National Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said during an interview earlier this week that she was stunned by how shady some operations within the CIA have become.
In an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, she was asked about the “swampy” nature of the intelligence community.
“I knew it was bad coming in. It’s worse than I thought in a lot of different ways,” Gabbard, a former Democratic lawmaker from Hawaii and current U.S. Army Reserve officer, began.
“I’d love to come back and talk to you as we pull back the layers of getting rid of the weaponization within the intelligence community, the politicization and those who are frankly trying to shape intelligence according to their own view or their own agenda. Rather than just providing our policymakers and the president with that unbiased, accurate, timely intelligence that they need to make their decisions,” she said.
“This example that we just talked about, where the Biden administration released these known or suspected terrorists or those with links to ISIS terrorists back into our country, you look at the dereliction of duty of that. But you also recognize this is one form of that politicization, where the Biden administration was so afraid of being labeled Islamophobes, they took this pro-Islamist bent in endangering our own national security that we see in that example,” she added.
The House Judiciary Committee released a report in 2024 that showed the Biden administration’s Border Patrol encountered 250 migrants who were on the terrorist watchlist and the Department of Homeland Security released 99 of them into the United States.
“This example that we just talked about, where the Biden administration released these known or suspected terrorists or those with links to ISIS terrorists back into our country, you look at the dereliction of duty of that. But you also recognize this is one form of that politicization, where the Biden administration was so afraid of being labeled Islamophobes, they took this pro-Islamist bent in endangering our own national security that we see in that example,” Gabbard added.
In February, it was reported that Gabbard was going after federal workers in the intelligence community who were thought to have been involved in inappropriate conversations on an internal agency messaging board.
Gabbard told all employees who participated in obscene and explicit chatrooms on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “Intelink” messaging platform that they would be fired and have their security clearances taken away. She also vowed that more serious actions may be taken once they take a closer look at what was going on behind the scenes.
“There are over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in… what is really just an egregious violation of trust. What to speak of, like basic rules and standards around professionalism,” Gabbard said on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” in discussing the shocking discovery, saying the president had “told her” to get to the bottom of corruption and abuse within the community.
Chat logs from the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “Intelink” messaging platform were reportedly obtained by researchers from the conservative Manhattan Institute through sources within the NSA. The logs showed employees from different intelligence agencies talking about their experiences with hormone therapy, polyamory, pronoun usage, and surgery to change their gender.
The Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Naval Intelligence, and the National Security Agency are said to be some of these agencies whose staffers were using the internal communication board for sexually inappropriate messaging.
When the Intelink chat logs were revealed last month, an NSA spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the agency was “actively investigating” possible abuses of the messaging platform it runs.
“We got to take a step back because this is just barely scratching the surface,” Gabbard told Watters
“When you see what these people were saying,… they were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior,” she said.
“And they were brazen in doing this because when was the last time anyone was really held accountable? Certainly not over the last four years, certainly not over the last 10, maybe 20 years, and we look at some of the biggest violations of the American people’s trust in the intelligence community,” Gabbard added.