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Tulsi Gabbard's conflict of interest — and hypocrisy (www.salon.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/politics@lemmy.world
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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.

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The director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, has mismanaged a whistleblower complaint involving Jared Kushner and Iran (www.salon.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/politics@sh.itjust.works
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I’m surprised that no one has pointed out that since she and her general counsel were subjects of the complaint, Gabbard and her office have a clear conflict of interest in making any determination. This made it clearly inappropriate for them to have played a substantive or even a procedural role in its handling. This is spelled out under a number of different authorities, including executive branch ethics regulations, which cover the DNI, and intelligence community constraints.

It’s baffling, to say the least, that Gabbard did not recuse herself from this matter.

We don’t know why Gabbard continues to aggressively obstruct this whistleblower complaint. It sounds like she’s more concerned with protecting Jared Kushner, and perhaps Trump himself, than the public she’s supposed to serve. But we do know this: The ICWPA system for intelligence community whistleblowers depends on the knowledge, trust, credibility and good faith of the director of national intelligence. It’s a fatal flaw to make that person an intermediary, much less a gatekeeper, on a whistleblower’s path to congressional oversight.