Last May, a classified whistleblower complaint alleged misconduct by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and another unnamed federal agency.

Under normal circumstances, the whistleblower would be allowed to share their complaint with Congress.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, after the complaint was filed, Gabbard placed a mole in the intelligence community’s inspector general’s office to report directly to her. And the oversight office, which is supposed to independently investigate the 18 intelligence agencies, kept the complaint locked in a vault for eight months, until a series of front-page articles forced the IG to share the complaint with Congress.

The secrecy prevented Congress from making a prompt determination at a time when Gabbard’s appointees have proved themselves willing to distort the truth, and highlights the precarious position of intelligence community whistleblowers.

The complaint

It’s tempting to speculate what the complaint could be about. It’s impossible to say, but the biggest public story about the intelligence community last May was the release of an intelligence community memo that completely undercut the Trump administration’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to El Salvador.

The memo was released to me in response to my Freedom of Information Act request. Shortly after the document made headlines, Gabbard fired several of the officials who authored the memo, as well as employees who worked in the FOIA offices that released it.

Prior to the FOIA release, both Gabbard and Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that reporting on the existence of the memo was a threat to national security. This proved to be unfounded, and calls into question the government’s classification claims.

The whistleblower complaint may be about an unrelated matter, but it is interesting timing.

What the FOIA release definitively shows is that Gabbard has retaliated against employees after the release of information that’s bad for her or the Trump administration, even when the disclosures are required by law.

Gabbard plants a mole

The delay sending this classified complaint to Congress was without known precedent.

The oversight office is supposed to determine if a complaint has merit within a few weeks. If the determination is made that the complaint is merited, it is submitted to the agency head, who must transmit the complaint to Congress within seven days.

If the determination is made that the complaint doesn’t have merit, the whistleblower still has the right to send the complaint to Congress, but they need directions from the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard, on how to do so.

At the time the classified complaint was made in May, the acting Inspector General Tamara Johnson determined the accusations against Gabbard specifically weren’t credible. Johnson wasn’t able to reach a determination on the accusations against the unnamed federal agency.

No instructions about how to share the complaint with Congress were given until the delay made headlines.

This begs the questions:

  • Why was Gabbard hiding the complaint from Congress if it was meritless? If she’s already been exonerated, she should have no concerns letting lawmakers review the document.
  • And why, soon after the complaint was submitted, did Gabbard install an adviser, Dennis Kirk, in the watchdog’s office to report directly to her? (Johnson was later removed from the role of acting IG and has since been replaced by Gabbard’s former aide, Christopher Fox.)

These personnel maneuverings are not only suspicious, they are an obvious conflict of interest that may explain why it took so long for Congress to see the report.

Insufficient IC whistleblowers protections

The debacle underscores the precarious situation of intelligence community whistleblowers and contractors working with classified information.

IC employees are exempt from the safeguards afforded by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which can, among other things, shield employees who share unclassified information with the press. This leaves intelligence community employees, who sometimes work exclusively with classified information, with limited options when reporting wrongdoing.

Currently, IC employees can either make disclosures to the head of their agency, or they can go to the inspector general of the intelligence community, who reports to the DNI. If they go outside official channels to share classified information, they may be subject to prosecution under the Espionage Act.

The entire system relies on trust and the credibility of the DNI.

She’s shown she has none.

What she does have, however, is hypocrisy in spades. Six years ago, as a representative in Congress, Gabbard introduced the Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act, which could have alleviated some of the very problems she is now worsening.

But since joining the Trump administration, Gabbard has embraced the administration’s whistleblower witch hunt with gusto.

Gabbard was never a true friend to whistleblowers. Moreover, she was never qualified to oversee the intelligence community, a fact she’s proved repeatedly since her confirmation.

If Congress wants to stop getting the runaround from her, it needs to expand whistleblower protections for IC whistleblowers — and push for a qualified DNI.