What’s Tulsi Hiding And Who Is She Protecting?

She delayed, then heavily redacted, a whistleblower complaint that alleged she had blocked normal distribution of an explosive intelligence report.

Image courtesy of NPR

Tulsi Gabbard is back in the news.

First, it was her highly unusual and frankly suspect presence, when the FBI executed a search warrant in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing millions of paper ballots from the 2020 election along with voter roll data. The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is supposed to handle foreign intelligence threats, not domestic election fraud claims. Add to this the fact that the White House has provided multiple conflicting explanations for why she was there at all, and the questions keep mounting.

Then last week the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had sat on a bombshell intelligence whistleblower complaint for eight months, failing to refer it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law.

Why the delay and why the secrecy? Per the Journal,

A cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel is swirling around the complaint, which is said to be locked in a safe. Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official said. It also implicates another federal agency beyond Gabbard’s, and raises potential claims of executive privilege that may involve the White House, officials said.

Reporting by The Guardian sheds further important light on what the complaint may be about. I’ll get to that in a bit. But first, let’s review how hard Tulsi has tried to keep this information from coming to light. Collectively, these are not the actions of someone who has nothing to hide, casting doubt on whatever the official narrative next will warp into.

Burying the whistleblower complaint

The Wall Street Journal has been breaking many stories about how the Trump White House has tried to bury investigations and reports, including famously on the Epstein files. Here’s what it had to say about a whistleblower complaint within the intelligence services:

A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.

The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.

A couple points here.

That there is a whistleblower complaint at all within the intelligence community should raise alarm bells. The amount of personal risk an official within intelligence agencies would need to take, all to raise a warning about the Director herself, should not be discounted.

Further, as the Journal noted, this has been sitting on Gabbard’s desk since last June, moving exactly nowhere until the Journal’s reporting came out.

Gabbard responded to charges that she intentionally dragged out the congressional notification process. The organization Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal organization that helps public and private sector workers report and expose wrongdoing, responded forcefully to her three main contentions.

It disputed her timeline of when she first saw the complaint, citing a letter from the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG):

Director Gabbard: The first time I saw the whistleblower complaint was 2 weeks ago when I had to review it to provide guidance on how it should be securely shared with Congress.

FACT: ICIG letter says you were provided the full submission after the “determination” was made in June 2025.

Indeed, the ICIG letter to the whistleblower from last June stated clearly that “given the nature of the allegations, ICIG exercised its authority . . . to keep the DNI fully and completely informed, and accordingly provided the DNI a copy of your complete submission….” (Emphasis added.) So either the ICIG lied, or Gabbard lied.

Gabbard attempted to portray the complaint as “not credible” based on a determination by the ICIG that did not necessarily so conclude:

Director Gabbard: June 2025, I became aware that a whistleblower made a complaint against me that after further investigation, neither Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson nor current IC Inspector General Chris Fox found the complaint to be credible.

FACT: Ms. Johnson did not determine that the complaint was not credible. The ICIG was simply unable to make a determination in the 14-day window.

The ICIG letter states, “the Inspector General could not determine if the allegations ‘appear credible.’” That is not the same as an affirmative conclusion that they were not credible.

And it took strong issue with the reason Gabbard gave for the long delay. She claims she was only made aware that she had to provide “security guidance” to Congress in December—to which Whistleblower Aid responded with what amounts to a “WTF, do you even understand your job?!”:

Director Gabbard: I was made aware of the need to provide security guidance by IC Inspector General Chris Fox on December 4, 2025, which he detailed in his letter to Congress.

FACT: You’re the DNI. What was going on in your office between June 5 and December 4 that you weren’t made aware of the request? Did you look into why for six months the ICIG neglected to relay the request for guidance?

This sort of delay is without known precedent, according to intelligence experts consulted by the Wall Street Journal. The law states that the ICIG is required to assess whether a complaint is credible within two weeks of receiving it, and then share it with congressional lawmakers within another week if it determines it is credible.

Even if it determines it is not credible, a whistleblower may still share the complaint directly with congressional intelligence committees. But here’s the catch: the DNI has to provide instructions on how to securely transmit it. The problem is, there is no legal requirement or timeline for doing so, but typically that process occurs within weeks. Here it took seven months. Why?

There may be fire behind the smoke

While the Wall Street Journal wasn’t able to obtain or view the complaint or find out why Gabbard had stonewalled for so long, The Guardian provided some answers on Saturday. It reported that the NSA had detected a phone call between two foreign intelligence agencies (which means, spies) who had a conversation about a person close to Trump.

The “person close to Trump” is not an administration official nor a special government employee, according to a person familiar with the matter.

While the individual’s identity remains undisclosed to the public, the report on the detected communication was brought to Gabbard’s attention. And it was apparently sensitive enough that she gave the whole thing special handling.

Here’s where things get super shady. Rather than allow the NSA to distribute that report, Gabbard took a copy of it directly to Susie Wiles, the White House Chief of Staff. They held a meeting, and the next day, Gabbard told the NSA not to publish the report. Instead, she asked it to transmit classified details about it directly to her.

That’s what led to the whistleblower complaint Gabbard has since tried to bury. She claims that she followed all the correct procedures and did not attempt to block the complaint from a routine dispatch or keep the complaint from reaching Congress. But somehow it still took seven months and reporting about her delay to break the impasse.

Gabbard also claims that the ICIG’s office had concluded that the complaint’s allegations about Gabbard were without merit. As discussed above, the ICIG letter doesn’t actually say that. But it’s also important to note that there was a critical change of leadership at the ICIG’s office back in May. Per The Guardian,

The independence of the watchdog’s office may be compromised, lawmakers have said, ever since Gabbard assigned one of her top advisers, Dennis Kirk, to work there on 9 May, two weeks after the whistleblower first made contact with the inspector general’s hotline.

She put in her guy, and then the complaint got buried. Funny how that works.

Congressional Republicans join the stonewalling

When the complaint finally reached congressional lawmakers last week, the GOP moved quickly to stop any forward progress on it. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who is known for batting for Trump wherever he can, was outright dismissive. He said, “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.” Cotton failed to provide context for why he made this assessment.

The chief legal counsel for Whistleblower Aid, Andrew Bakaj, who is himself a former CIA officer, noted that the complaint was heavily redacted before being provided to the congressional “Gang of Eight” lawmakers who have special clearance to receive and review highly classified intelligence.

“Given the extensive redactions we understand exist, even in the version provided to the Gang of Eight, it seems unlikely anyone could reasonably and in a non-partisan manner reach the conclusions issued by Sen. Cotton,” Bakaj wrote in a statement.

Tulsi lied to get the job, and now she’s running interference

During her confirmation hearings, Tulsi Gabbard pledged under oath to protect whistleblowers and ensure Congress was kept informed. She has failed to do that, instead doing almost all she could to keep the complaint from becoming public knowledge and, after she finally turned it over, redacting it so heavily that it’s basically useless.

For now, the GOP controls both the House and the Senate. But that likely won’t be true after November, with the House likely to flip and the Senate now within reach. Gabbard had better understand that she could lose the protective shielding of a compliant GOP Congress. Democratic lawmakers and their staff are onto her and her attempts at a cover up.

The public has a right to know more about that detected communication and what our own intelligence reported on it. It’s a matter of national security if someone within Trump’s orbit is being discussed by foreign intelligence agents.

Of course, Gabbard has never been truly interested in protecting our national security, just the political security of her own boss, Donald Trump. Now she’s shown how far she will go—including delaying for months and then heavily redacting reports once forced to act—all to keep anything potentially highly damaging to Trump from ever coming out.

And wow, doesn’t that sound familiar?