Tulsi Tuesday

In case you forget she was once one of us

Ms. Gabbard, aka the Director of National Intelligence Gabbard, has pushed one of my big hot buttons. If she’s not careful, she’s gonna make me a fanboi.

“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,” she declared on Friday in a thread on X.

“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,” Gabbard added.

• “A leaker who has been sharing classified information with the Huffington Post”
• “A leaker within the IC sharing information on Israel / Iran with the Washington Post”
• “A leaker within the IC sharing information about the U.S. – Russia relationship with NBC”
• “A leaker sharing information on NCSC activities and actions with The Record” Fox News

Oohh, I think I just got some shivers….

How often do you see the phrase “from a source who isn’t authorized to release such information” or “isn’t authorized to disclose ”  – but they did?

Now, I know there are some ex-intel weenies amidst all the dickweeds (and dickweedettes)and it’s gotta piss you off at the double standard. How many times when you were read on did they threaten you with everything just short of being drawn and quartered (hmm, would that be sketched and bivuaced? Have to check that) if you talked out of school? How many times were you checked, IDed, even searched, when passing through the Portals of Doom going into a SCIF? Discuss some of the really fun stuff after too many at the local gasthaus and get a call to go visit some very humorless folks – now. And here are all these Beltway types who seem to blab everything but Trump’s and Putin’s equipment size…and both the media and the folks who SHOULD care just blow it off?

I get it, sometimes there is value in leaking something that would not otherwise be authorized to tell – say, like maybe that a lot of our MIRV targeting now ends in “Tehran” but we can’t directly threaten those peace-loving mullahs – but it’s out of hand. Forty YEARS ago the joke ran “the only difference between classified information and common knowledge is that common knowledge is harder to find” – nowadays, our intel agencies have become gigantic sieves. Good on yer, Tulsi, if you can actually stop some of it.

Now, on the flip side of the coin…there are complaints that many of the workers fired in the DOGE purge both had clearances and were not ‘read-off’ properly.

You have a clearance, you lose your access or your job, you get ‘read off’ and told not to say now what you couldn’t say last week, beware of that sultry Russian lass half your age (well, for many of the folks here…just don’t talk about work), and sign forms whose penalties which read like Masonic oaths.  If you have a government laptop you turn it in, your logins are deleted, etc. Well, some got missed.

The lack of so-called “read outs” for workers with clearances dismissed by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in February could raise security risks as they dealt with secret information on everything from managing nuclear weapons to protecting the power grid from influence by adversaries and ensuring the safety of U.S international development staffers, former security officials said.

Two sources with top security clearances dismissed by DOGE, one at the Department of Energy and one former senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, told Reuters they were not debriefed.

Another worker still at the DOE, said several of the 28 workers fired on Feb. 14 at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal, had clearances and were not debriefed. The fourth source is a person familiar with the situation at USAID.  Reuters

Interesting read. I would point out that while DOGE may have ordered dismissals, individual Departments like Energy are the ones who perform the actual firings, and are the ones responsible for dotting is and crossing ts. The examples cited are from only a few sources and other than the example at NNSA seem more onesy-twosy than systemic. Maybe this demonstrates incompetent management which itself should draw scrutiny, hmm?

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