Top spy Gabbard says she fired 100+ intel officers for 'really horrific' chat messages
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Senate confirms Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence
Former House Democrat and Army veteran turned Trump ally Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed as the director of national intelligence.
WASHINGTON – Tulsi Gabbard, the new director of National Intelligence, said she has fired more than 100 U.S. intelligence officers from various agencies – and revoked their security clearances – for having what she said were improper and sexually explicit conversations in internal government chat rooms.
The chat rooms were run by the ultra-secret National Security Agency (NSA) through its multi-agency Intelink platform to allow the nation's spies and intel analysts to internally discuss a broad array of topics, including those involving diversity, equity and inclusion issues − and gender-affirming surgeries, according to a report Monday by conservative activist and journalist Christopher Rufo in City Journal.
Gabbard announced the firings in a Tuesday night appearance on Fox News but did not say what the employees discussed in what appeared to be private employee support groups, or why it constituted grounds for dismissal. She said the employees were using the chatrooms inappropriately to talk about "really, really horrific behavior."
"There were over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in this – what is really just an egregious violation of trust, basic rules and standards around professionalism," Gabbard said. 'I put out a directive today that they all will be terminated and their security clearances will be revoked.'
An ODNI spokesperson had no immediate comment Wednesday about whether the employees were given the specific reasons for their dismissal, including whether they violated guidelines for what could be discussed in the private chat rooms. In his article, Rufo quoted an unidentified NSA press official saying, "All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action."
Gabbard, a former Democratic House member from Hawaii who joined the Republican party in 2024, thanked Rufo "for putting it all out online." A day earlier, he published a report about "the NSA's Secret Sex Chats," with purported chat logs showing participants engaging in "wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration."
'One popular chat topic" was gender-affirming surgery, Rufo reported, using outdated terminology. Rufo included chat logs with purported conversations among employees in which they detailed their sex lives after transitioning, as well as "hair removal, estrogen injections, and the experience of sexual pleasure post-castration."
He said some of the conversations were held within LGBTQ+ employee resource groups and meetings with titles such as "Privilege," "Ally Awareness," "Pride," and "Transgender Community Inclusion."
In an official post on @X, the National Security Agency said it was aware of posts "that appear to show inappropriate discussions by IC personnel."
While the agency did not elaborate on specifics, it said, "Potential misuse of these platforms by a small group of individuals does not represent the community. Investigations to address this misuse of government systems are ongoing."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, which oversees the nation's 18 intelligence agencies, has sent a memo directing them to identify all employees who participated in the NSA's "obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit" chatrooms by Friday, according to DNI spokesperson Alexa Henning.
Gabbard: The latest of many 'violations of the American people's trust'
Gabbard was confirmed on Feb. 12 after facing one of the toughest confirmation battles among Trump's appointees. She suggested in her Fox News interview that the chatrooms were part of a larger problem in which U.S. intelligence agencies had operated without the proper oversight through at least several of the previous Democratic and Republican administrations.
People said during her Fox interview the people fired for inappropriate posts "were brazen in doing this because when was the last time anyone was really held accountable?"
"Certainly not over the last four years, certainly not over the last 10, maybe 20 years when we look at some of the biggest violations of the American people's trust in the intelligence community."
Gabbard described the firings as the first step in a Trump administration campaign to "clean house, root out that rot and corruption, and weaponization and politicization, so we can start to rebuild that trust in these institutions."
She said the ODNI and other intelligence agencies were receiving tips about those issues from "people (who) are stepping forward because they are all on board with the mission to clean house and refocus on our core mission of serving the American people."
In an unrelated matter, both the ODNI and the CIA have moved to fire an undisclosed number of employees as part of the Trump administration's efforts to rid the government of DEI initiatives. Some of these workers sued on the grounds that their dismissals violated federal workforce laws against discrimination.
"None of these officers' activities was or is illegal, and at no time have the agencies employing Plaintiffs contended that they individually engaged in any misconduct, nor are they accused of poor performance," the officers said in their complaint against Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C. paused the firings of 11 CIA officers on Feb. 18 until he could review the matter. A ruling in that case could come as early as Thursday.
Immediately upon taking office last month, President Donald Trump also signed an executive order revoking the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officials, most of whom Republicans have accused of coordinating with Joe Biden's 2020 White House campaign to discredit reporting on Hunter Biden's emails in the closing weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign.
All but one of the former intelligence officials signed a 2020 letter that said the public release of emails that reportedly belonged to Hunter Biden had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."
The letter signers Trump targeted included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, an intelligence official who worked for Republican and Democratic administrations; former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who led the department under former President George W. Bush; his successor in Barack Obama's administration, Leon Panetta; and John Brennan, who held the role for much of Obama's second term.
Josh Meyer is USA TODAY's Domestic Security Correspondent. You can reach him by email at jmeyer@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @joshmeyerdc.bsky.social.
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