In Washington, personnel decisions are never just about paperwork. They’re about power, trust, and whether the intelligence community is truly accountable to the people it serves. That reality came into sharp relief last month when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 individuals, including senior deputies tied to CIA Director John Ratcliffe, without advance notice to the White House.
According to several officials familiar with the matter, the move left Trump advisers blindsided, scrambling to understand how such a sweeping decision had been executed without their prior review. The absence of a direct paper trail from the President added to the confusion. By the time the White House fully grasped what had happened, the clearances of long-time CIA officers—some directly involved in sensitive military operations—were already gone.
The list even reached into Congress, stripping clearance from Maher Bitar, national security adviser to Senator Adam Schiff, and Thomas West, an aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That raised alarms of a looming separation-of-powers dispute. Washington thrives on precedent, and this step signaled that partisan staffers could no longer assume perpetual access to the nation’s most sensitive intelligence.
Several of the President’s advisers remain frustrated, describing the episode as a misstep at a time when skepticism toward the intelligence bureaucracy is already running high. Trump himself has openly questioned the usefulness of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, even musing about dismantling it altogether. The tension only deepened longstanding friction between Gabbard and the CIA, whose officers draft the President’s Daily Brief that she delivers.
Advisers complained that Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff, Alexa Henning, provided no clear explanation of how the names were chosen or what evidence justified the revocations. But a senior intelligence official countered that Gabbard personally told the President in the Oval Office she had identified officers who worked on the disputed 2016 assessments of Russian interference—assessments that Trump and his allies have long argued were politicized. “The CIA just wants to blame ODNI all the time,” the official said.
Trump’s response was blunt. If those individuals had been involved in the Russia assessments and still held federal jobs, he said, they should be removed. The official stressed that Gabbard’s list had, in fact, been circulated by email to senior White House staff and intelligence chiefs.
The White House stood firmly behind Gabbard. “Director Gabbard is doing a phenomenal job and the White House has worked closely with her on implementing the President’s objectives,” a spokesperson said. “The entire administration is aligned on ensuring those who have weaponized their clearances to manipulate intelligence, leak classified intelligence without authorization, and many other egregious acts are held to account.”
That message fit squarely within the administration’s broader push to clean up what it views as entrenched flaws inside the intelligence world. To conservatives, the move was not just about punishing political adversaries, but about restoring accountability in institutions too often shielded from public scrutiny. Gabbard’s own memo made that clear: she wrote that her actions came at the President’s direction and targeted those guilty of “politicization or weaponization of intelligence” or leaking sensitive information. “Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege, not a right,” she declared. “Those in the Intelligence Community who betray their oath to the Constitution and put their own interests ahead of the interests of the American people have broken the sacred trust they promised to uphold.”
This episode follows an earlier executive order and continues a pattern that has already seen the revocation of clearances for high-profile adversaries, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, tied back to the first Trump impeachment. It underscores the administration’s willingness to confront a culture that too often confuses access with entitlement.
Despite friction, Gabbard is unlikely to face real consequences. She has weathered other moments of tension, including public disagreements with Trump over Iran’s nuclear program and a controversial video warning of nuclear annihilation that the President dismissed as self-promotional. Yet through it all, she has maintained her role at the center of intelligence oversight, carrying out directives that align with the President’s agenda.
The revocation of 37 clearances may have sparked internal debate, but it reflects a larger principle: national security clearances exist to serve the country, not individual careers or partisan agendas. For conservatives who have long warned of bureaucratic overreach and political games inside the intelligence community, this is exactly the kind of housecleaning moment they’ve been waiting for.
