When a patriotic, combat veteran was confirmed last February to lead America’s intelligence community, many on the left mocked the move — but Tulsi Gabbard took the job and got to work uncovering corruption where it lived. Her Senate confirmation made her the nation’s Director of National Intelligence, a position she has used to pry open decades of secrecy and demand answers from those who weaponized our agencies.
This past July, DNI Gabbard declassified a tranche of documents that she says prove the Obama administration manipulated intelligence to sell the Russia-collusion narrative to the American people. She did not leak soundbites — she put paperwork on the table and dared the political class to explain themselves, exposing the mechanics of how a narrative was built and pushed.
The cable news establishment predictably reacted with sputtering outrage, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins tried to frame Gabbard’s actions as a craven bid for political favor — a question that spectacularly backfired when Gabbard calmly corrected the premise and made the press look petty and dishonest. Instead of doing their job and vetting the documents, many outlets tried to drown out the facts, even cutting feeds when inconvenient truth-telling began.
Even the Justice Department — finally forced to reckon with these new revelations — has opened a formal assessment of the claims that top officials politicized intelligence to undermine a presidency, which is the kind of accountability the public has been demanding for years. If there’s one lesson from this episode, it’s that power without accountability breeds abuse, and the rule of law must apply to every administration.
Not everyone is taking the declassification in good faith; veteran intelligence officers have rushed to defend the old assessments, calling the new allegations misleading and disputing Gabbard’s reading of the record. That defensive posture only proves the point: when an institution gestures more to preserving its reputation than to the truth, reformers are right to pry open the doors and let sunlight in.
Americans should be grateful we have a DNI willing to risk personal attacks to tell us what happened. Conservatives who love this country know that exposing corruption is not partisan — it’s patriotism — and Gabbard’s courage to unmask institutional wrongdoing deserves support, not the usual media smear campaign designed to protect the permanent bureaucracy.
The real story here is bigger than one news segment or one embarrassed reporter; it is about restoring faith in our institutions and making sure those who abuse intelligence to play politics face consequences. Hardworking Americans deserve an intelligence community that defends the nation, not one that participates in political warfare, and it’s time Washington listened to that straightforward demand for truth and accountability.
