Opinion | The President’s Personal Spy Chief

It’s time to talk about Tulsi Gabbard. President Trump, forever a reality TV star — “You’re fired. Get out of here.” — has assembled quite the cast of characters in his second term. One of them, Tulsi Gabbard, is the director of national intelligence. Gabbard is eroding the credibility of our intelligence agencies in real time. Last week, Gabbard made an unusual appearance in Georgia, joining F.B.I. agents as they searched an election center that President Trump criticized after his defeat in the 2020 election. “We all know that President Trump is obsessed about the fact that he lost Georgia and he lost the 2020 election.” The next day, Gabbard called the president — “It was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that they found out. People will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” — and got him on speakerphone to talk directly with the agents who conducted the search — “That is not the way our system works.” potentially compromising the independence of the whole investigation. “It’s injecting politics into an already very political situation.” We also found out that investigating the 2020 election has been a big part of Gabbard’s portfolio. Just what America needs our director of national intelligence to be focused on. “She’s working very hard and trying to keep the election safe.” This week it got a lot more concerning when The Wall Street Journal reported that a whistleblower filed a complaint against Gabbard last May. “Our client requested to have this transmitted to Capitol Hill. That is the law. That is what Tulsi Gabbard should have done.” We’re just hearing about it now, eight months later. That’s not normal. “The underlying complaint is about the D.N.I.’s actions.” And according to the whistleblower, it’s because Gabbard tried to bury the complaint. But this week, it finally went to Congress. On Wednesday, the complaint was shown to the eight leaders in Congress who are briefed on the most sensitive intelligence information. “It took six months of bipartisan pressure.” Gabbard’s team has said the whistleblower’s complaint is baseless, but even if it is, the fact that she may have suppressed it is unheard of. Separately, Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the C.I.A. director noting that he has deep concerns about C.I.A. activities. Now, one could be referring to the whistleblower complaint or Gabbard’s investigations into elections in the United States and Puerto Rico — “What in the hell is D.N.I. doing investigating Puerto Rican voting machines? — or the fact that last year, Gabbard fired a top lawyer in the office of the inspector general and installed one of her own advisers, which senior Democrats said violated the law. The point is, there are an alarming number of ways that Gabbard and her colleagues across the Trump administration are chipping away at the independence of agencies that deal with sensitive, high-stakes information. And that is incredibly dangerous for our democracy and for our national security.