The US government security clearances of at least 37 current and former national security officials have been revoked by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, according to a memo obtained by CNN.
Those impacted include people who were involved in conducting an assessment of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election as well as members of former President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, according to a person familiar. The person noted most of the intelligence professionals impacted are not household names.
The revocations were first reported by the New York Post.
In an X post on Tuesday, Gabbard confirmed reports of the action to revoke clearances, writing: “Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right. Those in the Intelligence Community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests ahead of the interests of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”
The memo, which does not cite specific evidence of wrongdoing by current or former officials, was circulated on Monday to multiple US intelligence community agencies, the person familiar said.
The DNI memo accused impacted individuals of the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence to advance personal, partisan, or non-objective agendas inconsistent with national security priorities.” It also accused individuals of failing to protect classified information and unprofessional intelligence assessment tradecraft.
The people cited in the memo held positions across a range of government agencies, and it’s unclear whether all still held an active clearance at the time of Gabbard’s announcement.
Gabbard’s move is the latest in a string of actions by senior Trump administration officials to discredit the intelligence community’s 2017 assessment that Russia sought to intervene in the 2016 presidential election in support of Trump — and penalize those involved. Gabbard in July released documents that she said were evidence of a “treasonous conspiracy” by the Obama administration, including former President Barack Obama, and made criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe also put out his own review critical of the 2017 assessment, and referred former officials to the Justice Department, who are now under FBI investigation, CNN reported. Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into accusations that the Obama administration manufactured intelligence.
Democrats have accused Gabbard and Trump of using the Russia investigation documents to try to distract from the furor surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files — and to punish his domestic political enemies.
In her allegations, Gabbard has conflated and misrepresented what the intelligence community actually concluded in its assessment.
For example, Gabbard cited various intelligence assessments from 2016 that stated the Russians did not alter the election results through cyberattacks aimed at infiltrating voting systems. But the intelligence community never found any votes were altered in the first place.
She also declassified and released a Republican House Intelligence Committee report that alleged the intelligence community’s assessment that Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton was thinly sourced and ignored contradictory evidence. But unlike Gabbard, the House report did not argue that the intelligence was “manufactured” or that Russian election interference did not occur.
Gabbard broadly has made what she has described as “depoliticizing” the intelligence community a top priority, and has removed clearances from a number of current and former officials, some of whom have been public critics of President Trump. Her critics say that, far from depoliticizing the intelligence community, she is weaponizing it against the president’s perceived political enemies at home.
“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 national security attorney whose own security clearance was previously revoked by Trump. “For this administration to claim these individuals politicized or weaponized intelligence blatantly wreaks of hypocrisy. This Administration would make Senator McCarthy proud.”
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