Newly minted Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a directive Tuesday to terminate the employment of and revoke security clearances of employees who have been caught up in an alleged explicit conversation scandal.
According to Fox News, employees at the National Security Agency (NSA) had participated in obscene and explicit chatroom conversations using the agency’s “Interlink” messaging platform.
During an interview on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Gabbard said there were over 100 employees who had violated the trust of the agency.
“There are over 100 people from across the intelligence community that contributed to and participated in … what is really just an egregious violation of trust. What to speak of, like basic rules and standards around professionalism,” Gabbard said.
Officials have said the employees under investigation used the messaging platform to share their sexual fantasies under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Chat logs from the NSA’s “Intelink” messaging platform, obtained by the Manhattan Institute, revealed discussions among intelligence agency employees about gender-reassignment surgery, artificial genitalia, hormone therapy, polyamory, and pronoun usage. Agencies involved reportedly include the Defense Intelligence Agency, U.S. Naval Intelligence, and the NSA, per Fox News.
Following the release of these logs, an NSA spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the agency is “actively investigating” potential abuses of the platform.
“We got to take a step back because this is just barely scratching the surface,” Gabbard told Watters.
She continued: “They were brazen in using an NSA platform intended for professional use to conduct this kind of really, really horrific behavior. And they were brazen in doing this because when was the last time anyone was really held accountable? Certainly not over the last four years, certainly not over the last 10, maybe 20 years, and we look at some of the biggest violations of the American people’s trust in the intelligence community.”
Gabbard added this is only the beginning of holding intelligence employees accountable for misconduct and the Trump administration’s goal to “clean house.”
According to the Manhattan Institute’s senior fellow Christopher Rufo, the chat logs came from DEI-focused groups that were hosted on the NSA’s Interlink, who added sources had come to him indicating the sexually explicit chats were given legitimacy through the NSA’s DEI efforts.
The source further stated that the messages were part of DEI-focused employee resource groups, highjacked by activists who held meetings with titles such as “Privilege,” Ally Awareness,” “Pride,” and “Transgender Community Inclusion.”
