Opinion | The President’s Personal Spy Chief

It’s time to talk about Tulsi Gabbard. President Trump, reality TV star forever – “You’re fired. Get out of here.” – brought together quite a cast of characters in his second term. One of them, Tulsi Gabbard, is the director of national intelligence. Gabbard is eroding the credibility of our intelligence agencies in real time. Last week, Gabbard made an unusual appearance in Georgia, joining FBI agents searching a polling station that President Trump criticized after his defeat in the 2020 election. “We all know President Trump is obsessed with losing Georgia and losing the 2020 election.” The next day, Gabbard called the president: “This was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it was exposed. People will soon be prosecuted for their actions.” — and put him on speaker phone to speak directly to the agents conducting the search — “Our system doesn’t work that way.” could potentially compromise the independence of the entire investigation. “This is injecting politics into a situation that is already highly political.” We also learned that researching the 2020 election is a big part of Gabbard’s portfolio. Exactly what America needs our director of national intelligence to focus on. “He works hard and tries to keep the elections safe.” The situation became even more concerning this week when The Wall Street Journal reported that a whistleblower filed a complaint against Gabbard last May. “Our client requested that this be forwarded to Capitol Hill. That’s the law. That’s what Tulsi Gabbard should have done.” We’re just hearing about this eight months later. This is not normal. “The core complaint concerns the actions of the DNI.” According to the tipster, this was because Gabbard tried to cover up the complaint. But this weekend, the issue went to Congress. On Wednesday, the complaint was shown to eight leaders in Congress, who were briefed on the most sensitive intelligence information. “It took six months of bipartisan pressure.” Gabbard’s team said the whistleblower’s complaint was unfounded, but even so, the fact that she might have suppressed it is unheard of. Separately, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the CIA director expressing deep concern about CIA activities. Now, it could be a reference to the whistleblower complaint or Gabbard’s investigations into elections in the United States and Puerto Rico — “What is the DNI doing investigating voting machines in Puerto Rico?” — or the fact that Gabbard last year fired a top lawyer in the inspector general’s office and brought in one of her own advisers, which senior Democrats said violated the law. The point is that Gabbard and her Trump administration colleagues have an alarming number of ways to ensure institutions are dealing with sensitive, risky information. Eliminating its independence is incredibly dangerous to our democracy and national security.