A criminal referral tied to the intelligence community’s handling of the complaint that sparked President Donald Trump’s first impeachment was sent to the Justice Department on Wednesday, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“ODNI can confirm a criminal referral was sent to the DOJ related to one or more former employees of the Intelligence Community and their role in the 2019 impeachment of President Trump,” a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
The referral targets “one or more” former intelligence officials, but Fox News reported that an intelligence official described the referral as broad while specifically directed at former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson and the whistleblower whose complaint triggered the 2019 impeachment proceedings.
The move follows a wave of newly declassified records released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Monday. Those documents, along with congressional transcripts, showed the whistleblower contacted congressional Democrats before filing his complaint to the inspector general, suggesting a level of coordination with Trump’s opponents that was not known at the time Congress and the media treated the whistleblower complaint as nonpartisan.
The documents have been framed by administration officials as evidence of a “coordinated effort” inside the intelligence community to advance a narrative that led to Trump’s impeachment.
“Newly-declassified records expose how deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that Congress used to usurp the will of the American people and impeach duly-elected President @realDonaldTrump in 2019,” Gabbard said in a post on X.
At the center of the controversy is the August 2019 whistleblower complaint concerning Trump’s July 25, 2019, phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In that call, Trump urged Zelensky to examine business dealings involving Hunter Biden and the actions of former Vice President Joe Biden related to Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
However, the younger Biden was already under a low-profile federal investigation by late 2018 that was prompted by unusual foreign transactions related to his former role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma. That investigation later pivoted from possibly illegal foreign lobbying and toward separate tax and firearms offenses once the statute of limitations ran out on the foreign lobbying allegations.
The complaint against Trump, which ultimately led to his impeachment by the House and acquittal in the Senate, relied largely on secondhand information about the president’s private conversation with Zelensky. The whistleblower acknowledged in the filing that he was “not a direct witness to most of the events described,” instead citing accounts from multiple U.S. officials.
Atkinson, who reviewed the complaint, determined it met the statutory definition of an “urgent concern” and forwarded it to Congress, despite noting that the whistleblower had indications of political bias, including support for a rival political candidate.
Newly declassified testimony adds another layer to the dispute. During a closed-door deposition in October 2019, Atkinson confirmed that the whistleblower had prior contact with congressional Democrats before filing the complaint — a detail that was not disclosed on the original submission form.
That omission has fueled concerns about coordination between the whistleblower and lawmakers leading the impeachment inquiry, which was spearheaded by then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford (R-AR) said Monday that the transcripts revealing the omission had been “withheld from the American public for far too long.”
Democrats, meanwhile, ratcheted up concerns about weaponization of justice on Thursday in response to Gabbard’s referrals.
“This is yet another desperate attempt by Tulsi Gabbard to crush and criminalize dissent and manipulate the levers of power in favor of Trump – much like she’s attempting to do in our elections,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
During Trump’s first term, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded that the complaint against Trump did not fall within the ODNI’s jurisdiction because it involved the president’s communications with a foreign leader, setting off a standoff over whether it should be transmitted to Congress. Atkinson ultimately moved to notify lawmakers himself.
The scope of the current referral remains unclear, and the DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on whether it had received the complaint.