A top aide to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Monday called Rupert Murdoch’s flagship paper “utter trash,” directly disputing a report in the Wall Street Journal about a highly classified whistleblower complaint from an intelligence official against the director earlier this year.   

The comment from DNI Deputy chief of staff Alexa Henning followed WSJ’s reporting on Monday that Gabbard was the subject of a highly classified whistleblower complaint earlier this year. However, Henning says, the paper buried “13 paragraphs down” the fact that the agency’s Biden-era inspector general deemed several of the allegations “weren’t credible.”  

“As if the [WSJ] needed to provide more examples of how it’s utter trash,” Henning wrote in a post to X. “Here’s the truth: There was no wrongdoing by [DNI Gabbard], a fact that WSJ conveniently buried 13 paragraphs down. Even the Biden-era IC IG came to this collusion [sic] the Whistleblower’s allegations against DNI Gabbard were not credible.”

The paper reported in an exclusive story that Gabbard faced the complaint from an intelligence official who alleged wrongdoing last May, but that the agency is “wrangling” over how to send it to Congress. 

The WSJ said it was unable to determine the subject of the complaint, but that one anonymous official said its contents could cause “grave damage to national security.” 

Gabbard’s deputy chief says the complaint bears all the hallmarks of a “Deep State” plot, following the same pattern that generated the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative in 2017. 

“Politically motivated weaponization of their position in the IC [by an official], submitting a baseless complaint and then burying it in highly classified information to create 1) false intrigue, 2) a manufactured narrative, and 3) conditions which make it substantially more difficult to produce 'security guidance' for transmittal to Congress,” Henning wrote. 

“This is what Brennan, Clapper, Comey, Obama did with the 2017 Russia Hoax ICA. They put the fake Steele Dossier in the highest classified version so they could manipulate Congress and the American people that the bs in that dossier was true and ‘highly classified,’” she continued.