Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday night that she was dismissing more than 100 employees of the US intelligence community (IC) who participated in “obscene, pornographic, and sexually explicit” chatrooms on a government messaging platform.
Gabbard told Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” that the spooks — who were exposed by conservative activist Christopher Rufo for having discussed their fetishes and sexual fantasies on the National Security Agency (NSA) Intelink platform — had committed “an egregious violation of trust.”
“When you see what these people were saying,” she told Watters, “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?” she asked. “Certainly not over the last four years, certainly not over the last 10, maybe 20 years, [as] we look at some of the biggest violations of the American people’s trust in the intelligence community.”
The cabinet official issued a memo earlier Tuesday calling for the termination of every employee, ranging from those at the Defense Intelligence Agency to US Naval Intelligence to the NSA, and the revocation of their security clearances by week’s end, according to DNI spokeswoman Alexa Henning.
“These disgusting chat groups were immediately shut down when [President Trump] issued his EO ending the DEI insanity the Biden Admin was obsessed with,” Gabbard, 43, also wrote on X. “Our IC must be focused on our core mission: ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.”
The chat logs, first reported in City Journal by Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, showed LGBTQ employees discussing polyamory, pronoun usage, sex lives and gender transition procedures between 2022 and 2024.
“[G]etting my butthole zapped by a laser was ‘shocking,’” said one employee talking about a procedure.
“Medical science is going to give me tits one way or another,” added a second employee.
“An intersex birth would be a great opportunity to raise a kid as non-binary and let them choose later,” a third offered.
Other chat logs in the “LBTQA” and “IC_Pride_TWG” Intelink Messenger groups reveal the employees accusing Gabbard of being a “Russian agent.”
Online “work” meetings of the chat groups included titles like “privilege,” “ally awareness,” “pride,” and “transgender community inclusion,” according to a current and former NSA employee who leaked the chats to Rufo.
“NSA is aware of posts that appear to show inappropriate discussions by IC personnel,” the agency posted in a Tuesday statement on X. “IC collaboration platforms are intended to drive mission outcomes. Potential misuse of these platforms by a small group of individuals does not represent the community. Investigations to address this misuse of government systems are ongoing.”
Gabbard noted in her Fox News interview that the messages were “just barely scratching the surface” of the rot within the intel community.
