WASHINGTON, Feb 10 (Reuters) - U.S. spy chief Tulsi Gabbard told Reuters on Tuesday that she has wound down a task force she launched last year with the declared goal of rooting out politicization from intelligence agencies, but which critics accused of being a tool for partisan attacks by the Trump administration.
Gabbard said in a statement she had reassigned members of the Director's Initiatives Group elsewhere in her agency. Her comments to Reuters came after two sources said the decision to wrap up the DIG, as it was commonly known, was taken after alleged missteps.
A spokesperson at Gabbard's Office of the Director of National Intelligence denied any missteps and said the DIG was meant to be only temporary, a view Gabbard echoed.
"The Director's Initiatives Group was created as a temporary effort to surge resources to deliver on high-priority projects with near-term deadlines, including Presidential Executive Orders," Gabbard told Reuters.
"We are continuing to deliver results focused on our mission by maximizing the expertise and experience of those who were temporarily assigned to the Director's Initiatives Group by assigning them to teams across ODNI."
The DIG has been scrutinized by members of Congress, many of whom saw its structure as secretive. Congress passed legislation in December requiring Gabbard to provide a classified report last month that included details on DIG leadership, staffing levels and hiring practices.
Gabbard's office missed the deadline but the ODNI spokesperson said the agency would still provide the information to Congress.
The disclosure that the DIG has been wound down comes at a sensitive moment for Gabbard, as Democrats raise alarms over her presence at a January 28 FBI raid that seized ballot boxes and other materials from a Georgia county’s election archive.
Reuters first reported last week that Gabbard's office also oversaw an investigation last year into voting machines in Puerto Rico, with officials taking possession of an unspecified number of them.
The White House has defended Gabbard's role in reviewing U.S. election security. But Democratic leaders of Congress argue that she has exceeded her spy agency's purview and say that the Trump administration could attempt to interfere in future U.S. elections.
Advocates of the DIG cite accomplishments such as the declassification of files related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, and making good on a raft of President Donald Trump's executive orders shortly after he took office.
But critics saw its efforts to root out politicization in the intelligence community as highly partisan.
The ODNI, for example, claimed as a major accomplishment declassifying documents that Gabbard alleged showed that former President Barack Obama had U.S. intelligence officials concoct an assessment that Russia sought to sway the 2016 presidential vote in favor of Trump.
Her allegation, however, was contradicted by a 2025 CIA review, a 2018 bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who indicted 25 Russians. Obama denied any wrongdoing.
In an interview with Reuters last year, Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he suspected the DIG was pursuing a "witch hunt" for intelligence officers it deemed disloyal to Trump. He did not cite specific evidence.
The two sources cited missteps as factors influencing the decision to end the task force. This included the DIG mistakenly linking a federal security worker to the planting of pipe bombs outside the respective headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties in Washington, D.C., on the eve of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the sources said.
The ODNI spokesperson denied any mistake, however, saying that the agency had a legal duty to pass along an allegation from a whistleblower, and that the agency's legal counsel was involved.
One of the sources said the DIG revealed the name of a CIA officer who was serving undercover overseas when revoking the security clearances of 37 current and former officials, most of them Democrats.
The ODNI spokesperson denied the CIAofficer's identity had been revealed since it did not name any agency affiliation.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart and Jonathan Landay in Washington; Editing by Don Durfee and Matthew Lewis)
