The National Intelligence Director, Tulsi Gabbard, said Monday that she has stripped the security authorities of former national security officials, Manhattan’s district prosecutor who secured a sentence for a serious crime against Donald Trump and a lawyer who represented a government complainant who triggered the first case of trial trial against Trump.
The decision is the last example of the unprecedented use of Trump administration security authorizations to go after perceived political opponents.
The Gabbard movement, announced in X, followed by an executive order that Trump issued shortly after its inauguration to a second mandate as president in January, which required that security authorizations for 49 former national security officials be revoked. The former officers signed a letter more than four years ago, which suggests that Russia could have played a role in amplifying accusations about the son of Biden Hunter as part of a broader effort to influence the result of the 2020 elections.
In his executive order, Trump accused the signatories of the Charter of “Deceptive and Inappropriate Political Coordination” with the presidential campaign of Joe Biden in 2020.
Trump’s order also asked the National Intelligence Director to review the security authorizations of others inside and outside the government that participated in an “inappropriate activity” related to the letter. The former senior officials have repeatedly denied Trump’s statement.
Gabbard said he had revoked security authorizations and prohibited access to classified information for Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State for the Biden Administration; Jake Sullivan, Biden National Security Advisor; and Lisa Monaco, who supervised the prosecutions against Trump’s supporters who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.
According to Trump’s previous vote, Gabbard said the daily intelligence information session for the president would not share with Biden.
Traditionally, the presidential daily information session has been shared with former presidents, but Biden suspended Trump’s practice.
Gabbard also canceled the security authorization for the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, who won a civil fraud judgment against Trump last year. In that case, a judge discovered that Trump defrauded the banks by inflating their net assets in the financial statements. Gabbard also revoked Alvin Bragg’s security authorization, Manhattan’s district prosecutor who secured a condemnation against Trump for a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 elections through a payment of money from silence to an adult film actor who said they had both sexual relations.
Under the action of Gabbard, Mark Zaid, a lawyer who has represented complainants in the intelligence community for years, was stripped of his security authorization. Zaid represented an intelligence officer who filed a complaint from complainants to Congress in 2019 for a phone call during Trump’s first mandate, in which he seemed to press the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to take measures to help the Trump 2020 re -election campaign. The complaint caused a political trial investigation in the Chamber. The camera was formally accused of the camera and acquitted by the Senate.
Zaid said that, according to the law, he was entitled to due process on his security authorization.
“It is not surprising, as I would expect in an authoritarian state, I have not received any. It is obviously obvious that this action is nothing more than small reprisals because I represent my clients effectively in holding the Trump administration for their actions, ”said Zaid in an email.
Zaid has had a security authorization for almost 25 years, he said. During Trump’s first mandate, the Trump administration granted ZAID a high -level high secret authorization for a complainant case involving a case of the National Security Department, he said.
Kevin Carroll, who has represented intelligence officers demanding the government, said the movement against Zaid could force complainants to seek other more risky ways to get attention to their concerns.
“We should not want the complainants in the intelligence community to go to Julian Assange,” Carroll said, referring to the founder of Wikileaks. “We should want them to go to authorized lawyers as Mark Zaid.”
A former National Security official said that the decision will hinder the Trump administration, since he holds with a variety of global threats, because he will be deprived of consulting with his predecessors that may have information to share.
“It does not affect the people who had authorizations. It impacts people on the government that they might need to consult with them, ”said the former official. “They will not have the benefit of reaching the former senior officials who have treated serious threats in progress.”
Trump said last week that he is discarding authorizations for lawyers in the prominent law firm of Washington of Covington and Burling. The firm, which uses lawyers who worked for previous democratic presidents, had helped former special advisor Jack Smith, who directed the prosecutions against Trump for his management of classified documents and their efforts to annul the results of the 2020 elections.
After Trump won re -election last year, both cases were dismissed. The policy of the Justice Department prohibits a acting president.
