But that’s not all. On Gabbard’s personal Substack, it appears anyone, anywhere, foreign or domestic, can send unlimited donations.
“That’s not normal,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Raw Story, while walking to a vote in the Capitol. “It does become an interesting conflict of interest, though, if it’s a violation of ethics rules.
”That is crazy," said Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer. "There's so much corruption, it's sort of like, where do you focus?"
Other members of Trump’s cabinet use platforms Gabbard uses but do not appear to offer subscriptions. This week, for just one mundane example, Secretary of State Marco Rubio used the State Department’s Substack account to pen his thoughts on Trump’s first 100 days in office. It was free to subscribe.
The Trump administration has already suffered embarrassments over high-level officials’ unguarded internet habits, notably including now ousted National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seeing unguarded Venmo accounts picked over for embarrassing details.
Requests for comment from spokespeople for Gabbard and the Office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community were not immediately returned.
Gabbard was a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii for eight years, from 2013. After an unsuccessful run for president in 2020, she left the Democratic Party and launched herself as an author, commentator, and podcast host. Drifting far from her formerly progressive positions, she endorsed Trump and campaigned for him before being nominated to be DNI.
As DNI, Gabbard’s official X account has a little under 570,000 followers. Her personal account has 3.7 million. Her personal account regularly reposts tweets from her official page. “Get bonus content when you sign up,” the personal account promises, offering $5-a-month subscriptions. “Look forward to sharing more with you here!”
On Substack, Gabbard has not posted since October. Nonetheless, the subscriptions page for her personal account offers subscriptions at $6 a month, $60 a year or, in a special founding member tier, a minimum of $1,000. There doesn’t seem to be any ceiling on how much can be donated.
'Alarming lapses in judgment'
Plenty of Senate Republicans had misgivings about Gabbard when it came to her confirmation process, especially over her past support for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information then fled to Russia. During her confirmation hearing, Gabbard refused to call Snowden a traitor.
But former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was the lone GOP senator to oppose Gabbard for the DNI role.
At the time, McConnell said: “The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment.”
With the Trump administration continuing its frantic, norm-upending pace, even some Democrats brushed aside questions about whether the director of national intelligence should have live social media pages offering paid subscriptions, at least on first blush.
Told about Gabbard’s subscription offers on X and Substack, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a member of the armed services and oversight committees, said the issue might seem peripheral compared to “all the things we have to worry about in this country.”
But, Khanna said, it was “a fair point” to see the director of national intelligence soliciting for payment on social platforms might represent an instance of “the degradation of norms” under the Trump administration.
Ocasio-Cortez said: “We also see that a lot of cabinet level positions are being turned into reality TV regularly, and so I don't think it's a small thing, I think it's a big thing.
“Ensuring that people aren't kind of setting up side businesses off of their public appointments is incredibly important.”
