Latest news with #Intelink
Fox News
08-04-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Gabbard establishes new Intelligence Community task force to restore transparency
EXCLUSIVE: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard established a new task force charged with restoring transparency and accountability in the intelligence community, Fox News Digital has learned. The group, dubbed the Director's Initiative Group (DIG), is starting by investigating weaponization within the intelligence community. Officials said the group will also work to root out politicization and expose unauthorized disclosures of classified intelligence. It will also work to declassify information "that serves a public interest." So far, the Director's Initiative Group has reviewed documents for potential declassification, including information related to the origins of COVID-19 and the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files; the original Trump-Russia investigation; anomalous health incidents; the Biden administration's domestic surveillance and censorship against Americans and more. Officials told Fox News Digital that the Director's Initiative Group also is leading assessments of the structure of the intelligence community, its resources and its personnel to "approve efficiency and eliminate wasteful spending." Gabbard told Fox News Digital that she established the group "in order to rebuild trust in the intelligence community and execute the tasks required by President Trump's intelligence-related executive orders." "We are already identifying wasteful spending in real time, streamlining outdated processes, reviewing documents for declassification, and leading ongoing efforts to root out abuses of power and politicization," Gabbard told Fox News Digital. "President Trump promised the American people maximum transparency and accountability," she continued. "We are committed to executing the president's vision and focusing the intelligence community on its core mission: ensuring our security by providing the president and policymakers with timely, apolitical, objective, relevant intelligence to inform their decision-making to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the American people." Gabbard also has held employees who participated in sexually-explicit NSA chatrooms accountable, and is pursuing action on those who have made unauthorized leaks of classified information within the intelligence community. In February, Gabbard said former President Joe Biden's administration was aware of "very sexually explicit, highly inappropriate and unprofessional chatter" happening on internal agency messaging boards across national intelligence entities for years, but they allowed it to go on. She said the chatrooms "were set up because of DEI policies." Federal employees are still under investigation for allegedly misusing an internal agency messaging board to dish on their sexual fantasies under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), officials say. Chat logs from the National Security Agency's (NSA) "Intelink" messaging platform, obtained by researchers from the conservative Manhattan Institute reportedly via sources within the NSA, revealed employees from various intelligence agencies discussing their experiences with gender-reassignment surgery, artificial genitalia, hormone therapy, polyamory and pronoun usage. Some of these agencies reportedly include the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Naval Intelligence and the NSA. After the Intelink chat logs were released Monday, an NSA spokesperson indicated to Fox News Digital that it was "actively investigating" potential abuses of the agency-operated messaging platform. Meanwhile, since becoming director of National Intelligence, Gabbard revoked the security clearances of several people, including former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and other Trump political opponents. She also revoked the security clearances of "the 51 signers of the Hunter Biden 'disinformation' letter."
USA Today
28-02-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Top spy Gabbard says she fired 100+ intel officers for 'really horrific' chat messages
Top spy Gabbard says she fired 100+ intel officers for 'really horrific' chat messages Show Caption Hide Caption 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@ Follow him on X at @JoshMeyerDC and Bluesky at @
Washington Post
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Gabbard fires intelligence workers over explicit chats
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard says she has ordered the heads of U.S. spy agencies to fire more than 100 employees who are accused of using a government communications platform, which is maintained by the supersecret National Security Agency, to exchange highly explicit, sexually themed messages. Revelations about the messages on Intelink, a secure system meant for collaboration and information-sharing among far-flung intelligence analysts, and Gabbard's forceful response are the latest tempest to affect the sprawling American intelligence apparatus.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Gabbard moves to fire 100+ intel officers over explicit chat messages
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has moved to fire more than 100 intelligence officers over explicit chats they allegedly sent around in an internal agency messaging board. Gabbard, who was confirmed as the nation's top intelligence official earlier this month, stated that she spearheaded a directive Tuesday to oust the individuals who partook in the explicit conversations using the National Security Agency's (NSA) 'Intelink' platform. 'There are over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in … what is really just an egregious violation of trust,' Gabbard told Fox News's Jesse Watters on Tuesday. 'When you see what these people were saying — they were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior,' she said during her appearance on 'Jesse Watters Primetime.' The messages were uncovered by conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) sent also out a memo instructing all intelligence agencies to 'identify the employees who participated in the NSA's 'obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit' chatrooms and to terminate their employment and revoke their security clearances,' ODNI spokesperson Alexa Henning wrote Tuesday on social platform X. The deadline for sending the information is Feb. 28. NSA said in a Tuesday statement that the agency is aware of the posts that 'appear to show inappropriate discussions' by personnel in the intelligence community (IC), and an internal probe is underway. 'IC collaboration platforms are intended to drive mission outcomes,' the statement reads. '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,' they added. When reached for comment, ODNI pointed The Hill to Gabbard's comments on Fox News. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Tulsi Gabbard says more than 100 intelligence officers to be fired over sexually explicit chats
The Brief Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday that more than 100 federal employees within the intelligence community will be terminated for alleged ties to explicit chats. Gabbard said the employees participated in obscene and explicit chatrooms on the National Security Agency's (NSA) "Intelink" messaging platform. DNI spokesperson Alexa Henning also confirmed the planned terminations and revoking of security clearances. WASHINGTON - Tulsi Gabbard, President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence, said Tuesday that more than 100 federal employees within the intelligence community will be terminated for alleged ties to explicit conversations on an internal agency messaging board. Gabbard confirmed the move in an interview with FOX News host Jesse Watters. What we know Gabbard, who was sworn in on Feb. 12, said she put out a directive on Tuesday to terminate the employment of and revoke the security clearances of employees who participated in obscene and explicit chatrooms on the National Security Agency's (NSA) "Intelink" messaging platform. Earlier on Tuesday, she confirmed a report by conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who writes for City Journal and is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, that a memo was being prepared to direct all intelligence agencies to identify the employees who participated in the NSA's "obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit" chats. Some of these discussions included experiences with gender-reassignment surgery, artificial genitalia, hormone therapy, and polyamory, according to FOX News. DNI spokesperson Alexa Henning also confirmed the planned terminations and revoking of security clearances. What they're saying "There are over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in... what is really just an egregious violation of trust. What to speak of, like basic rules and standards around professionalism," Gabbard said on "Jesse Watters Primetime." "When you see what these people were saying,... they were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior," Gabbard added. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency/Central Security Service said in its own post on X that the NSA was "aware of posts that appear to show inappropriate discussions by IC personnel." "IC collaboration platforms are intended to drive mission outcomes," a statement reads. "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 Source This story was reported citing an interview on FOX News that aired on Feb. 25, 2025, as well as several posts made on X. It was reported from Cincinnati.
