Senate Democrats were not going to let Tulsi Gabbard become Director of National Intelligence without a fight.
They reached for the Deep State's playbook to take her down.
Now the FBI has opened a criminal investigation – and someone on that committee is about to have a very bad year.
Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats Leaked Classified NSA Intelligence to the New York Times
The NSA intercepted two Hezbollah terrorists discussing Tulsi Gabbard's 2017 trip to Syria.
The intercept was classified.
It was also in the hands of Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats before it surfaced in a New York Times story published January 28, 2025 – right in the middle of Gabbard's confirmation fight for Director of National Intelligence.
The Times used the intercept to imply Gabbard had met with a top Hezbollah leader during that Syria visit – a claim she denied and that the NSA itself concluded was false.
The NSA investigated the disclosure, confirmed the leaked material matched one of its intercepts, and identified Senate Intelligence Committee Democrat staffers who had access to it before the Times story ran.
The agency filed a criminal referral with the Justice Department.
Nobody at DOJ's senior leadership was ever told it existed – and it sat untouched for months until it crossed Kash Patel's desk a few weeks ago.
Patel moved immediately.
Kash Patel Opened a Criminal Investigation the Moment He Found Out
This is not the first time Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee have had a classified leak problem.
In 2018, the committee's own security director – James Wolfe, who had run the panel's security operation for nearly three decades – pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about passing nonpublic committee information to a reporter he was involved with romantically.
Wolfe served two months in federal prison.
Democrats on that same committee apparently decided the lesson did not apply to them.
The current investigation has already expanded beyond the original NSA referral – FBI counterintelligence agents are now examining additional leaks and media contacts tied to committee Democrats.
This is a growing federal criminal probe, not a single-incident review.
Gabbard Has Been Dismantling the Deep State Leak Pipeline Since Day One
The leak targeting Gabbard did not happen in a vacuum – it was part of a coordinated effort by career intelligence bureaucrats to block anyone who threatened their operation.
Gabbard has spent her tenure as DNI taking that operation apart piece by piece.
Earlier this year she referred multiple intelligence community leakers to the DOJ, calling them out by name as "deep-state criminals" leaking classified material for partisan purposes.
She locked Five Eyes partners out of classified Ukraine negotiation intelligence – cutting off the pipeline that had been feeding sensitive material to political allies for years.
The declassified documents she released proved Obama administration officials directed the creation of a Russia collusion assessment they knew was built on fabricated intelligence.
In April, she sent criminal referrals to the DOJ targeting the whistleblower and former Inspector General Michael Atkinson – the men whose Ukraine complaint became the pretext for Trump's first impeachment hoax – and released transcripts Atkinson's team had kept locked in a safe for six years.
Senate Democrats knew exactly what Gabbard's confirmation meant for the machine they had spent years building.
So they grabbed a classified NSA intercept, handed it to the Times, and let the implication do the work.
Kash Patel just made sure there are consequences.
Sources:
- John Solomon, "FBI Probing Senate Intel Democrats for Possible Classified Leaks, Spurred by NSA Criminal Referral," Just the News, May 7, 2026.
- "ODNI Sends Criminal Referrals to DOJ for Ex-IG, Whistleblower Tied to Trump Impeachment," Fox News, April 16, 2026.
- "Ex-Senate Intel Staffer James Wolfe Was at Center of FBI FISA Leak Inquiry," Fox News, December 18, 2018.
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Press Release No. 06-26, April 13, 2026.
