Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) used his Sunday appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation" to launch a broadside against Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, declaring flatly that she is not competent for her position. Gabbard, for her part, had already drawn first blood — issuing a statement accusing Warner of repeatedly lying to the American people.
The exchange marks the sharpest public confrontation yet between the Senate's top intelligence Democrat and the woman now running the nation's intelligence apparatus. And it tells you everything you need to know about how threatened the old guard feels.
As Breitbart News reported, host Margaret Brennan set the table by reading from Gabbard's statement, which accused Warner of serial dishonesty and noted that the director said she never had the whistleblower complaint in her possession, seeing the hard copy for the first time only two weeks ago. Brennan asked Warner to respond.
He didn't hold back:
"I do not believe that Director Gabbard is competent for her position. I don't believe that she is making America safer by not following the rules and procedures on getting whistleblower complaint to the Congress in a timely fashion. I believe she's been totally inappropriate showing up on a domestic criminal investigation in Georgia around voting machines. I think she has not been appropriate or competent in terms of, frankly, cutting back on, investigations into foreign malign influence, literally dismembering the foreign malign influence center that is at the director of National intelligence."
That's a lot of accusations packed into one breath. Let's unpack what Warner is actually upset about — because the substance is more revealing than the outrage.
Warner's most telling complaint is about the so-called foreign malign influence center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He describes its reduction as "dismembering." What he doesn't mention is what that center actually produced during its tenure under the previous administration — a sprawling apparatus that conveniently blurred the line between monitoring foreign threats and policing domestic speech.
Conservatives watched for years as "foreign malign influence" became the all-purpose justification for intelligence community involvement in suppressing disfavored viewpoints online. The label was elastic enough to cover everything from actual Russian bot farms to Hunter Biden's laptop. Restructuring that center isn't incompetence. It's a course correction.
Warner frames this as making America less safe. A more honest framing: Gabbard is dismantling an infrastructure that the intelligence community used to launder political censorship as national security. The people who built that infrastructure don't like watching it come apart. That's not a scandal — that's accountability.
Warner also claims Gabbard failed to deliver a whistleblower complaint to Congress in a timely fashion. He cited testimony from Gabbard's own general counsel — now serving as deputy general counsel — who reportedly told a congressional body this week that he had shared Gabbard's legal obligations with her back in June.
Gabbard's response, as relayed by Brennan, is straightforward: she never had the complaint in her possession and saw the actual hard copy for the first time two weeks ago.
These are competing claims. Warner presents it as a settled fact. But notice what's missing from his account:
Warner wants the public to accept that being told about your legal obligations is the same as receiving a document. Those are not the same thing. A lawyer telling you "here's what you're required to do if you receive X" is not the same as handing you X.
The senator also called Gabbard "totally inappropriate" for "showing up on a domestic criminal investigation in Georgia around voting machines." He offered no case name, no specific details, and no explanation of what Gabbard allegedly did that was inappropriate — just the assertion.
This is how Washington operates when the facts are thin. You name a state, mention an investigation, imply wrongdoing, and let the audience fill in the rest. It's an innuendo dressed as oversight.
Step back and look at what's actually happening. The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee — a man who spent years defending an intelligence community that spied on a presidential campaign, laundered opposition research through FISA courts, and suppressed legitimate news stories before an election — is lecturing Tulsi Gabbard about competence.
Warner's frustration is real, but it isn't about whistleblower procedures or Georgia voting machines. It's about control. For decades, the intelligence community operated as a bipartisan fiefdom where oversight was a performance and reform was a talking point. Gabbard represents something the permanent intelligence class genuinely fears: a director who doesn't owe them anything.
That's why the attacks come in bulk — throw enough accusations at once and hope something sticks. Whistleblower timing. Georgia. Foreign influence centers. Each one vague enough to sound damning, none specific enough to verify.
Gabbard called Warner a liar. Warner called Gabbard incompetent. As he put it himself:
"We are going to agree to disagree about who's telling the truth."
At least that part was honest.
The intelligence community spent the better part of a decade asking Americans to trust it without question. Gabbard's sin, in Warner's eyes, isn't incompetence — it's that she stopped asking permission.
