topic from the threat assessment is a long-overdue correction. Gabbard should have said so plainly and directly.
