Finding the most terrible, noxious, execrable official in the Donald Trump White House is a difficult challenge. Is it the guy who took a $50,000 bribe. from FBI agents, or the one who is systematically destroying public health? What about the woman who can always find a justification for murder, whether it's puppies or people? Or maybe ... Okay, it's Stephen Miller. We all know it's Stephen Miller.
But when it comes to sheer insane-in-the-membrane loopiness, there's one Trump cabinet member who can beat even the guy with the brainworm. Or the worm. Because America's Director of National Intelligence (and it still seems incredible to say this even after a year) is Tulsi Gabbard.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard has done something so irretrievably bad that, even compared to the other outrages of this administration, it seems … really bad.
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.
What is the whistleblower alleging? We don't know. However, we do know that it supposedly:
- Represents a "grave threat to national security"
- Implicates at least one other department in the administration
- Involves claims of executive privilege
Considering Gabbard's personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, her willingness to spread Kremlin propaganda, and her dismissal of Russia experts at the CIA, it's not hard to guess that this might have something to do with Moscow. But we shouldn't have to guess. It's been eight months since this intelligence official came forward with serious allegations of wrongdoing.
Eight months. And still, no one in Congress has been briefed, and no hearings have been held. That seems like a very long time to sit on something that represents a "grave threat" to the nation.
Who is responsible for this intolerable delay? That's also Gabbard. Rather than send the allegations onward, as the whistleblower law requires, she's taken a somewhat different action. That includes unilaterally deciding that no one in Congress has the necessary security to look at what's in this report, and taking another action that's even less subtle.
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.
Emphasis added. Emphatically.
Aides to Gabbard are complaining about the WSJ article, saying that the whistleblower was "politically motivated" and had "weaponized their position" at the agency. Which sounds like exactly the sort of thing that Congress is supposed to evaluate when a whistleblower report is delivered. As required. By the law. Also, since the purpose of the Whistleblower Protection Act is to protect those who want to bring a serious matter to the attention of Congress without being persecuted for speaking up, it seems more than a little off for Gabbard's aides to be attacking the whistleblower before anyone has even seen the information.
However, this isn't the only WTF Tulsi Gabbard? issue in the news this week. There's also Gabbard's appearance at the FBI seizure of ballots in Fulton County, Georgia.
Trump on Thursday night praised Gabbard for “working very hard to try to keep the election safe” when asked by CNN why she was present during the search. “You’ll see some interesting things happening,” Trump said. “They’ve been trying to get there for a long time.”
If there's anyone Trump can count on to spin fantasies about problems with ballots that have already been examined repeatedly, it's Gabbard. In addition to being "historically unfit" to serve as DNI, she made her MAGA bones popping into Fox News to shore up the wildest claims about the 2020 election. In fact, Gabbard was there in 2016, making some of the same claims then that she would repeat in the following cycle.
Her involvement as Director of National Security in an election issue may be unprecedented, but as far as Trump is concerned, the most pressing issue in national security is bolstering his debunked claims about a vote that took place six years ago. And that's exactly what he's getting from Gabbard.
Gabbard has been “less visible” than colleagues on big foreign policy issues like Venezuela and Iran, said Jeet Heer at The Nation. But she has “made herself useful” to Trump as the administration’s “driving force” to vindicate his 2020 conspiracy theories.
Gabbard isn't performing the usual role of a DNI in terms of evaluating intelligence and coordinating a response to threats. Instead, she's leading Trump's efforts to exhume every false claim he's made over the last six years and create a unified narrative of election vulnerability.
She's the chief fabulist to the fabulist in chief; the Sheherazad of his thousands of ways to lie about an election. And he can't afford to lose her.
[Sen. Mark] Warner issued a written statement about this, explaining, “There are only two explanations for why the Director of National Intelligence would show up at a federal raid tied to Donald Trump’s obsession with losing the 2020 election. Either Director Gabbard believes there was a legitimate foreign intelligence nexus — in which case she is in clear violation of her obligation under the law to keep the intelligence committees ‘fully and currently informed’ of relevant national security concerns — or she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”
It's fine to declare that "Trump can't stop the elections!" Because he can't.
But no one should be taking a deep cleansing breath, relaxing, and assuming that everything is going to be peachy when it comes to the midterms. Trump knows he's going to lose this election. No, he may not be on the ballot, but Republicans across the country are going to suffer a big hit because of his highly unpopular actions.
That's why he's waged war on the upcoming election from the moment he stepped back into the White House. He's pushed Republicans to redistrict, tried to extort states into turning over election data, pressed efforts to end mail-in ballots, and turned the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division into a tool for helping red states remove Democratic voters.
Nothing makes Trump's intent to keep up this war more obvious than the offer to reduce ICE's presence in Minnesota in exchange for voter information that belongs to the state. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted:
On Saturday, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz linking the violence in Minneapolis to a demand that the state give the Justice Department complete access to the state’s sensitive voter rolls, among other things. There’s no explicit quid pro quo offered — but anyone familiar with Grade B gangster movies won’t miss the implication.
Why hasn't the whistleblower report on Gabbard made it out of that safe? It's not because it's impossible to share the information it contains with Congress. It's because Trump needs Gabbard. She's heading the effort to weave the conspiracy theory he needs to do maximum damage to the voting process.
Can he stop the elections? No. Can he make things difficult? Absolutely.
The president has virtually no authority when it comes to voting. … But Trump is testing that, and those in his circle have pushed fringe theories for how he can change how ballots are cast and counted. …
Trump ally and attorney Cleta Mitchell, who advised Trump in 2020, broached a bolder strategy to enact election changes: declaring a national emergency.
“The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States — as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have,” Mitchell said on a podcast appearance in September.
Trump has already used the essentially unchecked power to declare national emergencies to empower ICE and defend his illegal tariffs. He's declared a national energy emergency so he can attack renewables, multiple drug emergencies to support bombing fishermen, and half a dozen more. He declared three national emergencies on one day. He declared a national emergency because he didn't like the outcome of the election in Brazil.
Why all the emergencies? Because it gives Trump access to "a dizzying array of powers."
Many are measured and sensible, but others seem like the stuff of authoritarian regimes: giving the president the power to take over domestic communications, seize Americans’ bank accounts, and deploy U.S. troops to any foreign country.
Trump may not be able to stop the elections, but he can declare a national emergency and station masked stormtroopers outside critical polling stations. He can make every effort to undermine the nation's faith in the election, to make voting seem both pointless and dangerous, and declare that the system of state-run elections is corrupt.
Uncovering "evidence" to support his false claims about the 2020 election, backed by Gabbard and trumpeted by congressional clowns like the ever-willing Rep. James Comer, would provide an excellent smokescreen for Trump's next attempted coup.
Which is why that safe containing the whistleblower's warning isn't likely to open any time soon.
The New York Times is reporting that Gabbard met with FBI agents again following the raid on the election office.
Behind closed doors, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, met with some of the same F.B.I. agents, members of the bureau’s field office in Atlanta, which is conducting the election inquiry, three people with knowledge of the meeting said. They could not say why Ms. Gabbard, who also appeared on site at the search, was there, but her continued presence has raised eyebrows given that her role overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies does not include on-site involvement in criminal investigative work.
Gabbard then called Trump from the meeting, and he also talked directly with FBI agents. The Times reports that Trump personally sent Gabbard to Atlanta to watch as agents conducted the search.
All of this is counter to claims by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who told reporters over the weekend that Trump had no involvement in the search.
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