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What the hell is Tulsi Gabbard’s job anyway?
National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard is very busy these days. Not with
doing her actual job, of course—don’t be silly. Rather, eager to get noticed by
President Donald Trump, Gabbard joined the unprecedented FBI raid of the
election site in Fulton County, Georgia.
Meanwhile, Gabbard hasn’t seemed all that interested in dealing with concerns
about her own agency.
Back in May, a whistleblower filed a complaint with the inspector general
alleging wrongdoing by Gabbard and an office in another federal agency. What
type of wrongdoing? Who can say! What other federal agency? No idea! But the
invocation of some other agency apparently means that the administration can
start burbling about executive privilege, the White House, and so on.
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It’s tough to piece together anything because it’s such top-secret spy versus
spy stuff that no one can talk about the complaint, and it’s literally locked
in a safe.
Indeed, even the whistleblower’s lawyer isn’t allowed to see it. So you just
have to trust the unnamed official who told the Wall Street Journal that
disclosing the complaint could cause “grave damage to national security.”
Now, it isn’t unusual that the public doesn’t yet know the substance of the
complaint, particularly if it does indeed involve national security concerns.
What is unusual, though, is that Congress does not yet know anything about the
complaint either.
Normally, an inspector general has two weeks to assess the credibility of a
complaint and then, if it is deemed credible, an additional week to transmit it
to Congress. But none of that has happened here. Congress only learned about
the complaint in November when the whistleblower’s lawyer wrote a letter to
Gabbard’s office about the unprecedented holdup.
According to a spokesperson for Gabbard, the complaint is, of course,
“baseless and politically motivated.”
And according to a spokesperson for the inspector general, the claims against
Gabbard were not credible, but the inspector general could not make a
determination about the other allegations. One wee issue there is that no one
even bothered to tell the whistleblower’s lawyer that there was any official
determination.
Trump’s wholesale destruction of oversight is what got us here. He fired most
of the inspectors general right when he took office and has since replaced them
with MAGA loyalists. As for the intelligence community, Trump tapped
Christopher Fox, whose previous gig was as a senior adviser to Gabbard. So
neutral!
Let’s cut Tulsi some slack—she’s probably very busy of late, particularly
with all of the administration’s activities abroad, given it is her literal job
to assess foreign intelligence and threats.
Oh, wait. She was completely cut out of the planning to invade Venezuela and
topple Nicolás Maduro because she’d previously expressed opposition to military
action there. She didn’t even get to be in the shoddy little Mar-a-Lago war
room to watch things unfold.
Well, that’s just silly. Gabbard has proven she has no real principles and
wasn’t ever going to mount a serious opposition to this. Instead, she’s been
focused on domestic law enforcement efforts, joining the FBI’s Fulton County
raid. And that’s the problem: By law, Gabbard can’t actually help with any
domestic law enforcement efforts.
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Her job is to track foreign threats, but there’s no allegation that foreign
actors are intending to disrupt elections. If there were, Gabbard would have
needed to inform Congress, which—you will not be surprised—has not happened.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche kind of threw Gabbard under the bus on
this, while also simultaneously justifying Trump’s fixation on Georgia and
so-called election integrity.
“I don’t know why the director was there. She is not part of the grand jury
investigation, but she is for sure a key part of our efforts at election
integrity and making sure that we have free and fair elections,” he said.
It seems suboptimal that the DOJ can’t really explain why an agency head who
has nothing to do with elections showed up to help with an FBI raid. But per
the Trump administration, Gabbard “has a pivotal role in election security and
protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including
operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”
Gabbard’s “pivotal role” here is helping Trump destroy the integrity of
elections to “prove” he won in 2020. While that is outside her job description,
Gabbard doesn’t care. Her real job is to get noticed by Trump and stay in his
good graces, so it’s off to Georgia.
Meanwhile, the whistleblower complaint languishes, apparently never to be seen.
Click here to check out this story on DailyKos.com.
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