Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard torched Sen. Mark Warner on Saturday, posting a detailed rebuttal on X after the Virginia Democrat accused her of burying a classified whistleblower complaint filed against her last May. Gabbard didn't mince words—she called Warner a liar and laid out a timeline she says exonerates her office entirely.
The complaint, filed by an unnamed U.S. intelligence official eight months ago, alleges wrongdoing on the part of Gabbard. Neither the contents nor the specific allegations have been revealed. What has been revealed is a political fight over process—specifically, how long the complaint sat before reaching Congress and who bears responsibility for the delay.
Warner says the law required Congress to receive the complaint within 21 days. Gabbard says that the requirement doesn't apply here. One of them is banking on the public not reading the fine print.
Gabbard's Saturday post was lengthy, specific, and combative. She went after Warner by name and accused him of coordinating with the media to mislead the public.
"Senator Mark Warner and his friends in the Propaganda Media have repeatedly lied to the American people that I or the ODNI 'hid' a whistleblower complaint in a safe for eight months. This is a blatant lie."
She then zeroed in on the custody chain—a detail Warner's framing conveniently omits. The complaint wasn't sitting in Gabbard's desk drawer. According to Gabbard, it was secured by Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson, who held possession of it for months before her successor, Inspector General Chris Fox, continued the same protocols, as Fox News reports.
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, in possession or control of the Whistleblower's complaint, so I obviously could not have 'hidden' it in a safe. Biden-era IC Inspector General Tamara Johnson was in possession of and responsible for securing the complaint for months."
That's a significant point. If the complaint spent the bulk of its life in the hands of a Biden-appointed inspector general, the "Gabbard buried it" narrative requires some creative rewriting of the calendar.
Warner's accusation rests on a specific legal claim: that the statute required the complaint to reach Congress within 21 days of filing. Gabbard's rebuttal rests on an equally specific legal distinction—one that matters far more than Warner seems to want anyone to notice.
"The '21 day' requirement that Senator Warner alleges I did not comply with, only applies when a complaint is determined by the Inspector General to be both urgent AND apparently credible. That was NOT the case here."
An inspector general representative told the Wall Street Journal that it had determined some of the allegations in the complaint weren't credible, while it hasn't decided on others. If the complaint failed the credibility threshold, the 21-day clock never started. Warner's entire legal argument collapses into a talking point.
Gabbard said she was first notified by Chris Fox on December 4 that she needed to provide security guidance on how to share the complaint with Congress. She wrote that she took immediate action and that the IC Inspector General shared the complaint and referenced intelligence with relevant members of Congress last week. Fox hand-delivered it to the Gang of 8.
Gabbard offered Warner a choice:
Either he knows these facts and is intentionally lying to the American people, or he doesn't have a clue how these things work and is therefore not qualified to be in the U.S. Senate.
Both options are unflattering. Neither is implausible.
Warner, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NPR on Thursday that the situation was straightforward:
"The law is clear."
He added that the complaint was required to be sent to Congress within 21 days of its filing and said he believed it was an effort to bury the whistleblower complaint. His office told Fox News Digital that Gabbard's post was an "inaccurate attack that's entirely on brand for someone who has already and repeatedly proven she's unqualified to serve as DNI."
Notice what's missing from Warner's response: any engagement with Gabbard's actual legal argument. She cited the credibility threshold. He repeated, "The law is clear." She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint for months. He said she buried it. The accusation doesn't change no matter how many times the defense is stated—which tells you everything about whether this is a legal dispute or a political operation.
Sen. Tom Cotton reviewed the complaint and the inspector general's handling of it, then posted his assessment on X Thursday:
"I agree with both inspectors general who have evaluated the matter: the complaint is not credible and the inspectors general and the DNI took the necessary steps to ensure the material has handled and transmitted appropriately in accordance with law."
Cotton didn't stop there. He framed the entire episode as part of a broader pattern—one that should sound familiar to anyone who watched the last decade of Washington politics.
"To be frank, it seems like just another effort by the president's critics in and out of government to undermine policies that they don't like; it's definitely not credible allegations of waste, fraud, or abuse."
Cotton's characterization carries weight here. He's a Republican on the intelligence committee who has actually read the classified material. Warner has read it too—but Warner's public statements focus on process timelines, not the substance of what's in the complaint. That asymmetry is telling.
One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that disclosing the complaint's contents could cause "grave damage to national security." That's a detail worth sitting with. The same complaint Democrats are using to attack Gabbard is apparently so sensitive that its mere disclosure would be dangerous—and yet the political pressure campaign to publicize the dispute around it rolls forward without hesitation.
This is the contradiction at the heart of Warner's gambit. He wants maximum political damage from a complaint whose contents he can't discuss, filed by a person he can't name, about allegations an inspector general has partly deemed not credible. The weapon isn't the complaint itself. It's the accusation that it was hidden.
The whistleblower's lawyer accused Gabbard's office of slow-walking the complaint. Gabbard's office called the accusation "baseless and politically motivated."
Washington has a well-worn formula for this kind of fight. A classified complaint surfaces through media leaks. The substance remains hidden—conveniently immune to public scrutiny—while the process debate dominates headlines. The accused can't fully defend herself without compromising classified material. The accuser gets to imply the worst while risking nothing.
Gabbard, to her credit, engaged on the specifics. She named the Biden-era inspector general who held the complaint. She cited the legal standard Warner ignored. She provided a timeline with dates. Warner responded with a sentence fragment and a character attack.
The question isn't whether the complaint was in a safe for eight months. Everyone agrees it was. The question is whether Gabbard put it there—or whether a Biden appointee did, following standard protocol for classified material that didn't meet the credibility bar for expedited congressional review.
Warner knows the answer. He's counting on everyone else not to ask the question.
