ODNI sends criminal referrals to Justice Department targeting ex-inspector general and whistleblower behind Trump's first impeachment

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department for the whistleblower whose complaint triggered President Donald Trump's first impeachment and for former intelligence community inspector general Michael Atkinson, who forwarded that complaint to Congress in 2019. The referrals mark the most concrete step yet toward accountability for what DNI Tulsi Gabbard and other administration officials describe as a politically motivated effort to remove a sitting president.

The ODNI general counsel's referral, reviewed by Fox News Digital on Wednesday, targets "one or more former employees of the intelligence community" and cites "possible criminal activity in violation of federal criminal law." It points specifically to two 2019 briefings before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence involving the intelligence community inspector general, the same briefings that set the impeachment machinery in motion.

The Justice Department has not announced any charges. Fox News Digital reported it reached out to DOJ on Wednesday afternoon. The White House was also contacted for comment. Neither response was included in the reporting.

What the referral says, and what it doesn't

The referral language is broad. It does not name specific federal criminal statutes. But the scope is unmistakable: the ODNI general counsel wrote that the referral concerns circumstances described in a "Discussion with Intelligence Community Inspector General" and a "Briefing by the Intelligence Community Inspector General," both before the House Intelligence Committee during the 116th Congress.

An ODNI spokesperson confirmed the action to multiple outlets. Newsmax reported the spokesperson said the referral was "related to one or more former employees of the Intelligence Community and their role in the 2019 impeachment of President Trump."

The referrals followed a batch of newly declassified documents released earlier this week by Gabbard's office. Those records, she argued, show bias, misleading statements, and procedural irregularities in how the whistleblower complaint was handled from the start.

Gabbard posted on X on Monday, framing the declassified material in sharp terms:

"Newly-declassified records expose how deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that Congress used to usurp the will of the American people and impeach duly-elected President @realDonaldTrump in 2019."

When Fox News Digital asked ODNI for comment, the office directed reporters to Gabbard's post. Gabbard, who has taken an increasingly visible role in national security matters, including her presence in the Situation Room during strikes on Iran, has made the 2019 impeachment a recurring focus of her tenure at ODNI.

The whistleblower's complaint: secondhand from the start

The complaint that launched Trump's first impeachment centered on a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During that call, Trump pressed Zelenskyy to investigate the Biden family's business dealings in Ukraine, a request Democrats characterized as an abuse of power.

But the whistleblower, whose identity has never been officially confirmed, acknowledged in the complaint itself that the account was not firsthand. The declassified version of the complaint, released by the White House during Trump's first term, stated plainly:

"I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues' accounts of these events to be credible, because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another."

The whistleblower's concerns stemmed from secondhand accounts of "more than half a dozen U.S. officials." That detail, a complaint built on hearsay, not direct observation, was known at the time but largely minimized in the rush toward impeachment.

The Washington Times reported that Gabbard alleged the whistleblower was an anti-Trump registered Democrat who misled investigators about contacts with congressional Democrats. Republicans complained during the original proceedings that the whistleblower had made contact with then-Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff's staff before filing the complaint. Schiff downplayed the nature of that contact at the time.

Atkinson's role: 'urgent concern' despite red flags

Michael Atkinson, then the intelligence community inspector general, received the complaint in August 2019. His investigation found that the whistleblower showed indications of "political bias" and was "in favor of a rival political candidate." Despite those findings, Atkinson deemed the complaint a matter of "urgent concern" and notified Congress.

That decision set the impeachment process in motion. House Democrats seized on the complaint. Trump was impeached by the House in December 2019 and acquitted by the Senate in February 2020.

Gabbard has been blunt about her view of Atkinson's conduct. She said he "weaponized the whistle-blower process" and used his office to "manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump," Just The News reported. The ODNI has also said the declassified documents confirmed Atkinson failed to conduct basic due diligence and exceeded his statutory jurisdiction.

Gabbard further alleged that Atkinson interviewed only four witnesses, relied on secondhand information, and ignored evidence that could have cast Trump's Ukraine call in a more favorable light. Those claims, drawn from the newly declassified material, form the backbone of the administration's case that the inspector general's office operated with a political agenda rather than following standard procedures.

Transcripts withheld, now released

Adding another layer: transcripts of Atkinson's closed-door testimony before the House Intelligence Committee were withheld from the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment trial. That means the committee that actually conducted the impeachment proceedings did not have access to Atkinson's own account of how he handled the complaint.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark., led a vote in March to release those transcripts. Their contents have not been fully detailed in public reporting, but the decision to release them aligns with the broader push by Gabbard and congressional Republicans to reopen the record on how the first impeachment was built.

Gabbard has faced her own share of scrutiny in recent months, including questions about her presence at an FBI search in Fulton County. But on the impeachment question, her actions have drawn support from the administration and from Republicans who spent years arguing the 2019 proceedings were tainted from the start.

The Biden-Ukraine backdrop

The impeachment saga was always tangled up with the Biden family's Ukraine connections. Trump's July 2019 call with Zelenskyy included a suggestion that Ukraine look into Hunter Biden's ventures with Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm. Hunter Biden sat on Burisma's board, receiving thousands of dollars per month, while his father served as vice president. He was also quietly under federal investigation beginning in 2018.

Joe Biden himself acknowledged pressuring Ukraine to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma at the time. Biden recounted the episode during a 2018 Council on Foreign Relations event, telling then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that the country would not receive $1 billion in U.S. aid unless Shokin was removed:

"I said, 'You're not getting the billion.'... I looked at them and said, 'I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money.' Well, son of a b----, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time."

Biden's allies maintained he pushed for Shokin's firing because the prosecutor went easy on corruption, not to protect his son. But the optics of a vice president leveraging a billion dollars in aid to remove a prosecutor investigating a company paying his son were never easy to explain away. And the fact that Trump was impeached for asking questions about exactly that arrangement remains, for many conservatives, the central absurdity of the entire episode.

The Washington Examiner noted that newly declassified records and testimony indicate the whistleblower contacted congressional Democrats before filing the complaint, raising fresh questions about coordination during the impeachment process. That detail, combined with the whistleblower's admitted reliance on secondhand information and Atkinson's own findings of political bias, paints a picture of a process that was less about protecting national security than about engineering a political outcome.

What happens next

A criminal referral is not an indictment. It is a formal request for the Justice Department to investigate. Whether DOJ acts on the referrals, and how aggressively, remains an open question. No specific federal statutes were cited in the referral language reviewed by Fox News Digital, which could complicate any prosecution.

House Republicans sought to refer both Atkinson and the whistleblower to DOJ for investigation during the original 2019 and 2020 proceedings. Those efforts went nowhere at the time. The current referrals carry more institutional weight, coming directly from the ODNI under Gabbard's leadership.

The New York Post reported the referrals are part of Gabbard's broader release of declassified documents alleging misconduct, bias, and procedural failures in how the impeachment narrative was advanced. The move fits a pattern: Gabbard has used her position to push for transparency on intelligence community actions she views as politically compromised, a posture that has aligned her closely with the president's own priorities.

The whistleblower's identity remains officially unconfirmed. Atkinson has not been quoted in recent coverage responding to the referrals. The Justice Department has not signaled whether it will open a formal investigation.

For six years, the people who built the first impeachment on secondhand accounts and procedural shortcuts avoided any consequences. Now, at least on paper, the process of accountability has begun. Whether it leads anywhere depends on whether the Justice Department treats this referral with the same urgency the intelligence community once showed when the target was a sitting president.