A Whistleblower Accuses Tulsi Gabbard of Burying a Sensitive Intercept in Which Foreign Nationals Were Discussing a Person Close to the Trump Administration

Does the director of national intelligence exist to ensure that our government is informed about foreign threats—or to cover up for the president and his associates? That question is raised by allegations that Tulsi Gabbard buried a whistleblower’s complaint that her office was hiding intelligence about someone connected with Donald Trump.

The Wall Street Journal initially broke the story, but The New York Times has an update with more information:

Members of Congress were briefed this week on a whistle-blower report about an intelligence intercept of a call between two foreign nationals discussing a person close to President Trump, according to people familiar with the material.

It is not clear what country the two foreign nationals were from, but the discussion involved Iran. The whistle-blower report was drafted last May, around the time the Trump administration was deliberating about a strike on Iran. Mr. Trump ordered a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.

The identity of the person close to Mr. Trump could not be immediately determined, nor could the content of what the two foreign nationals were saying about the person. …

The whistle-blower accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of limiting who could see the report and of blocking wider distribution among the nation’s spy agencies, according to people familiar with the complaint. …

While inspectors general are required to notify Congress only about complaints they find credible, some of the administration critics said Ms. Gabbard erred in not alerting the congressional intelligence committees or members of congressional leadership about the whistle-blower report or the underlying intelligence soon after it was lodged.

Congressional officials learned about the complaint, but not its contents, when Andrew Bakaj, a lawyer for the whistle-blower, sent a letter to the intelligence committees in November.

This is all somewhat mysterious, considering that it involved secret information that has been hidden from review by independent sources. And perhaps the underlying intelligence will amount to nothing. But who could be reliable judges of this? Members of Congress and particularly members of the opposition party.

Yet a running theme of this administration has been a repeated refusal to share vital information with Congress, precisely to prevent this kind of oversight from an independent branch of government.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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