“Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is running her own review into the 2020 election with Donald Trump’s approval, working separately from a justice department investigation even as she joined an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia last week,” The Guardian reports.

“Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard participated in the FBI’s recent search of a Georgia election center at the request of President Trump, she told members of Congress in a Monday letter,” The Hill reports.

“FBI agents executed a search warrant on Wednesday for an election center in Fulton County, Ga., seeking to seize ballots in a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to investigate a jurisdiction that President Trump has continued to criticize over his 2020 defeat in the state,” the New York Times reports.

“The move harnesses the investigative power of the Justice Department and the FBI behind baseless claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen from him. State and local officials and election experts have repeatedly refuted those assertions.”

Atlanta Journal Constitution: “The FBI raided Fulton County’s election operations center Wednesday, an action apparently connected to the Trump administration’s long-held, but unproven, belief that Fulton’s handling of the 2020 presidential election was rife with fraud.”

“The FBI executed a search warrant on the elections warehouse of Georgia’s most populous county Wednesday seeking ballots from the 2020 election, the latest apparent move in President Donald Trump’s campaign to find widespread voter fraud from that election despite five years of debunked claims and dozens of dismissed court cases,” the Washington Post reports.

“An agency spokesperson confirmed its agents were executing a court-authorized law enforcement action at the Fulton County elections warehouse but declined to provide more details.”

President Trump told an audience in Davos that “people will soon be prosecuted” for “rigging” the 2020 presidential election, the AP reports.

New York Times: “Transcripts of secret grand jury testimony from the Georgia election interference case against Mr. Trump and his allies, obtained this week by the New York Times, show just how alarmed and exasperated a number of senior Republicans felt about the president’s efforts to overturn an American presidential election.”

“The testimony, given in 2022, is emerging at a time when Mr. Trump is again raising complaints about his 2020 defeat and voicing regret that he did not order the National Guard to seize voting machines after the election.”

“Donald Trump said he regrets not getting the U.S. national guard to seize voting machines after his 2020 election defeat ended his first presidency, as he continues to falsely claim that he won the race,” The Guardian reports.

“But he has also questioned whether national guard troops would be ‘sophisticated enough’ to pull something like that off.”

“The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, over records related to the 2020 election, escalating the Trump administration’s efforts to boost the president’s false claims that his loss to Joe Biden was rigged,” the Washington Post reports.

Beto O’Rourke told The Bulwark that he regrets not running negative ads against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in their U.S. Senate race.

Ed Kilgore: “At first blush, the idea that things would be better had Trump been peacefully re-inaugurated on January 20, 2021, seems nuts. But we can all agree it would have been good if there had been no ‘stop the steal’ rally, no gatherings of Christian-right extremists blowing shofars, no Capitol riot, no shattered windows, no dead or injured police officers, and no enduring right-wing myth of a rigged election.”

“A Trump win would have also meant no second Trump impeachment, then no federal criminal prosecution of Trump for his involvement in an attempted insurrection. These developments, while momentarily satisfying to Democrats, did virtually nothing to limit Trump’s political support while doing a lot to intensify polarization.”

“Moreover, think of the burdens Trump would have inherited as a second-term president taking office in 2021. He would not have been able to hand off the final stages of the coronavirus epidemic, and all the unpopular and unpleasant measures it involved, most of which he had originally supported. He would have almost certainly become the ‘inflation president,’ too.”

President Trump is demanding that a special prosecutor be appointed in order to investigate his 2020 election loss, based on his disproven claims that “MASSIVE and OVERWHELMING” fraud was responsible for Joe Biden’s victory.

“A senator at Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing to be FBI director pressed him to articulate a simple truth: Joe Biden won the 2020 election,” the New York Times reports.

“Under three minutes of questioning from Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, Mr. Patel conceded only that Mr. Biden was ‘certified’ as the president.”

Reuters: ‘Three senior U.S. Justice Department officials committed misconduct in the final months of Donald Trump’s first presidency by leaking details about a non-public investigation, a move that may have been intended to sway the 2020 election, the department’s internal watchdog concluded in a new report.”

“Wisconsin prosecutors filed 10 additional felony charges Tuesday against two attorneys and an aide to President-elect Donald Trump who advised Trump in 2020 as part of a plan to submit paperwork falsely claiming that the Republican had won the battleground state that year,” the AP reports.

New York Times: “With Election Day only three days away, Mr. Trump is already claiming the Democrats are ‘a bunch of cheats,’ as his allies in battleground states spread distorted reports of mishaps at the polls to push a narrative of widespread fraud.”

“Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a ‘crushing victory,’ as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose.”

“And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted, a move that ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Sunday refused to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden, USA Today reports.

Said Johnson: “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020.”

Mother Jones: Top Trump allies help set the stage for election chaos.