Key 2020 election denier is still working to prove it was stolen — now from inside the White House
Kurt Olsen became a key player in some of President Donald Trump’s most far-fetched 2020 election reversal schemes because he believed “that something was not right” in how he saw election officials handle the presidential count in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere.
Five years later, he’s back on familiar ground — in Trump’s ear and focused on Fulton County. The man who once described his hunt for voter fraud as an effort to “save the country” now has a direct line to the president, giving him more influence than ever.
After Olsen worked alongside some of the most prominent 2020 election deniers while Trump was out of office, the president named him the White House’s director of election security and integrity in October. From his new perch, Olsen drafted the criminal referral to the Justice Department that led to an unprecedented FBI seizure of Fulton County’s 2020 ballots in January.
Olsen has access to Trump through his role and calls the president directly, sources familiar with internal White House deliberations tell CNN. While there is a larger White House push related to “election integrity” and voting that’s focused on future elections, the sources say Olsen’s work is mostly on a separate track reexamining the 2020 election, which Trump still falsely claims was stolen. Olsen’s 2020 efforts also overlap with those of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose presence at the Fulton County FBI search has prompted numerous questions about her involvement.
“He’s just kind of doing his own thing,” one White House official told CNN.
Olsen did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
Fewer legal brakes in second Trump term
The Fulton ballot seizure alarmed state election officials who are fearful of what the administration is planning for the midterms amid Trump’s call to “nationalize” elections and his stated plans to issue a new executive order related to voting.
“I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post last month.
The federal government also has been pushing states to hand over their voter rolls, prompting even some Republican state officials to push back.
The Fulton County seizure has underscored the lack of legal brakes in this administration, as the types of attorneys in the first Trump administration who stood in Trump and Olsen’s way — preventing the federal government from getting involved in the president’s most flagrant election reversal gambits — are no longer around to play a similar role.
“He’s emblematic of the change in guard between Trump 1 and Trump 2,” Stephen Richer, who was a top Republican election official in Arizona’s Maricopa County from 2021 to 2025, said of Olsen. “Usually someone of his caliber would not have gotten the time of day during the first Trump administration.”
Richer, who was a defendant in a 2022 election fraud case brought by Olsen on behalf of Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, said that Olsen inspired what was previously “unthinkable” in the world of election administration: the federal seizure of ballots. (Richer later brought a defamation case against Lake for her false claims that he had “sabotaged” the election, which was settled in 2024.)
The presence of Gabbard, who leads the intelligence community but has no role in domestic law enforcement matters, at the Fulton County seizure has further raised suspicions about what the Trump administration is planning. (Her office says she’s leading “counterintelligence matters related to election security.”)
“Tulsi Gabbard, through Kurt Olsen, is going to say, without any basis in fact, that there’s evidence foreign intelligence services have compromised vote tabulation software and had manipulated it in 2020 and that therefore it’s very important that states follow these executive orders that have come out about voter ID and mail in votes,” predicted one attorney who is familiar with internal discussions about the investigation.
Trump’s allies outside the White House have been pushing an executive order, written last spring, that would declare a national emergency to enact new federal powers over elections, which are run by states under the Constitution. The draft document, which was obtained by CNN and first reported by The Washington Post, includes curbing most mail-in voting and banning the use of voting machines, which are at the heart of many 2020 election conspiracies.
While White House officials say Trump could pursue an executive order related to voter ID if Congress does not pass the SAVE Act, there’s no indication yet that the White House is considering declaring a national emergency. Trump told reporters recently he had not heard about the draft order.
Last month, Olsen was one of a half-dozen Trump administration officials who attended an “election integrity summit” in Washington alongside many who worked to help Trump overturn the 2020 election, ProPublica reported.
Access to classified intelligence
As Olsen hunts for election fraud from his White House position, sources say Trump has granted him access to classified information from the intelligence community related to the 2020 election, a move that was first reported by Politico.
Sources familiar with the matter said the CIA and the National Security Agency are in active conversations about how they share such material. They’ve provided information about 2020 to Olsen, the sources said, but so far his scope has been limited to that election.
Olsen has also worked with FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, who was present at the Fulton County search, in his efforts to relitigate the 2020 election, according to the sources.
Democratic lawmakers on the Senate and House Intelligence committees have raised concerns about the Trump administration’s decision to allow Olsen access to highly classified material related to foreign election interference efforts — but are still working to get an understanding of the scope of material he will be provided, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
One US official characterized Olsen’s well-documented views about the 2020 election as “kooky” but acknowledged that, on its own, is not reason enough to restrict his access to relevant classified intelligence since he clearly has been given a broad investigative mandate by the president. Olsen has also been vetted by US intelligence officials who did not identify any “red flags” that would prevent him from accessing classified information, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A White House official said every person given access to classified information “goes through an extensive background review, including record checks and personal interviews.”
The Fulton County search was the first evidence of Olsen’s impact. His role came to light when a court unsealed the FBI’s search warrant application for the county’s ballots, including an affidavit that described the investigation as having “originated from a referral” sent by Olsen.
The application’s affidavit is built around allegations of election fraud that have long circulated in far-right circles, such as theories of missing ballot images or other alleged discrepancies in the count, which have already been investigated by the state and found not to have affected the final results.
In a court case demanding the federal government return the seized election materials, Fulton County accused the Justice Department of making “serious” omissions of information that would have cast doubt on the credibility of the witnesses it was using to justify the search. The county also noted that Olsen had been sanctioned by multiple courts.
The FBI’s affidavit was full of “gross mischaracterizations of the facts of how elections work and are directly at odds with the findings and conclusions of all of the prior investigations of the November 2020 election in Fulton County,” Ryan Macias, an election technology and security expert who has worked on thousands of elections, wrote in a declaration on the county’s behalf.
In response, the Justice Department distanced itself from Olsen’s role as DOJ attorneys argued that Fulton County’s claims of bias were “exceedingly weak.”
“For example, they attack Kurt Olsen. But the affidavit merely mentions that this investigation originated from a referral sent by Olsen. It does not rely on him as a witness or for any evidence,” DOJ wrote in a filing last month. The judge scrapped plans for a February 27 hearing in which he was expected to scrutinize the warrant, with an order that sent the dispute to mediation for now.
In his current White House role, which began in October 2025, Olsen serves as a “special government employee” — a federal employment designation for advisers who are supposed to work for the government for up to 130 days within a yearlong period.
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