Trump’s spy chief Tulsi Gabbard is in the hot seat

Since the job was created in 2005, the director of national intelligence has typically been a low-profile role, more focused on working behind the scenes to coordinate information-sharing among the country’s 18 intelligence agencies.

But President Donald Trump’s current director is anything but low-profile.

An Army reservist who served in Iraq, Tulsi Gabbard was the first practicing Hindu in Congress, a 2020 candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination and a onetime Bernie Sanders backer before she became a Republican and joined Trump’s Cabinet. 

That high profile may prove to be a liability, however, as Gabbard is now facing intense scrutiny from Congress over two recent controversies.

First, she accompanied FBI agents in late January as they executed a search warrant at a Fulton County election center, seizing ballots and other materials from the 2020 election. She later acknowledged in a letter to Congress that she “facilitated” a brief phone call between Trump and the FBI agents, adding the president requested that she attend. Trump offered a conflicting account: saying Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that the director go to Fulton County.

Then, in early February, allegations surfaced that she had mishandled a whistleblower complaint about a National Security Agency intercept of communication between two foreign citizens discussing a person close to the president. 

MS NOW first reported that members of Congress will pepper Gabbard with questions on March 18, when she’ll sit before the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee. The hearing is normally a standard annual discussion on threats to U.S. national security.

Her presence at the Fulton County raid prompted lawmakers to ask why the director of national intelligence would be present for a domestic criminal investigation, especially after Trump had spent years making false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. 

“What in the heck is Tulsi Gabbard doing?” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, told reporters last month. “If there’s any evidence of foreign interference, she’s clearly broken her obligations as director of DNI to tell the intelligence community, because we’ve heard none of this.”

Warner has been in another public spat with Gabbard and her team, which has accused him of leaking details about the whistleblower complaint to the press without evidence.

The lawyer representing the whistleblower also questioned Gabbard’s handling of the issue. 

Andrew Bakaj told MS NOW on Monday night that he stood by his statement that Gabbard restricted the distribution of the whistleblower’s complaint across the intelligence community and to congressional oversight committees. He noted that Gabbard shared access to the report with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

The copy received by Congress is heavily redacted, according to Warner, who says he’s not yet confident about the intelligence behind it. It’s unclear how credible the report is or whether it merits concern. Still, he argues that Gabbard did not fulfill her obligations to make the report known to lawmakers for as many as eight months, an allegation she denies. 

In a lengthy statement over the weekend, Gabbard said she saw the complaint for the first time two weeks ago, to offer guidance on “how it should be securely shared with Congress,” and called the allegations against her a “blatant lie.” The White House did not comment on whether the president was aware of the complaint and believed the director acted properly in reporting to Congress.

“There’s really no excuse that it took so many months,” former CIA Director John Brennan told MS NOW. “It should have and could have been done much more quickly.”

Despite a fast rise to a prominent role in Trump’s cabinet, reports suggest that Gabbard is in the outer circle of Trump’s most trusted aides on some of his biggest foreign policy moves. Democrats have criticized her focus on U.S. election security as an effort to curry favor with the president despite a director’s legal obligation to focus on outward-facing threats from abroad.

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