The Tulsi Secret

Adam Silverman, over at Balloon Juice, puts together what we know about a whistleblower complaint to Tulsi Gabbard. It’s not a lot: generalities that have been widely reported, and a Guardian article with a bit more. Adam has picked out the meat of the Guardian article and matched it up with the generalities. As he notes, there’s still a lot we don’t know.

Adam pulls eight facts out of the reporting. This is hard work. I have never understood why reporters make it so difficult to do this.

1. In spring 2025, the National Security Agency (NSA) “detected evidence of an unusual phone call between an individual associated with foreign intelligence and a person close to Donald Trump, according to a whistleblower’s attorney briefed on the existence of the call.”
2. Rather than have this intelligence briefed out, Gabbard put it on close hold and took directly to the White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The next day, Gabbard quashed the intelligence report completely.
3. An intelligence officer filed a whistleblower complaint over this.
4. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) Inspector General’s (IG) Office determined that “the Inspector General could not determine if the allegations appear credible.” Basically, the IG investigation concluded that they did not have enough information to assess whether something illegal had or had not taken place. Which would indicate either some information was being withheld or someone was stonewalling.
5. Gabbard assigned one of her top advisors, Dennis Kirk, to the IG’s office two week’s after the whistleblower first made contact through the whistleblower hotline.
6. The complaint also alleges that the ODNI General Counsel’s Office failed to make a referral of a potential crime to DOJ.
7. Gabbard’s office then jerked the whistleblower and his attorney around for eight months by refusing to provide the required guidance for transmission of the complaint to the appropriate congressional oversight committees.
8. Gabbard’s office finally released the complaint to the appropriate members of Congress last Tuesday, however it was heavily redacted under a claim of executive privilege.

This is not nearly enough information to surmise which intelligence service and which person close to Donald Trump, although on Bluesky there have been any number of superficial thinkers willing to put their thoughts in writing. I tend to deal harshly with them, because this closes down analytical thinking.

It’s likely that if we can figure out one of those questions, the other will be easier to find. But not necessarily. Intelligence often provides surprises. The topic of conversation would also be helpful.

A cconclusion Adam draws from those eight facts is that Gabbard is protecting someone, likely Trump, although I differ with him in seeing a number of other people she might be protecting, starting with herself. That doesn’t quite fit the facts, but I think the question of whom she’s protecting needs to stay open while finding Trump most probable with the information we have now. Note: whom she’s protecting is not necessarily the same as the person who took the call.

One of the difficulties in figuring this out is that none of the people involved have much experience in intelligence, so there is no reason to assume that their actions are what an intelligence professional would take. More noise in the data, along with the general sucking up to Trump and his delusions.

It’s not clear whether this is what Ron Wyden wrote about to Director of Central Intelligence John Ratcliffe. I don’t see a good reason to assume that it is or that it is not. Another piece of data that would be useful to the analysis.

There’s a lot we don’t know. It does look like this could be a big deal.