Inspector General confirms whistleblower complaint against Tulsi Gabbard ‘did not appear credible’

The Intelligence Community Inspector General transmitted a letter to Congress on Monday confirming that his predecessor judged a May 2025 whistleblower's complaint alleging wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard “did not appear credible," Just the News has learned. 

The handling of that whistleblower complaint by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was first reported on Monday by The Wall Street Journal, which repeated the whistleblower’s allegation that Gabbard had stalled transmission of the complaint to Congress. The paper buried the fact that the acting Intelligence Community Inspector General assessed that the allegations against Gabbard did not appear credible, while others were not capable of being substantiated.

The assessment by the current Inspector General, who was appointed after the complaint, confirms to Congress his predecessor’s findings and also provides new details about the allegations against Gabbard, the letter, which was reviewed by Just the News, shows. That letter was transmitted to the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. 

According to the Intelligence Community watchdog Christopher Fox, the whistleblower submitted a complaint on May 25, 2025, alleging that Gabbard restricted the distribution of a “highly sensitive intelligence report for political reasons” and that the responsible general counsel’s office failed to report the “potential crime” to the Justice Department.  

IG: "The claims “did not appear credible”

His predecessor, acting Inspector General Tamara Johnson, determined on June 4, 2025, that “if true” the allegation amounted to a matter of “urgent concern” but was not able to assess the credibility of the allegations. 

Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, “urgent concerns” are matters that “an IC employee reasonably believes to evidence violations of law, rule or regulation; gross mismanagement; gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”

However, in a follow-up determination after reviewing new evidence, she assessed that the claims “did not appear credible,” the current Inspector General wrote. “On June 9, 2025, after receiving newly-obtained evidence, Acting IC IG Johnson issued a supplemental determination memorandum, finding that the first allegation did not appear credible while remaining unable to assess the apparent credibility of the second allegation,” Inspector General Christopher Fox wrote to the leadership of the House and Senate intelligence panels. 

Further, Fox told the congressional leaders that in a fresh review of the whistleblower’s allegations, he would disagree with his predecessor’s determination that the matter met the definition of “urgent concern” under statute. 

Separately, the Inspector General’s letter addresses the whistleblower’s claims that Gabbard has stonewalled the disclosure of the complaint to Congress. The whistleblower alleged that Gabbard did so by failing to provide the necessary security guidance because the complaint contains highly classified information.  

After Fox was confirmed and made aware of the complaint, he “immediately prioritized [his office’s] transmittal of this complaint to Congress” and asked the acting DNI general counsel to provide the required “security guidance” to do so. 

However, when he met personally with Gabbard about a month after his confirmation, she said that she was never informed of the responsibility to produce such guidance. 

Same playbook as false allegations against Trump

“In my meeting with Director Gabbard, I inquired about the security guidance, and she revealed to me that the Acting General Counsel prior to Mr. Dever's confirmation had never informed her of the outstanding requirement for this security guidance, nor had she received any request from IC OIG,” Fox wrote. 

“Upon learning it was one of my office's top priorities, Director Gabbard committed to providing the guidance as soon as practicable,” he added. 

Earlier this week, Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff said the whistleblower’s complaint bears the hallmarks of “politically motivated weaponization” designed to gin up “false intrigue" and contrive a narrative damaging to Gabbard, Just the News previously reported. She compared it to how senior Obama administration intelligence officials helped gin up the debunked Trump-Russia collusion allegations. 

The same playbook was also used by an Intelligence Community whistleblower to file a complaint against President Donald Trump in 2019 alleging that Trump used a call with Zelensky to pressure the Ukraine leader to investigate allegations the Biden family had a corrupt relationship with energy company Burisma Holdings, and that Trump tried to tie U.S. foreign aid to the request. 

The transcript of the call eventually was released showing Trump did not tie U.S. aid to his request, thus undermining the original complaint. But, the narrative had been set, widely repeated in legacy media, and House Democrats proceeded to impeach Trump before the Senate acquitted him at trial.