Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard responded to criticism from Sen. Mark Warner and others that she allegedly “hid” a whistleblower’s complaint.
“Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI ‘hid’ a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months,” Gabbard said in a post on X. “This is a blatant lie.”
A U.S. intelligence official alleged wrongdoing by Gabbard in the handling of a whistleblower complaint that was filed with the intelligence community’s inspector general in 2025, according to the official’s lawyer and Gabbard’s office. The official’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, said the complaint was filed with the intelligence community’s inspector general in May and the whistleblower asked in June to share their complaint with lawmakers.
Warner, D-Va., is the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He told NBC News on Thursday that Congress didn’t receive the complaint until February and that “much of it was redacted.”
The senator said the monthslong delay in sharing the complaint with lawmakers showed that Gabbard is “either not competent to do the job, or if her legal advisers didn’t tell her, she didn’t have competent legal advice.”
“This was, again, a complete avoidance of, and I think it was an effort to try to bury this whistleblower complaint,” Warner said.
Gabbard addressed the criticism in a long post Saturday, writing that she is not, and never has been, in possession or control of the complaint. She said that the inspector general “was in possession of and responsible for securing the complaint for months.”
Gabbard said the first time that she saw the complaint was two weeks ago, “when I had to review it to provide guidance on how it should be securely shared with Congress.”
She said the complaint “contains baseless allegations,” but nonetheless needed to be secured in a safe like all whistleblower complaints that contain “highly classified and compartmented intelligence.”
Gabbard went on to lay out a timeline in her post, writing that she first became aware of the complaint against her in June, but that neither then-acting Inspector General Tamara Johnson nor current Inspector General Christopher Fox — who started his role on Oct. 7, 2025 — found it to be credible.
Olivia Coleman, press secretary for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told NBC News in an email that both inspectors general “did not find the complaint credible.”
Gabbard said that while she communicated with Johnson during the investigation, she was not informed that the whistleblower wished to show the complaint to Congress and therefore did not issue security instructions to do so.
Gabbard said she was “made aware of the need to provide security guidance” by Fox on Dec. 4.
“I took immediate action to provide the security guidance to the Intelligence Community Inspector General who then shared the complaint and referenced intelligence with relevant members of Congress last week,” Gabbard wrote in her post.
“Senator Warner’s decision to spread lies and baseless accusations over the months for political gain, undermines our national security and is a disservice to the American people and the Intelligence Community,” the post continued.
Rachel Cohen, Warner’s communications director, told NBC News in an emailed statement Saturday that Gabbard’s post is “an inaccurate attack that’s entirely on brand for someone who has already and repeatedly proven she’s unqualified to serve as DNI.”
Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group representing government and private-sector employees who aim to uncover wrongdoing, responded on social media to Gabbard’s statement, saying Saturday that she “continues to make unfounded claims about our whistleblower client’s complaint.”
The group attached a letter dated June 6, 2025, from the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community that stated that Gabbard — whose post said “the first time I saw the whistleblower complaint was 2 weeks ago” — was provided with the full complaint after a “determination” that happened in June 2025.
