Top lawmakers on the House and Senate Intelligence committees are set to review an official’s whistleblower complaint against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, after months of asking to receive it.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate committee, told reporters at a press conference that he is expecting to see the sensitive complaint as soon as Tuesday.
“I’m going to see that complaint imminently,” Warner said. “I have not received it, but I think it is literally today or tomorrow.”
Warner said the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the top Democrat and Republican in both chambers of Congress as well as the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, had repeatedly asked Gabbard’s agency to turn over the complaint.
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“It took six months of bipartisan pressure to get them to bring it forward,” Warner added.
A whistleblower filed the complaint of wrongdoing, whose contents are not known, against Gabbard in May, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. A spokesperson for the inspector general told the outlet that the intelligence community inspector general decided when it was filed that some elements of the complaint were credible, and that other elements could not be determined either way.
A spokesperson for Gabbard told the outlet that she gave her staff the guidance to send “appropriate details” of the complaint to Congress. Her spokesperson also dismissed the complaint as “baseless and politically motivated” to The Wall Street Journal.
After the story was published, Gabbard’s spokesperson denied any wrongdoing by Gabbard and said “the Whistleblower’s complaint is with the Congressional Intelligence Committees for review.”
“Director Gabbard has always and will continue to support Whistleblower’s and their right, under the law, to submit complaints to Congress, even if they are completely baseless like this one,” said Olivia Coleman, the spokesperson, in a statement on Monday. “This is a nothingburger story, written like a salacious gossip column.”
By law, the inspector general is required to transmit the complaint, with determinations about its credibility, to the House and Senate intelligence committees within weeks of receiving it. The whistleblower is also entitled to notify the committees directly, with instructions from the inspector general on how to do so securely.
The whistleblower’s lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, has accused Gabbard of stalling the complaint from reaching Congress. The complaint has reportedly been locked in a safe, and even the whistleblower’s lawyer has not seen its contents.
Warner said Tuesday that he had been notified over the last “few days” that the complaint would be coming to relevant top lawmakers for review. A Democratic aide on the committee told NOTUS that this development occurred after the Journal story was published.
The acting inspector general at the time was the one who made the initial decisions on the complaint in May. In October, the Senate confirmed Christopher Fox, a former aide to Gabbard, as the new inspector general.
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