A whistleblower who accused spy chief Tulsi Gabbard of wrongdoing is ready to speak with lawmakers about the top-secret complaint that got locked away in a safe.
Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization that protects whistleblowers, said its client was willing to speak with top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees about the complaint against the 44-year-old director of national intelligence.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that a U.S. intelligence official had filed a complaint against Gabbard last May containing information so sensitive that it was tucked away in a safe and triggered a firestorm about how to share it safely with Congress. The Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General determined that the specific allegations against Gabbard were not credible, but could not reach a conclusion regarding the others.
“Our whistleblower client is willing to speak — with appropriate protections —to the Gang of Eight and their cleared staff to provide additional details about the complaint, address questions about credibility and concerns over politicization, and answer questions that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and DNI Tulsi Gabbard have refused to address,” Whistleblower Aid wrote in an X post on Thursday. “We all want the truth.”
The Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of the top lawmakers in Congress and on the House and Senate intelligence committees, finally got access to the complaint on Tuesday, eight months after it was filed.
Christopher Fox, the Intelligence Community Inspector General, outlined the complaint in a letter to the intelligence committees. The complaint alleged that the distribution of a highly classified intelligence report was “restricted for political purposes” and that a lawyer for an intelligence agency failed to report a crime to the Justice Department.
Gabbard’s office dismissed the complaint as “baseless and politically motivated.” The Republican lawmakers who viewed the complaint took their cue from the spy chief appointed by President Donald Trump.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, wrote in an X post on Thursday that “the complaint is not credible.”
“To be frank, it seems like just another effort by the president’s critics in and out of government to undermine policies that they don’t like; it’s definitely not credible allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse,” he said.
But Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, pointed out in a Thursday interview with MS NOW’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki that Gabbard failed to report the complaint to Congress in due time.
“The whistleblower brought the complaint in May. By law, Gabbard is supposed to turn this over to Congress within 21 days,” he said. “We didn’t even know the whistleblower was out there until November.”
An official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told the New York Post that Gabbard was not informed for months after the complaint was filed that she needed to issue security guidance, adding that she did so immediately after learning about the requirement.
“Ignorance of the law is not a defense if you’re in charge, so this is a mess on steroids,” Warner countered.
Gabbard’s press secretary, Olivia Coleman, remained defiant in a post on X.
“Director Gabbard has always and will continue to support Whistleblower’s [sic] and their right, under the law, to submit complaints to Congress, even if they are completely baseless like this one,” she wrote.
