What’s Tulsi Gabbard’s big, bad secret? Our current Director of National Intelligence-meets-birthday party Cruella De Vil is the subject of a whistleblower complaint reportedly so explosive that the file itself requires Mission: Impossible-like security. Even teasing its nature would provoke such “grave damage,” in the words of Gabbard’s own office, that it’s probably better for all parties concerned to just pretend it doesn’t exist at all, right?
Well… no.
What charge could possibly be so damning in an administration whose leader has already been credibly accused of any number of high crimes and dank depravities? It can’t be that she works for the Russians because (1) we already suspected that and (2) half the administration (allegedly) works for the Russians, including the aforementioned President.
Well, maybe it can—let’s circle back to that.
Did she accept a $50,000 bribe in a Cava bag like “border czar” Tom Homan? Or perhaps she cc’d a reporter on a Signal chat about top-secret war plans, like Pete Hegseth. Did she decapitate a whale? Lie under oath? Starve hundreds of thousands of people by cutting off foreign aid to their countries? Throw out a couple Nazi salutes at the Republican National Convention a la Elon Musk? No. These sorts of activities are all de rigeur for the MAGA movement.
Oh God, she didn’t donate to the ACLU, did she?
In an administration staffed by white supremacists, crooks, sexual abusers and J.D. Vance, it’s hard to imagine any scandal Gabbard might be involved in that’s worse than the ones they’ve already survived. But here we all are.
Gabbard, you may recall, was raised in a religious cult called The Science of Identity Foundation founded by Chris Butler, a former Hare Krishna devotee. Butler’s followers are taught to revere him, with some former disciples even claiming that they were encouraged to eat his clipped toenails. Is the scandal related to Butler? Is it related to eating toenails?
We do have some information about the nature of the complaint, which was first filed in May of 2025 and has two parts. The first, according to Inspector General of the Intelligence Community Christopher R. Fox, concerns the distribution of a “highly classified intelligence report [which] was restricted for political purposes.” The second claims that the IG’s office “failed to report a potential crime to the Department of Justice, also for political purposes.”
So what was the “crime” they failed to report? We don’t yet know, although the Gang of Eight—the most highly-placed congressional leaders from both parties—was finally allowed to begin examining the evidence a couple days ago. (The only who has since commented is Democrat Jim Himes, who said he has “ongoing concerns about both the contents and the delay in it being reported to Congress.”)
Fox, who authored a February 2 unclassified report on the matter, believes the complaint does not rise to the five-alarm fire level his predecessors found it to be.
Confusingly, though, he writes in the same document that, “Of all ‘urgent concerns’ handled by the IC OIG since the establishment of this Office, only one previous case from 2020 included information so sensitive it had to be hand-carried to Congress. In the present case, the intelligence report from which the complaint was derived is the most sensitive-to-date received by IC OIG as an ‘urgent concern’ complaint.”
Now, when I read the words “most sensitive-to-date” intelligence report along with the word “crime,” it’s a concern. In this specific instance, it leads to my brain jumping to the hopefully paranoid conclusion that our DNI is maybe, just maybe, passing along some secrets to her alleged friends in the Kremlin.
Gabbard’s rumored association with (and affinity for) the Russians dates back to at least 2017, when she visited Putin’s ally, Syria, during that country’s civil war, meeting with Bashar Al-Assad and questioning the Western narrative that he had gassed his own people. Following that meeting, Gabbard continued to dig in her heels regarding Syria and Russia. In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, she tweeted, “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.”
Got that? Gabbard’s take on Putin’s invasion of his neighbor boils down to, “Look what President Biden made Russia do.”
Appallingly, days into the conflict, she released a bizarre video asking Putin, Biden, Zelensky, and the people of Ukraine to “embrace the spirit of aloha, respect, and love.” The video appears to have been exactly as effective as Gal Gadot’s celebrity-filled Imagine video in curing Covid-19.
During Gabbard’s DNI confirmation hearing, almost 100 intelligence officials—including a former NATO Deputy Secretary General and former Deputy Secretary of State—signed a letter questioning her qualifications and experience. They wrote, among other concerns, “Her sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Assad raises questions about her judgment and fitness.”
Yeah, you think?
I’ll be honest—I don’t understand Gabbard’s whole deal. Is she deluded? Power hungry? Traitorous? Why did this toenail-eating island child of namaste and former Bernie Bro eventually cast her lot with a cabal of sociopaths? Why did she come to trust Putin’s aims more than those of Obama and Biden? What does she want? And what is she willing to do to get it?
We may never know. But given that she’s also leading the charge for Trump’s efforts to compromise electoral integrity, we certainly need to.
The post Opinion: What’s Tulsi Gabbard’s Big Bad Secret? appeared first on The Daily Beast.
