US intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard leaving post after rocky tenure | Trump administration
Tulsi Gabbard is leaving her post as U.S. director of national intelligence after a tumultuous period in which she was largely sidelined by Donald Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran.
In his letter to the US president, he said that he would resign and leave his post on June 30. “While we have made significant progress… I recognize that there is still important work to be done,” he wrote.
According to Reuters news agency, citing a source familiar with the matter, the White House forced Gabbard to resign. Fox News was first report Gabbard left, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis.
Trump was asking cabinet members last month if he would replace Gabbard, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
“Sadly, after doing a great job, Tulsi Gabbard will be leaving Management on June 30,” he wrote in a statement on the Truth Social platform on Friday.
Gabbard “did an incredible job, and we will miss her,” the president said, adding that Aaron Lukas, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, will serve as acting director of national intelligence.
Gabbard already appeared marginalized last June when Trump endorsed Israel’s decision to attack Iran before the United States joined the war by ordering the bombing of the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.
The decision was a public repudiation of Gabbard’s earlier testimony on Capitol Hill that Iran was not building nuclear weapons. Trump appeared to add insult to injury declare she didn’t care what he said and called his assessment “wrong”.
Within weeks, Gabbard made a public effort to curry favor with the president by calling for the prosecution of Barack Obama and several top national security officials in his administration, claiming they were waging a “treasonous conspiracy” to portray Russia as interfering in the 2016 election on Trump’s side.
Obama has denied the allegations, which appear designed to satisfy Trump’s “revenge” agenda against his political rivals.
This year, he sparked outrage among Democrats by arriving at the scene of an FBI raid to seize ballots for the 2020 presidential election; It was a setting well outside of a mostly foreign intelligence briefing, but it was another sign that his priority was to get on Trump’s good side.
In contrast he excluded from the decision-making process It was related to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, and was likewise absent from major decisions and public statements regarding the decision to renew military strikes against Iran in February.
Gabbard’s apparent exclusion from major national security policy decisions vindicated those who doubted her qualifications for a post that gave her oversight of 18 intelligence agencies.
Trump’s nomination following his November 2024 election victory was criticized by those who pointed out that he repeated Kremlin talk about Russia’s war with Ukraine and said Syria was “not an enemy of the United States” in a 2017 meeting with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Hillary Clinton previously suggested that Gabbard, a former Democrat who is leaving the party in 2022, was being “treated” by Russia.
Democratic senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate select intelligence committee, said his thoughts were with Gabbard and her family but he hoped her successor would help ensure “the office remains grounded in facts, independence and the rule of law.”
“The next DNI must be committed to restoring trust in the office, protecting the integrity of our intelligence, and ensuring that our nation’s intelligence professionals can speak truth to power without fear or interference,” he said.
Democratic senator Adam Schiff also wished Gabbard’s husband a speedy recovery, then argued that the outgoing intelligence director’s only advantageous contribution to US national security was her resignation. “He politicized intelligence. He dismantled critical agencies that kept Americans safe. [Intelligence Community] pursuing unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. And more,” he wrote. to post In X.
He added: “We must ensure that a term of office determined by a commitment to the person of the president, not to the security of the country, represents a terrible exception for the DNI, not the new normal.”
Gabbard is the fourth woman to leave Trump’s cabinet in just over two months, following the firing of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March; Pam Bondi, who was fired as attorney general in April; and labor secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who resigned in April following a series of misconduct allegations.
The director of national intelligence (ODNI) said in a statement that Gabbard is making a “transformational effort to reshape the Intelligence Community in ways no one has attempted before.”
“It’s been a bad 15 months for the ‘deep state’ led by Tulsi Gabbard,” ODNI spokeswoman Olivia Coleman said.
The so-called successes cited included revoking security passes for those whom Coleman called “Deep State bad actors” but whom others said were loyal career intelligence officers, as well as the release of previously classified files on the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.
