Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard escalated her campaign to relitigate the circumstances of Trump’s first impeachment this week, releasing a batch of newly declassified documents and sending criminal referrals to the Department of Justice targeting a former intelligence community whistleblower and ex-Inspector General Michael Atkinson.
The documents, released on Monday April 13, include investigative materials used by Atkinson during his 2019 preliminary review of the Ukraine whistleblower complaint. Also released were two transcripts from Atkinson’s closed-door congressional testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, which had been withheld from the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings.
Gabbard framed the release in sweeping language. “Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States,” she said in an official statement from her office.
She accused Atkinson of relying on second-hand information from the whistleblower and two witnesses she described as politically biased. One of those witnesses is described in the documents as a co-author of the 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which Gabbard has previously described as fabricated.
Atkinson, a former career Justice Department lawyer who was fired by Trump in April 2020, has maintained that he carried out his duties faithfully and without partisan motivation. He and the DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the criminal referrals.
The referrals were confirmed by a spokesperson for Gabbard’s office, though specific alleged crimes were not disclosed publicly. Whether federal prosecutors open an investigation remains entirely at their discretion.
Democratic lawmakers dismissed the documents as falling well short of Gabbard’s characterisation of them. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said: “Director Gabbard’s latest claims aren’t about accountability. They’re about rewriting history to serve Donald Trump. She has shown a willingness to say or do whatever it takes to stay in his good graces.”
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Atkinson had been correct to find the whistleblower complaint credible and share it with Congress. He pushed back on the framing that the original impeachment inquiry was manufactured rather than grounded in legitimate oversight concerns.
A spokesperson for Gabbard’s office defended the release. “Legacy media spent years propping up Democrats who peddled these talking points, and now DNI Gabbard has declassified evidence showing they were wrong,” said Olivia Coleman, the ODNI spokeswoman. She urged the public to “review the evidence for themselves and stop listening to the members of Congress who steered the public wrong once before.”
Critics have noted a broader pattern in Gabbard’s tenure at the ODNI. The criminal referrals follow a similar move last year when her office released files tied to the intelligence community’s Russia investigation, claiming they revealed a “treasonous conspiracy” by officials from the Biden era. Former CIA Director John Brennan and others linked to that inquiry were subsequently subpoenaed in a federal probe based in Florida, though no charges have been filed.
Democrats on the intelligence committees warned this week that Gabbard appears to be building an evidentiary and institutional architecture designed to cast doubt on Democratic electoral victories ahead of the November 2026 midterms. Gabbard is also reported to be leading a separate effort to investigate fraud claims related to the 2020 election in Arizona, Georgia and Puerto Rico, and was present during FBI seizures of voting equipment in Fulton County, Georgia, last year.
The whistleblower at the centre of the original 2019 complaint has never been formally identified in official proceedings. The complaint raised concerns about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump requested an investigation into then-Vice President Joe Biden. Trump was impeached by the House in December 2019 and acquitted by the Senate in early 2020 in a largely party-line vote.
The political context surrounding Gabbard’s moves is significant. Her actions consistently serve a dual purpose: they give the Trump White House a stream of declassification news that feeds its base, and they place the intelligence apparatus she now leads in a posture of confrontation with its own prior institutional conclusions. Whether the DOJ acts on the referrals or not, Gabbard has ensured the 2019 impeachment remains a live political controversy heading into an election year.
