Continuing purge, Gabbard revokes security clearances of 37 current, former officials

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began a fresh strike Tuesday against national security officials whom President Donald Trump deems political enemies, announcing she had revoked the clearances of 37 people, including several currently serving U.S. intelligence officials.

Gabbard’s unusual action targeted current and former officials involved in a 2017 assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election that the intelligence czar has sought to undermine, individuals involved in Trump’s impeachments during his first term, and an array of others who worked for former Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

In a memo dated Monday, Gabbard said the individuals had politicized intelligence, failed to safeguard classified information or failed to adhere to professional standards in analyzing intelligence.

Democratic lawmakers and former intelligence officials said Gabbard’s move was the latest example of injecting politics into spy agency work and using her office to go after Trump’s perceived opponents.

Former U.S. officials expressed bafflement about the composition of the list and dismay at the administration’s seemingly insatiable appetite for retaliation against perceived adversaries.

One former senior U.S. intelligence official, whose security clearance was not revoked and who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, likened the indiscriminate list to a “drive-by shooting.”

What more than two dozen of them have in common is signing a 2019 letter saying that allegations regarding Trump’s dealings with Ukraine were serious enough to merit the impeachment proceedings that the House was then initiating.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer posted a link to the letter on X three weeks ago, urging that “dozens of anti-Trump officials from the CIA and [National Security Council]” who signed the letter have their clearances revoked.

Gabbard’s list of 37 includes officials working in high-ranking positions at the CIA and other agencies, as well as others who left government years ago and appear to have neither used nor maintained their clearances. It also includes former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development and at least two people working in the U.S. Congress for Democratic lawmakers.

At least two of the 37 worked closely with Trump, delivering the classified President’s Daily Brief during his first term. Some worked on Russia-related issues, but others were focused on the Middle East, Latin America and other topics.

“These are unlawful and unconstitutional decisions that deviate from well-settled, decades-old laws and policies that sought to protect against just this type of action,” said Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents intelligence officers and whistleblowers.

“For this administration to claim these individuals politicized or weaponized intelligence blatantly reeks of hypocrisy. This administration would make Senator McCarthy proud,” said Zaid, whose clearance was revoked by the Trump administration in March.

Gabbard, along with CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other Trump national security appointees, are in the midst of a campaign to overturn findings that Russia intervened in the 2016 elections in part to help Trump, alleging that conclusion is the result of a “treasonous conspiracy” hatched by Obama and his top aides. They have declassified documents that they assert make their case and have threatened criminal charges.

Gabbard’s memo makes no specific accusations against the 37 people being stripped of their clearances.

Charles Kupchan, whose last job in government was as special assistant to Obama on European affairs in 2017, said in an interview that he had “no clue whatsoever” why he was on the list, adding that he assumed that his clearance had lapsed after leaving the White House.

Kupchan signed the 2019 letter.

If there were a “top 10 list of Trump critics,” Kupchan said, “I certainly wouldn’t be on it.” Kupchan’s tenure in the White House coincided with the Obama administration’s deliberations over how to respond to explosive intelligence showing that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and that Moscow had worked to boost Trump’s chances of winning.

Kupchan, like others, said that he had neither been notified that Gabbard was assembling such a list, nor given any chance to respond before it was signed and made public.

“Gabbard’s move to yank clearances from a seemingly random list of national security officials is a reckless abuse of the security clearance process and nothing more than another sad attempt to distract from the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files,” said Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Warner and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) introduced legislation in June that would bar the executive branch from revoking security clearances based on individuals’ expression of political views or for political retaliation.

Alexa Henning, a top Gabbard aide, said “those who politicize and weaponize intelligence for partisan purposes should not hold clearances and have access to our nation’s most sensitive matters.”

Among those on the list is Maher Bitar, national security adviser for Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California). Bitar previously worked for Schiff when he chaired the House Intelligence Committee. Trump has long targeted Schiff for his role in the president’s first impeachment.

A Schiff spokeswoman had no comment.

One U.S. official said the revocation of congressional aides’ clearances raised troubling questions about the constitutional separation of powers. “Revoking a Senate staffer’s clearances gets very close to, if not over, the line of the Executive Branch now impeding the ability of the Congress to do its Constitutionally-mandated job of oversight,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.

One person on the list, Vinh X. Nguyen, a senior National Security Agency official who has been instrumental in mobilizing the intelligence community around the cyberthreat from China, was a national intelligence officer for cyber during the 2016 election cycle. He recently was named in an article in Real Clear Investigations as working on the 2017 spy agency assessment on Russia.

Today he is responsible for accelerating artificial intelligence adoption by the NSA. Through friends, he declined to comment.

Shelby Pierson, a senior operations official at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, briefed lawmakers in February 2020 that Russia had “developed a preference” for Trump in the upcoming election. She was then the intelligence community’s election threats executive. Trump dismissed the assessment as a “misinformation” campaign driven by Democrats.

An intelligence community report released the following March assessed with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin had authorized influence operations “denigrating President Biden’s candidacy” and “supporting former President Trump.” Pierson declined to comment on the revocation of her clearance.

Mark Feierstein, now a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group, is a Western Hemisphere expert who served in the Clinton State Department, the Obama NSC and in senior posts at USAID under Biden. He said he had received no notification of Gabbard’s action but hadn’t had a security clearance since 2021.

“It’s quite amusing to have a security clearance revoked that I don’t even have,” said Feierstein, who signed the 2019 letter. “False accusations like these are in line with what I’ve gotten from autocratic leaders around the world. Another badge of honor.”