Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is onto something. And the right people are terrified.
As my colleague Bob Hoge reported, after Gabbard appeared on the scene at the operation to secure the multi-year crime scene that is the Fulton County, Georgia, Election Hub and Operation Center (see FBI Raids Fulton County Election Hub Days After Trump Vows Prosecutions for 2020 Election - Here We Go and 700 Boxes of Ballots Seized After FBI Executes Fulton County Warrant, Dems Try to Develop ‘Legal Plan’), she was the subject of thinly sourced, scurrilous "leak" to The Wall Street Journal that seemed to have the sole purpose as sidelining her with a faux scandal; see Tulsi Gabbard Comes Out Full Throttle Against 'False and Slanderous Accusations' From Dems and Media.
To recap, the Wall Street Journal ran an "exclusive" on Monday that seemed to claim Gabbard had done something. However, a fair reading of the article doesn't make it very clear what she did or didn't do.
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.
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.
Thirteen, that is 13, paragraphs into the article, we find this gem.
Gabbard answered written questions about the allegations from the inspector general’s office, a senior official at the spy agency said. That prompted the acting inspector general at the time, Tamara Johnson, to determine the allegations specifically about Gabbard weren’t credible [my italics—streiff], the official said. Johnson remains employed at the agency, which didn’t make her available for an interview.
As it turned out, there was no delay in producing the "security guidance" from DNI Gabbard on how to handle the report. The whistleblower's complaint is with the Congressional Intelligence Committees for review, and Gabbard produced the receipts.
As that "scandal" was getting a helping push from the media, the "Why was she even there?" narrative was launched by The Washington Post.
There are “only two explanations” for why Gabbard was in Fulton County on Wednesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Virginia) said at the hearing.
One is that she believes there’s a “legitimate foreign intelligence nexus,” he said, in which case Gabbard “violated her legal obligation to keep the intelligence committees fully and currently informed,” or she is attempting to insert the intelligence community into what Warner called “a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.’’
The New York Times went for the capillaries with a story that President Trump had congratulated the agents who had participated in the Fulton County operation.
By any measure, the F.B.I.’s search of an election center in Fulton County, Ga., last week was extraordinary. Agents seized truckloads of 2020 ballots, as President Trump harnessed the levers of government to not only buttress his false claims of widespread voter fraud, but also to try to build a criminal case against those he believes wronged him.
What happened the next day was in some ways even more unusual, The New York Times has learned.
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.
What occurred during the meeting was even further outside the bounds of normal law enforcement procedure. Ms. Gabbard used her cellphone to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up but called back shortly after, the people said.
The coordinated campaign across the nation's three most prestigious print outlets to discredit DNI Gabbard and her investigation into what is increasingly looking like a totally fraudulent 2020 election is eerily similar to how the Deep State worked to sandbag President Trump during his first term.
On August 12, 2019, an anonymous intelligence community whistleblower, now known to be Eric Ciaramella (see Whistleblower's Attorneys Make a Desperate and Pathetic Attempt to Silence the Free Press and a Free People), filed a formal complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson. The complaint alleged that Trump abused his office by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 U.S. election. The foreign interference, of course, was President Trump allegedly asking Ukrainian President Zelensky for information on the Biden administration's and Hunter Biden's dealings with Ukraine and its energy company, Burisma.
By mid-September 2019, media reports, particularly in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, based on anonymous sources, began to emerge, revealing the outlines of the whistleblower complaint and details that Trump pressured Zelensky during the July call to investigate the Bidens.
Keep in mind that all of this was done in a "hall of mirrors," so to speak, where rumors and leaks and interpretations of those rumors and leaks became the cause for the nothingburger that was Trump's impeachment trial. That said, the impeachment served the purpose of freezing U. S. diplomacy and hamstringing President Trump for a crucial period of time as the demented Joe Biden was prepped to be the Democrat nominee for president.
While none of the hits on Gabbard, up until this point, are enough to force her resignation, I do think The New York Times gives us some insight into the long game the Deep State is pursuing. First, there is evidence out there, lurking in the backrooms of Fulton County, GA, and some other jurisdictions where large numbers of Biden ballots mysteriously appeared after the polls closed. The problem is how to prevent them from ever being subjected to public scrutiny.
By speaking directly with the investigators, Mr. Trump may have provided significant ammunition to any future defense should the investigation yield criminal charges.
His conversation with the agents would probably become part of an effort to have the case dismissed as a vindictive prosecution. Alternatively, if such a case went to trial, defense lawyers would presumably try to elicit testimony from the F.B.I. agents who spoke to the president in the early stages of the investigation, or possibly from Mr. Trump himself.
The search itself raises serious questions. It is unclear what evidence was presented to a federal magistrate judge to establish probable cause for a search warrant for the ballots and other materials, which are now more than five years old.
But multiple prior investigations — including one at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term by the same F.B.I. office and federal prosecutors working at the time for the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta — found no evidence to support his false claims of significant voter fraud.
The very fact that someone is pulling out all the stops to discredit the investigation into election integrity in 2020, and presumably since, is a sign that something very criminal and dangerous happened. It is also a sign that those behind that election, even if they aren't trying to pull the same trick again in 2026 and beyond, are terrified of what would happen if their machinations came to light.
If our elections are corrupt, that calls into question every action of the government and breaks the bond between "We the People" and the Founders that was created in 1787. It is not difficult to believe that hostile foreign actors are involved, as well as our own self-hating elites. The fact that Gabbard was on the ground for the FBI, serving a search warrant, points to a significant intelligence problem alongside the raw criminality. The reaction indicates there is more of this to come.
