U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday evening on Fox News that the CIA’s swamp is “worse” than she had anticipated. Before Gabbard’s confirmation, the CIA reportedly offered payouts to its entire workforce, with Trump administration officials telling The Wall Street Journal that the move was a signal to help those opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda find other employment.
On The Ingraham Angle, Fox host Laura Ingraham asked Gabbard, “on a scale of one to 10, how swampy is the intel community?” Gabbard began: “I knew it was bad coming in. It’s worse than I thought in a lot of different ways. I’d love to come back and talk to you as we pull back the layers of getting rid of the weaponization within the intelligence community, the politicization and those who are frankly trying to shape intelligence according to their own view or their own agenda rather than just providing our policymakers and the president with that unbiased, accurate, timely intelligence that they need to make their decisions.”
“This example that we just talked about, where the Biden administration released these known or suspected terrorists or those with links to ISIS terrorists back into our country, you look at the dereliction of duty of that. But you also recognize this is one form of that politicization, where the Biden administration was so afraid of being labeled Islamophobes, they took this pro-Islamist bent in endangering our own national security that we see in that example,” Gabbard added.
According to an August 2024 report from the House Judiciary Committee, between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, Border Patrol agents encountered more than 250 illegal migrants on the terrorist watchlist along the southern border. Following these encounters, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly released an estimated 99 of these individuals back into the U.S. without further detention.
“But we’ve also seen with the pro-Hamas rallies on streets across the country and the riots. So we see now with President Trump, he and I and others in the national security team are focusing our resources back where they belong, on keeping the American people safe and getting rid of those who seek to do us harm,” Gabbard said. Since Gabbard assumed her new position as director, the CIA has reportedly dismissed several Biden-era employees, according to The New York Times. With Trump continuing to push for government spending cuts, the outlet reported that a group of “probationary employees” were let go.
