The Wall Street Journal’s crumbling credibility took another hit Monday with an “exclusive” hit piece on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that one agency official described as “one of the most disgusting cases of clickbait I have ever seen.”
DNI officials say the story, headlined, “Classified Whistleblower Complaint About Tulsi Gabbard Stalls Within Her Agency,” is a “nothingburger” on a “baseless complaint.”
“Here’s the truth: There was no wrongdoing by @DNIGabbard, a fact that WSJ conveniently buried 13 paragraphs down,” Gabbard’s Deputy Chief of Staff Alexa Henning wrote Monday on X. “Even the Biden-era IC IG [Intelligence Community Inspector General] came to this collusion the Whistleblower’s allegations against DNI Gabbard were not credible.”
‘Couldn’t Learn’
The piece claims that a “U.S. intelligence official” made allegations of wrongdoing by Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint filed eight months ago. What does the complaint allege? We don’t know. The complaint is “so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress,” some anonymous “U.S. officials” familiar with the complaint tell the Journal’s cybersecurity and intelligence reporter Dustin Volz and its Washington, D.C. bureau reporter C. Ryan Barber.
What Volz and Barber don’t tell readers until half a dozen paragraphs into the story is that the allegations specifically about Gabbard filed in May 2025 “weren’t credible.” That finding came from then-Acting Inspector General Tamara Johnson, a longtime Office of the Director of National Intelligence employee who has served both the Trump and Biden administrations.
Despite the fact that the Wall Street Journal “couldn’t learn the substance of the allegations,” the corporate news outlet treated it as a five-alarm fire within the U.S. intelligence community. The hit piece breathlessly likened the behind-the-scenes sparring over the complaint, said to be locked in a safe, to a “cloak-and-dagger mystery reminiscent of a John le Carré novel.” Disclosure of its contents could cause “grave damage to national security,” one official told the Journal.
The complaint implicates some other federal agency with wrongdoing, but, again, officials with knowledge of the matter dare not speak the agency’s name, according to the reporters.
‘Coup has Started’
The Journal quotes Andrew Bakaj, the whistleblower’s attorney, who in a letter “viewed by the Wall Street Journal,” accuses Gabbard’s office of hindering delivery of the complaint to congressional members by “failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so.”
That’s a crock, DNI officials tell The Federalist. They say that the agency has relayed the security guidance to Intelligence Community Inspector General Christopher Fox, who is responsible for transmitting the complaint to Congress. Fox, the DNI office tells The Federalist, is currently in coordination with the Hill to deliver it.
Bakaj has served as legal counsel on multiple whistleblower complaints against the Trump administration. The attorney and former Democrat operative is representing the whistleblower and inspiration behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) “sensitive information” case. In a press release earlier this year, Bakaj said his client exposed the “nefarious underbelly of DOGE”, making the rounds on all of the left-wing content provider sites to talk about what he insists is the “Trump Administration’s lawless attack on democracy.”
Bakaj represented the whistleblower who gave House Democrats’ kindling to start their 2019 impeachment fire. Bakaj, a former official in the CIA and Pentagon, worked for Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), The Federalist has reported.
According to RealClearInvestigations, Bakaj contributed money to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. In the deep state whistleblower complaint sparking the 2019 impeachment proceedings, Bakaj brought in Democratic donor and “politically active anti-Trump advocate” Mark Zaid to help in the whistleblower case, the publication reported.
After Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates, an Obama loyalist, on Jan. 20, 2017, Zaid blasted out a tweet declaring, “#coup has started. First of many steps. #rebellion. #impeachment will follow ultimately. #lawyers.”
Smells Familiar
DNI spokeswoman Olivia Coleman said the whistleblower complaint targeting Gabbard is a “classic case of a politically motivated individual weaponizing their position in the Intelligence Community, submitting a baseless complaint and then burying it in highly classified information.” The motivation of the complaint, Coleman wrote in a post on X, is to create false intrigue and a manufactured narrative.
Where have we seen that movie before? *See Russiagate, Arctic Frost and myriad other Democrat and deep state scams meant to politically cripple President Donald Trump.
You’ll recall the old deep state crew — John Brennan, James Clapper, Jim Comey, Barack Obama — shoved the bogus Steele Dossier in the highest classified status so that they could falsely convince Congress, courts, and the public that it was indeed “highly classified” intelligence. Putting it in the public version instead of the deeply classified annex would have deflated the Russia collusion hoax much faster than it did, although it may have cost The Washington Post and The New York Times Pulitzer Prizes they didn’t deserve.
And who again declassified the lies contained in the Intelligence Community Assessment that fueled the Russia Collusion Hoax? That’s right, Tulsi Gabbard. Maybe, just maybe, the folks who got caught driving an attempted soft coup have some axes to grind.
Coleman said the mysterious whistleblower complaint also creates “conditions which make it substantially more difficult to produce ‘security guidance’ for transmittal to Congress.”
The Wall Street Journal piece asserts the delay in sending the complaint to Congress “is without precedent.” Watchdog “experts,” according to the publication, say the inspector general is “generally required to assess whether the complaint is credible within two weeks of receiving it, and share it with lawmakers within another week if it determines it is credible.”
But the complaint wasn’t deemed credible, so there is no legal requirement for how quickly National Intelligence must share security guidance, a point the Journal concedes.
DNI officials say that given the highly sensitive nature of the information involved, the security guidance process can take longer than a “matter of weeks,” as the Journal contends.
‘A Nothingburger Story’
If the point was to garner as much negative press as possible, mission accomplished. The usual Trump-hating media outlets trumpeted the claims. “Tulsi Gabbard accused of trying to ‘bury’ whistleblower complaint,” NBC News’ headline screamed. “Complaint against Tulsi Gabbard could do ‘grave damage’ to national security: Report,” the left-leaning Independent pushed.
The Wall Street Journal reporters did not return The Federalist’s request for comment.
Coleman said Gabbard supports whistleblowers and their right under the law to submit complains to Congress, “even if they are completely baseless like this one.”
Speaking of baseless, Coleman said the Journal “should be ashamed that they published this trash.”
“This is a nothingburger story, written like a salacious gossip column,” the DNI spokeswoman said.
