>WASHINGTON—The Trump administration told Congress it won’t share with lawmakers the classified intelligence that led to a whistleblower complaint against U.S. spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, citing presidential claims of executive privilege.

>In an email to Democratic congressional staffers sent on Feb. 13 and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Gabbard’s office said it was unable to provide the unredacted intelligence that underpinned the complaint “due to the assertion of executive privilege to portions” of the intelligence itself.

>In a Tuesday letter to Gabbard, Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees, asked who asserted privilege over the intelligence report and on what basis. 

>The intelligence at issue was assembled in a report by the National Security Agency early last year and relates to a conversation two foreign nationals had about Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the Journal has reported.

>Senior Trump administration officials have said the claims about Kushner were demonstrably false, but declined to offer more specifics on grounds that doing so could expose a highly sensitive surveillance method. 

>“Executive privilege” generally refers to the power of the president to withhold confidential information or private discussions from Congress or the judicial branch. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the use of executive privilege to limit the sharing of intelligence was unusual. 

>“Executive privilege is rarely used as a reason to not give information to the Gang of Eight,” said Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel at the National Security Agency, referring to the top four Republican and Democratic lawmakers in Congress who are cleared to see the most secretive intelligence information.

>Gerstell, who said he wasn’t familiar with the intelligence at issue in the whistleblower dispute, added that it was harder to justify using the privilege when the communication involves discussions between third parties outside the White House.

>The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment about the executive privilege claim.

>“The request and provision of intelligence reports have been longstanding practice between the [intelligence community] and its congressional oversight committees,” Warner and Himes wrote in the Tuesday letter. 

>A whistleblower complaint filed last spring accuses Gabbard of improperly limiting the distribution of that intelligence within the Trump administration for political purposes, allegations that Gabbard has denied.

>A spokeswoman for Director of National Intelligence Gabbard declined to directly address the decision to not share the underlying intelligence with Congress. She instead referred to a previous letter to lawmakers from the office’s general counsel that said Gabbard had met her requirements concerning notification to Congress about the complaint.

>The complaint itself had stalled within Gabbard’s office from reaching Congress for more than eight months, kicking off a behind-the-scenes power struggle over the fate of a document that had been locked away in a safe.

>The intelligence, which is at least in part about Iran, is said to derive from an exceptionally sensitive surveillance method. Officials have said any disclosure of the collection method could damage U.S. national security. Gabbard’s office ultimately shared the complaint with select lawmakers earlier this month, but redacted significant portions of it, also chiefly on grounds of executive privilege.  

>In the new letter, Warner and Himes said they weren’t able to confirm whether the discussion at issue was about Kushner because the version of the complaint they received was so heavily redacted. Kushner has been deeply involved in some of the administration’s most challenging foreign-policy issues. He is serving as a volunteer in the Trump administration and doesn’t have a formal U.S. government role.

>Democrats are in the minority in both chambers in Congress, and have little recourse to force Gabbard to share material with them without support from Republicans, who control the intelligence committees and have dismissed the complaint as meritless and a manufactured controversy intended to smear Gabbard and the Trump administration.

>With control of the intelligence panels, Democrats could issue subpoenas to Gabbard’s office or the NSA to obtain the unredacted intelligence, though that could prompt a drawn-out legal fight between the two branches of government if the spy agencies didn’t comply.

>https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/spy-agency-blocks-congress-from-seeing-gabbard-whistleblower-intelligence-1baea148?st=coUAhp

Trump Admin Covers for DNI Tulsi Gabbard & Spurns Congress as Jared Kushner is Implicated in Intellegence Report per Whistleblower Complaint. Gabbard accussed of Restricting the Distribution said Intelligence Report within the Trump Admin for Political Purposes Per WSJ