Sen. Ron Wyden's cryptic warning
You won't find this exploration in the traditional national press
On Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) made public a brief letter he sent to the director of the CIA. Consensus among those who cover intelligence services is that Sen. Wyden wanted it on the record that he has “deep concerns about CIA activities.”
It’s known to civil libertarians as a warning: ‘Watch this space closely because there is something happening that I can’t yet talk about because it’s classified.’ The Wyden Siren.
The Senator joined the Intelligence Committee in 2001, making him its longest serving member, and he has consistently championed privacy rights and criticized surveillance.
As an example of this warning and its outcome, analyst Spencer Ackerman notes that in 2011, Sen. Wyden was worried about surveillance being undertaken under the auspices of the Patriot Act.
And it was clear from context that what worried Wyden was the just-reauthorized Section 215, which permitted federal law enforcement to get customer records from businesses with neither notification nor a judge’s order. I asked Wyden about that. “It is fair to say that the business-records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming,” was his answer. We went with a story headlined There’s A Secret PATRIOT Act, Senator Says. I did my best.
It would take Edward Snowden, two years later, to reveal what Wyden was talking about. The “gap” Wyden mentioned was a bit of lawyering the NSA and the Justice Department performed to shoehorn the NSA’s secret collection of all Americans’ phone records—begun after 9/11 by the NSA in blatant violation of existing surveillance law and, more fundamentally, the Constitution’s First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments—into an act of Congress. I was lucky enough to be on that story for The Guardian. Finally I understood an interview I had done years before.
I say all that to say this: The vaguer Ron Wyden is, the worse things are. And yesterday, Wyden released maybe the vaguest warning I’ve ever seen him release (emphasis added).
His track record is remarkable:
Wyden has used this same approach to expose ICE illegally collecting millions of Americans’ financial records through bulk administrative subpoenas—a program that was hastily shut down the moment Wyden’s office started asking questions about it. He’s caught the government gathering push notification data from Apple and Google while forbidding those companies from telling anyone about it. He’s questioned domain seizures, the FBI’s power to look at your browsing history without a warrant, and countless other government activities that were happening in secret.
There have been several headlines this week about Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. The DNI oversees intelligence agencies. The director of the CIA reports to the DNI, who is not involved in law enforcement.
First, Gabbard has tabled a whistleblower complaint (supposedly it’s in a safe) for almost a year. According to the Intelligence Community Inspector General, in a letter to Congress, distribution of the “highly classified intelligence report” was restricted for “political reasons” and “that an intelligence agency lawyer had failed to report a potential crime to the Justice Department.” Republicans yawned.
Second, we also learned that last year Gabbard seized voting equipment used in 2024 in Puerto Rico. (Although they are US citizens, Puerto Ricans cannot vote in presidential elections and are not represented in Congress.) The investigation sought to determine if Venezuela had tampered with ballots. The investigation did not substantiate the claim. However, it provided precedent for the DNI to insert itself into domestic elections.
Third, Gabbard was in Atlanta this week when the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County. Why was she there? The Administration story keeps changing, but Gabbard did arrange for President Trump to talk to the FBI agents on site. (Fulton County has filed a motion to have the ballots returned.)
Better yet: why was the FBI there? The ballots have already been counted twice. The election results, repeatedly adjudicated.
Trump is a broken record, insisting with almost every breath that he won in 2020 and that he got a majority in his two wins (he did not). Part of that song and dance is this:
When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms. We shouldn’t even have an election.
So if Trump can seize voting machines in Puerto Rico and ballots in Fulton County, Georgia … he will stop at nothing to do the same in states where Republicans lose in 2026.
Is Tulsi Gabbard at the center of Sen. Wyden’s warning? He was certainly concerned about her nomination last year.
I asked Ms. Gabbard whether intelligence agency whistleblowers must have a clear path to the Senate Intelligence Committee and don't need permission from agencies to talk to us. She responded that the answer was “clearly yes.”
Clearly she has reneged on that commitment.
Whether or not the CIA issue revolves around Gabbard, I’ll close with this observation from Ackerman:
I have never known Wyden to point to smoke that doesn't emerge from a five-alarm fire.
Pay attention.