Tulsi Gabbard revokes the security authorizations of 37 current and old national security officials
US government security authorizations of at least 37 current officials and former national security were dismissed by the director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to a note obtained by CNN.
The affected persons include people involved in carrying out an assessment of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 elections as well as members of the National Security Council of former President Joe Biden, according to a familiar person. The person noted that most of the affected intelligence professionals are not household names.
The revocations were reported for the first time by the New York Post.
In a post X on Tuesday, Gabbard confirmed the reports of the action to revoke the releases, writing: “The fact of being sentenced to a security authorization is a privilege, not a right. Those of the intelligence community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests before the interests of the American people broke the sacred trust which they promise to maintain. ”
The memo, which does not cite specific evidence of reprehensible acts by current or former officials, was released on Monday to several US intelligence community agencies, the familiar person said.
The memo of the accused DNI had an impact on individuals of “politicization or the armament of intelligence to advance personal, supporters or objective programs incompatible with the priorities of national security”. He also accused people of not protecting classified information and the evaluation of non -professional information.
The people mentioned in the note occupied positions in a range of government agencies, and it is not clear if all still had an active authorization at the time of Gabbard’s announcement.
Gabbard’s decision is the last in a series of actions from senior officials from the Trump administration to discredit the assessment of the intelligence community in 2017 according to which Russia sought to intervene during the 2016 presidential election to support Trump – and penalize those involved. Gabbard, in July, published documents which, according to her, were evidence of a “betrayal plot” by the Obama administration, including former president Barack Obama, and made criminal references to the Ministry of Justice.
CIA director John Ratcliffe also published his own critical examination against the 2017 evaluation and has referred former civil servants to the Ministry of Justice, who are now under the FBI investigation, CNN reported. The Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors to launch an investigation by the Grand Jury on the accusations that the Obama administration has manufactured information.
Democrats accused Gabbard and Trump of having used the investigation documents in Russia to try to distract the fury surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s files – and to punish his national political enemies.
In his allegations, Gabbard has confused and distorted what the intelligence community has really concluded in its evaluation.
For example, Gabbard cited various 2016 intelligence assessments which said that the Russians had not changed the results of the elections through cyber attacks aimed at infiltrating voting systems. But the intelligence community has never discovered votes in the first place.
She also downgraded and published a republican report of the House Intelligence Committee which alleged that the evaluation of the intelligence community that Putin preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton barely came and ignored contradictory evidence. But unlike Gabbard, the report of the room did not argue that intelligence was “made” or that the interference of the Russian elections did not occur.
Gabbard has largely made what she described as “depoliticizing” the intelligence community an absolute priority, and has eliminated the authorizations of a certain number of current and former officials, some of which were public criticism from President Trump. Her criticisms say that, far from depoliticizing the intelligence community, she armaments against the president’s perceived political enemies at home.
“These are illegal and unconstitutional decisions that deviate from well -established laws and policies of decades that have sought to protect against this type of action,” said Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer whose own security authorization was previously revoked by Trump. “For this administration, to claim these politicized or armed people of intelligence in a blatant hypocrisy manner. This administration would make Senator McCarthy prier. ”
