Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard survived a bruising Senate confirmation fight 12 months ago, despite her lack of experience for the job. She then got down to pursuing high-profile intelligence issues, mostly aimed at revealing hidden historical truths. This generated more heat than light but was edifying to many MAGA voters.
By the end of last year, however, Gabbard seemed to have disappeared. She played no discernible role in the daring raid to snatch fugitive President Nicolás Maduro. And last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had interfered with an Intelligence Community Inspector General report regarding a whistleblower allegation of DNI malfeasance.
The report was short on specifics but centered on a phone call intercepted by the National Security Agency involving foreign intelligence and a discussion of a Trump administration official. This isn’t unusual. Intercepting foreign communications is NSA’s main job, and sometimes such signals intelligence collection pulls up discussions about — and sometimes with — top U.S. government officials. Per NSA procedure, when such “incidental collection” occurs, the identity of any U.S. person is masked in SIGINT reporting. The WSJ account, though light on substance, more than implied that Gabbard was dodging the whistleblower allegation, including hiding it from Congress.
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This revelation delivered Democrat denunciations and MAGA fury, amid claims of a set-up to discredit Gabbard. The Guardian then advanced the story with new details that the NSA intercepted the call last spring and it involved a discussion about a senior Trump official between two foreign intelligence officers. This highly classified intercept was brought to the DNI’s attention, at which point Gabbard shared it with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Gabbard then apparently ordered the NSA to not report this intelligence, as it normally does. This unusual action by the DNI prompted an anonymous whistleblower to file a report which ultimately reached the IC IG.
The Guardian report clearly enraged Gabbard. A senior DNI staffer took to X (formerly Twitter) where she denounced the new claim as “false” while berating the reporter who broke the story as “a total loser being used by your sources (likely Congress) to leak highly classified information.” This staffer was poorly briefed because if the information is false, it can’t also be highly classified. Which is it?
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Gabbard then jumped into the X fracas herself with a long-worded post that denounced Democrats and their “Propaganda Media” while asserting that, while she was made aware of the whistleblower claim last June, she in fact had only seen the complaint “two weeks ago,” while placing blame for any misunderstanding on Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Gabbard offered no evidence for her version of events, while insisting that she had done nothing wrong and the IC IG had deemed the whistleblower’s allegation “not credible.”
Yesterday, the New York Times added important information with a fresh report on this affair. Congress was reportedly briefed on this issue last week, while the SIGINT hit pertained to Iran; the intercept occurred a few weeks before Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear program. This new reporting didn’t elaborate what was discussed, nor who the senior Trump official was. However, it included a significant consideration: “There was no other intelligence that led officials to think the two officials had been speaking truthfully. Some intelligence analysts concluded the two foreign nationals were either gossiping or deliberately spreading disinformation.” If that’s the case, Gabbard’s decision to quash any NSA report seems more common sense than sinister.
Let me add my own take, based on my experience doing just such work for NSA.
First, any intercepts of foreign intelligence communications are automatically highly classified: Top Secret with handling caveats. If there’s mention of U.S. officials, that restricts the dissemination of such reporting even in Top Secret channels. Even if Gabbard had allowed NSA to report this SIGINT, it would have been seen by very few people in Washington due to the highly sensitive nature of the intelligence. The spy gossip mill has it that the Trump official discussed in said intercept was either Jared Kushner or Steve Witkoff, both of whom have been involved in White House negotiations in the Middle East. However, people can be wrong, or even deceptive, when they are caught on U.S. intercepts. The notion that foreign intelligence officers were talking trash about a top American official, with the intent to spread lies and deception, isn’t far-fetched in the slightest. Salacious claims require corroboration.
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I’ve been there. An NSA team I was leading intercepted something “hot”: two foreign intelligence officers saying controversial things about a top Western security official. This intelligence was fit for a tabloid more than the President’s Daily Brief. However, I could find no other intelligence, from any U.S. or Allied spy agency, to corroborate the intercept. Therefore, after long debate, my boss and I reluctantly agreed to quash any report based on that SIGINT, to the dismay of the analysts who uncovered it. However, that turned out to be the right call. As I suspected, those foreign intelligence officers were indeed talking trash, gossiping, probably with the awareness that they were being listened to. Foreign spies know that the NSA is very good at their job and sometimes play to the notion that even though they are speaking on an encrypted line, other ears are listening in on them.
Perhaps Gabbard was right to quash any NSA report here. Nevertheless, it’s anything but standard operating procedure for the DNI to reach down like that to interrupt the normal intelligence process. Moreover, attorneys for the anonymous whistleblower have publicly countered the DNI’s claims in this case, asserting that Gabbard is misrepresenting the timeline of events, at best. This mess cannot be fully unraveled at the unclassified level nor by journalists. We need a bipartisan review by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is less infected by partisanship than its House counterpart, even if Gabbard doesn’t like that. Oversight of the Intelligence Community is their job, let them do it.
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Regardless, this scandal raises troubling questions. First, is the IC Inspector General truly independent? If not, that needs immediate remedy. Whistleblowers must be confident that their claims will be fairly adjudicated without partisanship or reprisal. That seems like a tall order for Gabbard, given her leadership habits. Second, is Gabbard fit for her office? Many possessed doubts a year ago, given her lack of experience plus excessive fealty to Donald Trump.
Last, should Gabbard’s job exist at all? The DNI position was created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to centralize IC leadership. However, over the past couple decades, DNI staff has become another bloated secret bureaucracy on the Potomac. Gabbard has promised to reform and pare down her outfit, but that job may be too big for any one person.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.