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Tulsi Gabbard is battling “politicization” of the American intelligence community by firing top career officials on a senior team for allegedly leaking to the media.
Fox News first reported the firings of two National Intelligence Council officials on Tuesday. Mike Collins, the council’s acting chair, and his top deputy Maria Langan-Riekhof were the targets of the latest purge. A dozen others are reportedly under suspicion of leaking and are undergoing internal investigations.
Gabbard is also set to bring the National Intelligence Council to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in McLean, Virginia, for oversight purposes, reported Fox News.
The right-leaning news network further reported senior officials telling Fox that Collins was under an investigation for allegedly “deliberately undermining the upcoming Trump administration” dating from the transition period. The official separately depicted his deputy, Langan-Riekhof, of being a champion for DEI-related efforts, while giving no examples.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that the pair were potentially targeted for a different reason: issuance of a memorandum that firmly rejected the Trump administration’s political narrative surrounding immigration and violent drug-related crime hailing from Venezuela. The White House and other administration officials have insisted that Tren de Aragua, a violent drug cartel targeted by the Trump administration’s rhetoric as the government ramps up deportation operations nationwide, is operating with the assistance and possible direction of Venezuela’s government.
But a document first reported by the Post last week states that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [Tren de Aragua] and is not directing [Tren de Aragua] movement to and operations in the United States.”
The memo, a “Sense of the Community Memorandum”, was issued by the National Intelligence Council and authored by the National Intelligence Officer for the Western Hemisphere. The document was largely unsparing in its criticism of the Maduro government, which the U.S. does not recognize as the winner of legitimate elections.
It called the Venezuelan government unable to control the extent of the country’s territory and generally willing to cooperate with armed groups to ensure security. It also highlighted the role that low-level government officials take in facilitating Tren de Aragua’s operations and profiting from the gang’s illicit businesses. In some cases, the document said, low-level military and federal officials may cooperate with Tren de Aragua in some instances, like a 2023 prison raid in which the gang’s leadership escaped, but in general was dismissive of a core part of the MAGA-world narrative: the description of migration through the US southern border as an “invasion” from Venezuela or other countries.
“Venezuela’s permissive environment allows Tren de Aragua to operate,” the intelligence community’s assessment read. But it continued: “the [intelligence community] has not observed the regime directing [Tren de Aragua] to push migrants to the United States.”
The Post reported that there was no indication that either Collins or Langan-Riekhof had a “direct role” in the memorandum’s publication. But Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff denied that premise entirely on Wednesday as she responded to a Post reporter who tweeted that the firings came after “the council authored an assessment that contradicted Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act”. The administration’s use of that law, passed in 1798 to regulate the activities of noncitizens during wartime, marks only the fourth time it has been invoked in the nation’s history.
“No one from ODNI told you that, so of course you inject your own politically motivated opinion. That’s wrong but who cares about facts, right? These Biden holdovers were dismissed because they politicized intelligence,” tweeted Alexa Henning, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff.
Gabbard’s efforts to weed out officials suspected of leaking to the media — a problem that vexed Trump and his team during his first presidency — has gone on for weeks, if not longer.
"It takes time to weed them out and fire them," one ODNI official told Fox News, describing Gabbard’s enemies as "career bureaucrats that are entrenched in Washington politics,” and “Deep State holdovers” supposedly responsible for "trying to sabotage President Trump’s agenda."
Staffers on her team separately told Fox News in late April that Gabbard issued criminal referrals for three senior intelligence community officials to the Justice Department for allegedly leaking classified information to reporters at the Post and another news outlet; it wasn’t immediately clear if those referrals included Collins and/or Langan-Riekhof.
"Politicization of our intelligence and leaking classified information puts our nation’s security at risk and must end," said Gabbard in April. "Those who leak classified information will be found and held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. [...] These deep-state criminals leaked classified information for partisan political purposes to undermine President Trump's agenda."
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