Democrat Russia Hoax Investigator Is Now Top Lawyer At Trump’s National Security Agency

A top lawyer for President Donald Trump’s National Security Agency previously worked for Senate Democrats on their discredited probe attempting to tie Trump to Russia and has a history of partisan anti-Trump activism, a Daily Wire investigation reveals.

April Falcon Doss is the current general counsel for the NSA, the powerful cyber-intelligence agency, according to the agency’s website. A longtime veteran of the agency, Doss also worked as an NSA intelligence lawyer from 2003 to April 2016. But in between those two stints, she worked on the highly-partisan congressional investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election.

Just months into Trump’s first term as president, she took a high-level job working for Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) on the Senate Intelligence Committee, investigating supposed Russian interference in the 2016 election. Doss was the Democrats’ Senior Counsel for the committee’s Russia investigation, which conducted hundreds of interviews in its failed attempt to find evidence of conspiracy between Trump and Russia.

The Daily Wire’s discovery of Doss’s continuing employment at the top level of the intelligence community comes as newly-revealed documents provide further evidence of unethical conduct by Democrats and the intelligence state aimed at sabotaging Trump. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral over what she called a conspiracy of “manufactured intelligence”, and Trump has said the documents could support the prosecution of people as high up as former President Barack Obama, and his top intelligence chiefs, James Comey and James Clapper.

Doss is a transparently partisan activist who has written publicly about her opposition to Trump. She has called for Trump to be permanently banned from social media for staging an “insurrection,” attacked Republicans for opposing a crackdown on “disinformation,” and defended the treatment of Trump aides Carter Page and Michael Flynn at the hands of the intelligence state.

The Record reported in June 2022 that the NSA, during the Biden administration, had re-hired Doss for the top role. The intelligence agency didn’t publicly announce the hire, it reported, because it didn’t want to “stir the hornet’s nest among Capitol Hill Republicans.” That’s because in the interim, Democrats, “experts,” and intelligence officials had decried it as improper — and ultimately blocked it — when Trump had attempted to name a Republican former House intelligence committee staffer to the same role.

The Trump administration appointed Michael Ellis to the job in November 2020, but then-NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone placed him on administrative leave the day he saw sworn in, while an investigation into whether Ellis’s hire was appropriate ensued. The investigation ultimately found no wrongdoing, but by that time, Ellis had resigned.

The job remained without a permanent occupant until Doss — after brief stop back at the same private practice — filled it. The general counsel job is considered a “career civil service” position, so she remained in the Trump administration, even as Trump sought to prevent a repeat of his first term, which was derailed by left-wing “deep state” intelligence actors pushing a cyber-conspiracy.

The divergent treatment of two people with similar backgrounds echoed those concerns. In Ellis’s case, Trump’s own NSA brass tried to stop a Republican from being hired in a Republican administration, and he was driven out by the early months of the Biden administration. In Doss’s case, Biden’s NSA approved the hiring of a Democrat, and worked to hide it. Thus far, she’s been retained in the second Trump administration.

Doss— who “earned her J.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and received an M.F.A. degree from Goucher College,” according to the NSA website — also taught at Georgetown University. In that role, she published essays reflecting a personal opposition to Trump.

Writing for Just Security in May 2021, Doss celebrated that “at long last,” President Trump had been banned from all major social media platforms. In the essay, she blamed Trump for “deaths at the Capitol and a serious attempt to prevent certification of the election, plus the ongoing ‘Big Lie’ – the sustained set of evidence-free claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.” (The idea that right-wing rioters killed police on January 6 turned out to be, itself, misinformation.)

Doss also slams Republican efforts to prevent censorship, and said Republican conspiracy theories like “the rapid spread of anti-vaccination propaganda” necessitated a wide-ranging crackdown on “disinformation.”

In November 2020, she wrote an op-ed advising the “Biden-Harris Administration” on racial equity, and how to crack down on “disinformation” like Qanon and “extremism” like the right-wing plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan. (Many of the defendants in that alleged plot were later acquitted after their attorneys presented evidence that government assets had lured and encouraged them).

In a July 2021 article called “The Tucker Carlson Disinformation Show,” she attacked Carlson for calling Nakasone, the NSA director in the first Trump administration, a “far-left partisan.” Nakasone was the one who drove out the Republican general counsel, ultimately opening the slot for Doss.

“Carlson’s repeated assertion that it’s ‘illegal’ for the NSA to spy on Americans is untrue,” Doss wrote. She dismissed Republicans’ objections to the targeting of Trump officials, mockingly imagining conservatives saying “but Carter Page…” and “But Michael Flynn….”

In response to The Daily Wire’s inquiry, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA, said it was looking into the matter.

In April, President Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh, who led the NSA since 2023, after a meeting with Laura Loomer. Last month, the White House vetoed the Pentagon’s nomination for his replacement, Lt. Gen. Richard Angle, Politico reported.

Senator Warner, Doss’ former boss, has been railing at Gabbard for releasing documents about the five-alarm effort by the intelligence community to tie Trump to Russia during his first term, with Warner asking: “What was Tulsi Gabbard trying to distract from with her insulting lies about the Russia investigation?”

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