Intelligence I.G. on Hot Seat in Roiling Whistleblower Case

Christopher Fox implicated in ominous allegations of a Tulsi Gabbard coverup

A day after the Senate confirmed Christopher Fox as the intelligence community’s inspector general in October, the most sensitive matter on his agenda was locked in a safe, according to a sensational revelation that surfaced this week. It’s said to be a whistleblower complaint alleging serious wrongdoing by his boss, DNI Tulsi Gabbard.

Filed in May by an unidentified U.S. intelligence employee, the allegations could cause “grave damage” to national security if released, according to U.S. officials cited in an explosive Wall Street Journal article published on Monday. The complaint may involve the White House as well, as well as another federal agency, the article said.

Despite the document’s importance, and for a series of reasons explained only after publication of the piece, it took nearly eight months to reach the eyes of the so-called Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of top congressional intelligence overseers.

The whistleblower’s lawyer, a former CIA officer named Andrew Bakaj, described the delay in presenting the allegations to congressional overseers as unprecedented. On Friday morning, Bakaj’s organization, Whistleblower Aid, gave Gabbard a deadline of Friday night, “to finally provide security guidance” to his client “to go to the congressional intelligence committees with a highly classified disclosure—or we will offer an unclassified briefing to Congress on Monday.” That put the little known Fox under a spotlight.

A month before being nominated to be the I.G. in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Fox, 38, a highly decorated former Air Force enlisted man and CIA officer, had been working as an aide to Gabbard. His work for her was focused on intelligence oversight, Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification policy. His route there included four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with Air Force special operations. He would later work as a CIA covert action officer.

Long Path

It was a career that began in the lowest ranks of the Air Force, starting with his 2007 enlistment and then basic training in Lackland, Texas, followed by advanced instruction to become a member of a Tactical Air Control Party, airmen who embed with combat units to call in precision airstrikes or naval or artillery gunfire. Along the way, Fox earned an associate bachelor’s degree in applied sciences from the Community College of the Air Force, a junior college for enlisted personnel, and then a degree in psychology from the online American Military University.

The degrees set the stage for Fox’s work with the Army and Air Force as a special warfare airman under the Special Operations Command. His war zone duties earned him two Bronze Stars and an Air Force Commendation Medal with Valor, indicating acts of heroism in combat, among other decorations.

Following his Air Force service, he earned a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Southern California and then moved to Washington, D.C. where he began his climb up the bureaucratic ladder of the intelligence community. First there was an internship in the Justice Department’s National Security Division, all the while pursuing a law degree at Georgetown University, which he was awarded in May 2019. Then it was on to the CIA, where he spent three years as a “Specialized Skills Officer and Covert Action Officer,” according to his official biography. That was followed by two years in the private sector applying his special security skills, until the second Trump administration came calling.

“I did not take the easy road here. I have challenged careerists who wanted to play it safe and avoid risk in their own self-interest,” he wrote in his opening statement for his confirmation hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee. “My priorities will be straightforward: First, I will protect whistleblowers—not just in principle, but in practice. Whistleblowers are often the only ones willing to raise the alarm for issues that could have been resolved before they develop into crises. Whistleblowers deserve respect, protection, and prompt action.”

Prompt action was exactly what did not occur with the whistleblower complaint which catapulted into public view this week, critics allege.

The complaint was first filed in late May with the ODNI’s Acting Inspector General Tamara Johnson. Two weeks later, amid Fox’s confirmation process, the whistleblower asked for his or her disclosure to be communicated to Congress, as is allowed for by the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. Around the same time, Gabbard installed one of her aides, Dennis Kirk, in the I.G.’s office with a direct line of reporting to her. The appointment of Kirk, an alumnus of the Heritage Foundation’s far-right Project 2025, who had served in the first Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management, drew a rebuke from Rep. Stephen F. Lynch of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, who said it “raises troubling questions about the independence of the IC IG …” Today, Kirk is Gabbard’s chief operating officer, “responsible for the strategic management of the ODNI,” the agency’s home page says.

In November, after months of ODNI foot-dragging, Bakaj, chief legal counsel for WhistleblowerAid.org, informed Congress of the existence of the complaint. Then on Monday, he escalated his campaign, taking public aim at Gabbard.

“After nearly eight months of taking illegal actions to protect herself, the time has come for Tulsi Gabbard to comply with the law and fully release the disclosure to Congress,” he wrote. “The Inspector General’s independence and neutrality is non-existent when the Director of National Intelligence illegally inserts herself into the process.”

Mark Zaid, a longtime Washington attorney for intelligence community personnel, commented on X that “a fair & reasonable way to address @ODNIgov‘s one sided criticisms is to have @wbaidlaw‘s client meet w/ Congress & provide greater details abt serious concerns. There is nothing partisan or politicized,” he added, [about the] lawful whistleblower process so long as truth is [the] ultimate objective.”

Paper Trail

Fox was briefed on the complaint a day after his confirmation in October, he explained in a letter to the Gang of Eight the next day.

In the letter, he explained the delays as he understood them, and the nature of the complaint.

The whistleblower, he wrote, alleges that a “highly classified intelligence report was restricted for political purposes,” and that the ODNI’s general counsel had “failed to report a potential crime” to the Justice Department, “also for political purposes.”

Fox says he was told by the ODNI’s top lawyer that delays were a result of the “complexity of classification,” the government shutdown and the naming of a new general counsel. When he met with Gabbard in December he says she told him she hadn’t been informed of a need to provide security guidance on the matter in order to advance the process.

(The ODNI general counsel since October, 2025 is Jack Dever, a former assistant general counsel at the FBI and assistant U.S. attorney, whose military service in the Army included stints as a signals intelligence Korean linguist and Judge Advocate General officer.)

Rep. Rick Crawford (R-Ark.), the Trump loyalist and chair of the House Intelligence Committee, says he reviewed the complaint on Tuesday after Fox hand-delivered it to him and other members of the Gang of Eight. On the social media platform X, he called it “non-credible”—the same “conclusion that the Biden-era IC IG, Tamara Johnson,” had reached—and that the “ensuing media firestorm—fed by speculation and little fact—was an attempt to smear @DNIGabbard and the Trump Administration.”

All that could be cleared up by a review of the whistleblower complaint in the proper congressional channels, of course, which the ODNI has resisted for several months. And now the clock is ticking on Bakaj’s Friday night deadline demand to Gabbard.

The morass may feel oddly familiar to Fox, who had a stint as an actor in L.A. while pursuing his post-military graduate degree at USC. He played a cop in a true crime cable TV series called “Swamp Murders.” ###

SpyTalk Editor Jeff Stein contributed to this piece.