Tulsi Gabbard resigns as Trump’s top US intelligence official

Democrat Gabbard, long a critic of US interventionism, cites husband’s illness for leaving post. Tulsi Gabbard is resigning from her job as United States President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, according to her resignation letter posted on her X account. In her resignation letter, Gabbard told Trump she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of Intelligence for the last year and a half”. She cited her husband’s recent diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer as the reason for her resignation. Trump also confirmed the resignation in a post on his Truth Social account, saying, “Unfortunately, after having done a great job, Tulsi Gabbard will be leaving the Administration on June 30th.” “Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her,” he added. The president added that the principal deputy director of national intelligence, Aaron Lukas, would serve in the role in an acting capacity. Gabbard served in the US Congress as a Democrat for eight years, from 2013 to 2021. She launched a long-shot bid for president in 2020. A former member of the Hawaii Guard, she was deployed during the US invasion of Iraq. The experience informed her staunchly anti-interventionist views. After leaving office, Gabbard broke with the Democratic Party, and in 2020, she endorsed US President Donald Trump, of whom she had been a top critic. She pointed to Trump’s promises to end US military adventurism abroad as the motivator for her decision. The administration of then-President Joe Biden “has us facing multiple wars on multiple fronts in regions around the world and closer to the brink of nuclear war than we ever have been before”, Gabbard said at Trump campaign event in Detroit, Michigan. But Gabbard’s past statements, including opposition to military action against both Venezuela and Iran, have stood in stark contrast to the Trump administration’s actions. Tulsi was reportedly sidelined when the administration decided to launch a military abduction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. After initial silence on Iran, Gabbard later defended the Trump administration’s decision to launch the current war on Iran alongside Israel, maintaining that the president, and not the intelligence community, is “responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat”. Controversial tenure Several of Gabbard’s actions as DNI also came under scrutiny during her tenure. That included the firing of officials at the Intelligence Council (NIC) shortly after it published a report contradicting the administration’s claims that Venezuela’s government was working in coordination with the Tren de Aragua gang. The position had been a linchpin of the Trump administration’s efforts to swiftly deport Venezuelans. Gabbard’s presence at an FBI raid on an election centre in the US state of Georgia also raised eyebrows, with a Democratic senator among those voicing concerns she had exceeded the purview of her office. Trump has long focused on election administration in the US, claiming, without evidence, the 2020 election was “stolen”. Gabbard had regularly maintained she was working to end the “weaponisation and politicalisation” of the intelligence community. On Friday, several Republican lawmakers praised Gabbard. Senator Eric Schmitt, in a post on X, said Gabbard “worked to set a tone of accountability across the federal government, and I’m sorry to hear she’ll be leaving the Administration”. Other foreign policy observers said they hoped Gabbard’s resignation would offer insights into the Trump administration’s decisions to go to war. “Tulsi Gabbard ran for president, campaigning against regime change wars, and ended up serving in an administration that launched the stupidest one yet against Iran,” Matt Duss, the former foreign policy adviser to Bernie Sanders and the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, told Al Jazeera. “I hope that once she leaves Trump’s service, she’ll speak out about how the US was misled into yet another unnecessary conflict,” he said.