Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday that more than 100 intelligence officers from 15 agencies had been fired for sexually explicit discussions on a government chat tool.
The chat program was administered by the National Security Agency and intended for discussions of sensitive security matters. But a group of employees used it for discussions that contained sexual themes, intelligence officials said this week. The chats also included explicit discussion of gender transition surgery, officials said.
Transcripts of the chat were first disclosed Monday by Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who writes for City Journal.
Appearing Tuesday evening on Fox News, Ms. Gabbard said she had issued a directive to fire more than 100 people who participated in the discussions and to strip the officers of their security clearances. She said the chats were an “egregious violation of trust” that violated “basic rules and standards” of workplace professionalism.
A spokeswoman for the office said on X that Ms. Gabbard had sent a memo to all intelligence agencies asking them to identify all employees who had participated in “sexually explicit chat rooms” on the N.S.A. tool by Friday.
Ms. Gabbard put her actions in the larger context of her efforts to depoliticize the intelligence community and the Trump administration’s efforts to hold employees accountable.
“Today’s action, in holding these individuals accountable, is just the beginning of what we are seeing across the Trump administration,” Ms. Gabbard said. She added that officials had moved to “clean house, root out that rot and corruption, and weaponization and politicization, so we can start to rebuild that trust in these institutions.”
The Central Intelligence Agency and Ms. Gabbard’s office have moved to fire an undisclosed number of employees who worked on diversity issues during the Biden administration. That action was paused by a federal judge who was reviewing the action and was expected to make a ruling on Thursday.
Unlike with the explicit chats, there is no allegation of wrongdoing by the officers involved in recruiting and diversity efforts, and the officers have sued the government arguing they should be offered other posts.
In her appearance on Fox, Ms. Gabbard said the Trump administration was going to seek to get rid of officers whose primary loyalty was to themselves, and not to the United States or its Constitution. She said after she took the action to fire the people involved in the chats, other officers came forward to tell her about other inappropriate activity.
“People are stepping forward because they are all on board with the mission to clean house and refocus on our core mission of serving the American people,” Ms. Gabbard said.
