The United States intelligence community is reportedly on edge amid a recent whistleblower complaint, which reportedly alleges wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard.
The revelation was recently made public following statements issued by a lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, the Chief Legal Counsel with WhistleblowerAid.org, who is representing the whistleblower. The complaint was filed with the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) last May, and thereafter shared with lawmakers in June at the whistleblower’s request, according to Bakaj.
“WhistleblowerAid.org is calling on Congress to open an investigation into Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for hiding high-level intelligence from Congress for nearly eight months,” read a statement on the organization’s website, which also cited the DNI’s “attempts to bury a whistleblower disclosure about her own actions, the reporting of which is required by law.”
The statement affirms that the whistleblower, whose identity has not been revealed, brought the information to WhistleblowerAid.org in May of last year, nearly coinciding with its filing with the ICIG.
“In June 2025, the whistleblower, consistent with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, requested that their disclosure be transmitted to Congress,” the statement reads. “Since then, Director Gabbard has repeatedly stonewalled and thwarted its release because she is the subject of that complaint.”
The organization representing the whistleblower alleges that DNI Gabbard has taken “legal actions to protect herself” for the last eight months and is now calling for her “to comply with the law and fully release the disclosure to Congress.”
The whistleblower complaint was first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, which said at that time that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) had not yet made the complaint’s existence public due to security matters that were still under review to protect the sensitive nature of the information the complaint contains.
In a statement provided to NBC News, Bakaj confirmed that he has not had access to information conveyed in the complaint.
In response to the Wall Street Journal reporting this week, Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson representing DNI Gabbard, said in a posting on X that “There was absolutely NO wrongdoing by DNI Gabbard,” and charged that the media outlet had “buried” this information in its reporting.
“Even the Biden-era Intelligence Community Inspector General came to this conclusion, determining that the Whistleblower’s allegations against DNI Gabbard ‘did not appear credible’,” Coleman wrote, further characterizing the ICIG complaint as being “politically motivated” and featuring a series of baseless claims that appeared alongside “highly classified information” to generate intrigue and hinder the process of conveying the information to Congress.
Former intelligence officials with knowledge of such matters told NBC News this week that it is uncommon for government agencies to take so long to transmit whistleblower complaints to Congress, and that in some cases, security concerns involving ICIG complaints can be resolved in a matter of just weeks or less.
However, there are also instances where such processes can become more complicated. In June 2023, The Debrief was the first to report the existence of a whistleblower complaint filed with the ICIG by National Geospatial Intelligence Agency veteran David Grusch, involving allegations that the United States was in possession of exotic craft of unknown origin.
At the time the 2023 complaint was filed, the complaint was deemed credible and urgent and helped prompt Congressional hearings, as well as investigations by the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which concluded in a 2024 report that it could find no evidence of such exotic off-world technologies. Despite many historical inaccuracies AARO’s report contained, critics have also maintained that there is a lack of evidence supporting the claims presented in the 2023 whistleblower complaint.
In a separate earlier instance in 2019, Adam Schiff, then House Intelligence Committee Chairman, subpoenaed the acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, amid accusations that he unlawfully withheld a whistleblower’s complaint from the Intelligence Committee, reportedly at the direction of the White House during President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
According to the DNI’s own ICIG whistleblowing page on the DNI website, “lawful whistleblowing is the process through which an individual provides the right information to the right people while protecting national security equities and avoiding unauthorized disclosure.” There is currently no legal mandate governing the speed at which the DNI is required to share security guidance related to such complaints from whistleblowers to the ICIG.
Adding an additional layer of complication to the recent whistleblower complaint, DNI Gabbard reportedly had not been aware of her responsibilities in this regard until October of last year, several months after the complaint was filed, and at which time a new inspector general had only recently taken the position.
An ODNI official who spoke anonymously with NBC News said that Gabbard had made every attempt to provide security guidance to ensure the information could safely be transmitted to Congress.
In her statement on X this week, DNI spokesperson Olivia Coleman argued that the manner in which the complaint had been filed had unnecessarily complicated this process and made it “substantially more difficult to produce ‘security guidance’ for transmittal to Congress.”
However, Bakaj pushed back on the ODNI’s justifications for its slow course of action, characterizing the DNI’s apparent stonewalling as “a grave dereliction” that “jeopardizes the ability of Congress to exercise its legally mandated oversight of the US Intelligence Community, including agency covert operations.”
ODNI officials continue to justify the Office’s actions, however. In a series of postings on X, DNI Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning maintained that DNI Gabbard had done nothing wrong and instead accused the Wall Street Journal and the unnamed whistleblower of engaging in politically-motivated actions.
DNI Gabbard “has always and will continue to support Whistleblower’s (sic) and their right, under the law, to submit complaints to Congress,” Henning said on X, “even if they are completely baseless like this one.”
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.