Tulsi Gabbard Clamps Down on Leaks to Media With Unhinged Threat

https://newrepublic.com/post/192753/tulsi-gabbard-clamps-down-leaks-media-threat

https://archive.ph/DnFg1


Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Friday that she would be cracking down on intelligence leaks. Gabbard announced in a post on X that the ODNI was aware of several leaks within the intelligence community to publications including NBC News, HuffPost, and The Washington Post, among others.



“Our nation’s Intelligence Community must be focused on our national security mission. Politically motivated leaks undermine our national security and the trust of the American people, and will not be tolerated,” Gabbard wrote. “Unfortunately, such leaks have become commonplace with no investigation or accountability. That ends now. We know of and are aggressively pursuing recent leakers from within the Intelligence Community and will hold them accountable.” “Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such,” Gabbard wrote in a separate post.



Gabbard’s list of (what are considered by the right to be) liberal publications signals that her office intends to focus on targeting leaks to publications that report rigorously and critically on Donald Trump’s administration. Her threat to crack down on leaks exists within the greater context of threats made against the media by the Trump administration. After Trump entered the White House in January, the Federal Communications Commission announced that it would investigate NPR and PBS.

Project 2025, the authoritarian playbook for Trump’s second administration, called for the government to strip noncommercial education stations of their federal funding and licenses. Of course, Trump’s targets extend beyond liberal publications to any news outlet that dares undermine his mandate. On Thursday, Trump railed against The Wall Street Journal after it reported that business leaders were only pretending to love his disastrous tariffs sinking the stock market.

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