According to the Journal, an intelligence community whistleblower filed a highly-classified complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG), an independent watchdog office, in May 2025. Among the allegations was a claim that Gabbard’s office blocked the proper distribution of the complaint for eight months — including to Congress — for political reasons. Another alleged that lawyers, presumably from the DNI’s Office of General Counsel, failed to refer a potential crime to the Justice Department for political reasons.

We don’t know the substance of the intelligence report underlying the whistleblower complaint, but the government claims it is “exquisitely” classified, which raises an immediate problem: That’s not a real classification level. The report apparently involves an intelligence service intercepting a conversation between two foreign nationals about Iran and Jared Kushner’s influence on his father-in-law, the president. At the time, the Trump administration was considering a strike on Iran, which in fact occurred at the end of June 2025.