Last updated on May 15, 2026
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard strips more than 36 agents of access, escalating politically charged retaliation against critics of Trump’s handling of 2016 election interference
More than three dozen intelligence officers who worked on the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election lost their security clearances Tuesday. The move was the latest in the administration’s effort to retaliate against public employees who sought to enforce the law in ways that displeased Donald Trump.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a memorandum that accused the agents of “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” and of “failure to adhere to professional analytic tradecraft standards.”
According to the Associated Press, Gabbard did not notify all of the officials of her move before she posted a memorandum announcing it on Elon Musk’s X social media website.
Gabbard, who has openly expressed sympathy for Russian president Vladimir Putin even after that nation’s invasion of Ukraine, has previously withdrawn security clearances of other Trump critics.
The latest use of her office to target political opponents of the administration is also in line with the Department of Justice’s decision earlier this year to fire Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who worked on the cases involving the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi executed the latest administration effort to retaliate against law enforcement officers earlier this month when she fired former interim agency director Brian Driscoll.
In January the regime revoked security clearances of more than four dozen intelligence officials who signed a letter announcing that the “scandal” over Hunter Biden’s laptop computer was the fruit of a “Russian information operation.”
That purge hit former DNI James R. Clapper Jr., former Central Intelligence Agency leaders John O. Brennan and Leon E. Panetta, and former National Security Agency and CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden.
In March Trump revoked the security clearances of his 2016 and 2020 presidential election opponents, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton.
Trump also pulled the security clearance of a national security lawyer, Mark Zaid, who represented the whistleblower whose allegations led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019. That move led to a lawsuit, now pending in federal court in Washington, that claims security clearance removals must comply with the Constitution’s due process clause.
Gabbard oversees all 18 federal intelligence community agencies, including CIA, NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Before agreeing to serve Trump, she was a U.S. Representative from Hawai’i and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
She has explicitly defended Russian aggression against other nations, including Ukraine. “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” Gabbard wrote on X, then known as Twitter, in 2022. The Russian state media has called her a “superwoman.”
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