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. 

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