The Department of Justice has been sent a criminal referral for two individuals who helped instigate the 2019 impeachment process against President Donald Trump.
The two include a whistleblower whose name is not mentioned and former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, according to Fox News. A criminal referral is a means of asking the Justice Department to file charges.
“I want to refer information that may constitute possible criminal activity in violation of federal criminal law committed by one or more former employees of the intelligence community,” the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in a referral Fox News said it reviewed.
“The possible criminal activity concerns the circumstances described in the following congressional briefings: Discussion with Intelligence Community Inspector General, House Permanent Select Comm. on Intel., 116th Cong. (2019); Briefing by the Intelligence Community Inspector General, House Permanent Select Comm. on Intel., 116th Cong. (2019),” the referral said.
Fox said it was told by a source it did not name that amid broad language, the referral was directed at Atkinson and the whistleblower.
On Monday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released documents revealing what she called a” coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.”
In her Monday news release, Gabbard said that during an investigation into a 2019 phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives – only conducting interviews with four individuals: the Whistleblower, the Whistleblower’s friend who was a co-author of the January 2017 Russia Hoax Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) and close colleague of disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok, and two character references who had zero firsthand knowledge of the July 2019 phone call.”
“Despite a lack of any firsthand evidence, IC IG Atkinson proceeded to take actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction by ignoring Department of Justice guidance and relying on only second-hand testimony to ensure the whistleblower complaint was released to Congress, referred to the FBI, and leaked to the propaganda media,” the release said.
Gabbard noted that this flawed material was the foundation used by congressional Democrats to impeach Trump. Although the Democrat-dominated House supported articles of impeachment against Trump, they died in the Senate.
Gabbard said the episode was evidence of a deeper rot within America’s intelligence community.
“Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States,” she said.
“Inspector General Atkinson failed to uphold his responsibility to the American people, putting political motivations over the truth. And this, along with the politicization of the whistleblower process by a former CIA employee who was working hand in glove with Democrats in Congress, are egregious examples of the deep state playbook on how to weaponize the Intelligence Community,” she said.
“Exposing these tactics and showing how they undermine the fabric of our democratic republic furthers the critical cause of transparency and accountability and will help prevent future abuse of power,” she said.
“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,” Gabbard posted to X Monday.
The documents Gabbard posted included transcripts from Atkinson’s testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which were not released until this year, according to Fox News.
Listen,
I’m all for exposing these people.
But until you guys DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
These releases are completely meaningless.
We KNOW what they did. The FBI launched a counter intelligence operation on a sitting president.
The problem is NO ONE IS IN PRISON.
We know…
— Walter Curt (@wcdispatch) April 13, 2026
ODNI said the documents showed Atkinson “failed to conduct basic due diligence and willfully exceeded his statutory jurisdiction to mischaracterize the president’s phone call with Zelensky as an ‘urgent concern’ to Congress.”
Atkinson, during his investigation, found that the whistleblower showed indications of “political bias” and was “in favor of a rival political candidate,” while still deeming the complaint a matter of “urgent concern.”
The 2019 call became political fodder because Trump asked Zelenskyy to probe the Biden family’s actions in Ukraine.
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