President Donald Trump was impeached in December 2019, charged by the House of Representatives with abusing his office to gain leverage over Joe Biden in the upcoming presidential election. This week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rebooted that scandal with the release of a handful of newly declassified documents that question the beginning of the impeachment investigation — in hopes of discrediting everything that followed.
MS NOW confirmed Wednesday that Gabbard’s office has sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department for the whistleblower whose concern over a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy launched the impeachment inquiry and the former inspector general who fielded their complaint. The referrals were first reported by Fox News.
Gabbard’s new disclosures mirror a well-worn playbook used by Trump’s loyalists to investigate his investigators. But in every instance, including this latest endeavor, the evidence gathered of wrongdoing on Trump’s part has far outweighed proof of misconduct from his investigators.
In every instance, the evidence gathered of wrongdoing on Trump’s part has far outweighed proof of misconduct from his investigators.
In Gabbard’s telling, as she posted on X, the process was an inherently corrupt conspiracy where “deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that Congress used to usurp the will of the American people.” Michael Atkinson, former inspector general for the Intelligence Community, is painted in a press release accompanying the new materials as a rogue actor who spun a secondhand tale into an attempted coup.
The materials posted Monday do provide an interesting window into the chain of events eventually leading to Trump’s first impeachment. Among them are official records from the preliminary 14-day investigation Atkinson undertook to determine that the whistleblower’s initial complaint was of “urgent concern” and needed to be reported to Congress. Also included are transcripts from Atkinson’s two closed-door interviews with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, one before the White House released the transcript of the Zelenskyy call and one after the impeachment inquiry was underway.
But despite Gabbard’s breathless claims of a “coordinated effort … to manufacture a conspiracy,” nothing among the materials contradicts anything uncovered later. If anything, the initial interviews with the whistleblower, conducted in late August 2019, line up neatly with the fuller story that would be revealed over the coming weeks in the press and during the House’s impeachment inquiry. Both the whistleblower and a corroborating witness were extremely forthcoming about exactly what they did and did not know about the call, and why they were deeply concerned by Trump’s repeating conspiracy theories and pressing Zelenskyy to resume an investigation into Biden.
Gabbard’s cries of “politicization” from Atkinson are likewise overblown. Her claim is based on a section in the IG’s interview process where subjects were asked if they have anything in their background that might reveal any biases that could be used against them. The responses given suggest a certain hesitation to speak out for fear their words would be spun into right-wing attacks but was overridden by the necessity to speak out. Atkinson transparently mentioned in a letter to then-acting DNI Joseph Maguire that there was an “indicia of an arguable political bias” from the complainant, but that it didn’t alter his determination that their information was credible.
Maguire initially prevented Atkinson from providing the complaint to Congress, claiming that the Justice Department ruled it was outside of the IG’s remit. Atkinson disagreed and told lawmakers an “urgent concern” existed, as he believed the law required him, but did not provide the whistleblower’s complaint. Instead, it was only after media reports of the investigation and the White House’s subsequent release of the so-called perfect call with Zelenskyy that Atkinson was able to speak to Congress about the complaint directly.
All of this, in Gabbard’s telling, amounted to a “weaponization” of the process.
Several things stand out at this point. First is how ill-equipped Gabbard is to be leading America’s intelligence community. Her emphasis on how the first people to come forward about Trump’s scheme didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the call would be laughable if it weren’t so inept. It is literally the job of the intelligence community to consume partial information as it is received and work that raw data into a complete analysis. What Gabbard is essentially saying is that someone who only saw a single piece of the puzzle, at first, cannot be trusted to put together a picture in their head once more pieces have come together.
It is literally the job of the intelligence community to consume partial information as it is received and work that raw data into a complete analysis.
Second is how blatantly she has copied the failed formula of the GOP’s efforts to discredit the Russia investigation during Trump’s first term. For years now, through numerous investigations from the House and an independent counsel alike, Republicans have tried to claim wrongdoing from the FBI and other supposed “deep state” figures when first investigating hints of Russian interference in the 2016 election. But John Durham’s four-year-long probe came up empty, and despite Trump’s demands for revenge, there have been no criminal charges filed against anyone involved in the case.
Finally, it’s worth remembering Gabbard’s position when she was serving as a U.S. representative from Hawaii during Trump’s first impeachment. By the time the House voted on the articles of impeachment, she was already running a longshot bid for president. Accordingly, she was attempting to position herself as not beholden to the left wing, but still a viable candidate to be the Democratic nominee.
Gabbard was the only Democrat in the House to vote “present” on the articles. But she made clear in a statement afterward that she believed “President Trump is guilty of wrongdoing.” Her vote, or nonvote rather, was cast because, in her view, “removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.” The centrism by way of cowardice branding that brought her to prominence has fully given way — she now simply yields to the rightward pressures she finds herself under as part of Trump’s cabinet.
In his first interview with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Atkinson described himself as a first responder, one who may not have had the full picture, but who had heard a fire alarm ringing and chose to act. “I don’t know whether it is just smoke, don’t know whether it is a small fire,” he told lawmakers as he refused to reveal what he’d learned from his preliminary findings. “All I know is that there was a time when … another first responder was not getting information about an alleged fire.”
Atkinson did what he thought was right and in accordance with the law by telling Congress that a complaint existed. The whistleblower did the same, despite the potential reprisals they’d face from a vengeful White House. Gabbard is now targeting them specifically for doing so, even as it is her job to be the early warning system against the nation’s greatest threats. It’s disturbing then to think what alarm bells she would prefer to silence, what risks she would take with America’s safety, rather than risk upsetting Trump.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.