DNI Gabbard Says CIA ‘Swamp’ Is Worse Than She Thought
National Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently expressed her shock at what she described as increasingly questionable operations within the CIA.
During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Gabbard was questioned 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,” said Gabbard, a former Democratic representative from Hawaii and an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.
“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 continued.
She went on to highlight a particular issue, stating, “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.”
A 2024 report from the House Judiciary Committee revealed that Border Patrol encountered 250 migrants on the terrorist watchlist, with the Department of Homeland Security subsequently releasing 99 of them into the United States.
Reiterating her concern, Gabbard emphasized, “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.”
In February, reports surfaced that Gabbard had begun cracking down on intelligence community personnel believed to have engaged in inappropriate discussions within an internal agency messaging board.
She issued a firm warning to any employees found to have participated in explicit chatrooms on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “Intelink” messaging platform, stating that they would lose their security clearances and be dismissed. She also indicated that further consequences could be on the table pending deeper investigation into the matter.
“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 stated on “Jesse Watters Primetime.” She noted that the president had “told her” to uncover corruption and misconduct within the intelligence community.
Research conducted by the conservative Manhattan Institute, reportedly based on sources within the NSA, uncovered chat logs from the agency’s “Intelink” platform. These logs revealed employees from various intelligence organizations discussing personal topics such as hormone therapy, polyamory, pronoun preferences, and gender transition surgeries.
Personnel from agencies including the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Naval Intelligence, and the National Security Agency were among those alleged to have misused the platform for sexually inappropriate discussions.
Following the release of these chat logs, an NSA spokesperson informed Fox News Digital that the agency was “actively investigating” potential misuse of its internal messaging system.
“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 remarked.
“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 concluded.