| of 44556 | | | Trump Should Fire Tulsi Gabbard. But He Won’t.She’s not doing her job—but she is doing what he wants her to do.
Benjamin Parker
Jun 18, 2025
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
PITY TULSI Gabbard.
She has a very hard job. As director of national intelligence, she’s responsible for overseeing the largest foreign intelligence enterprise in the world, a multi-billion-dollar behemoth of eighteen agencies spread across multiple departments. At the same time, she’s the “principal adviser to the President, to the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to the national security,” as laid out by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the position.
The post has relatively little authority but a huge amount of responsibility.
However, Gabbard also has a second job, which, unlike her official role, isn’t spelled out in law. As a courtier of Donald Trump, she’s there to make the boss look good—and, possibly more important, feel good.
These two jobs were bound to clash eventually, and the Israel–Iran conflict forced the issue.
Asked last night about Gabbard’s March testimony before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” Trump responded, “I don’t care what she said.”
If that’s so, then why is she his principal intelligence advisor?
The Intelligence Reform Act specified that the DNI must ensure that intelligence provided to the president is “timely, objective, independent of all political considerations, and based upon all sources” and that the director “shall . . . establish objectives, priorities, and guidance for the intelligence community to ensure timely and effective collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination . . . of national intelligence.”
Was that what Gabbard was doing in March when she told the House Intelligence Committee that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon, and Supreme leader Khomeini 1 has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003”?
Maybe this really is the best assessment of the intelligence community. But there’s also a lot of ambiguity in the phrasing. Does “building a nuclear weapon” include preparing for an eventual nuclear test, or does she mean engineers literally assembling warheads? According to the Wall Street Journal, there seems to be some disagreement between Israeli and American analysts about how close Iran is to making a weapon and the regime’s true intentions behind what it insists is a peaceful program.
There are a lot of outstanding questions, such as: If the supreme leader didn’t order the nuclear weapons program suspended in 2003 to restart, is it possible he ordered some other nuclear weapons program to start or continue? For years, in annual reports to Congress, the intelligence community reported that Iran “isn’t currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device.” But that assessment changed last year, when the DNI warned that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”
One reported reason why the Israeli government chose to strike Iran’s nuclear program now was that the “weapons group” was attempting to “acquire specific equipment that would only be needed for a timed nuclear detonation.”
That news seemed to make an impression on Trump, who gave the Israelis the green light for ( almost all of) their air campaign and has insisted multiple times that “IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” But it also placed the spotlight back on Gabbard. After all, why would he say that if his own DNI was so sure that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon, even if it was better positioning itself to do so?
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ONE OF THREE THINGS must be true:
- Gabbard was honestly explaining the analytic consensus of the intelligence community, that analysis is/was correct, and the Israelis (and, now, Trump) are wrong about Iran’s nuclear activities and intentions. 2
- Gabbard was honestly explaining the analytic consensus of the intelligence community, but that analysis is/was incorrect, and the Israelis (and, now, Trump) are right about Iran’s nuclear activities and intentions.
- Gabbard was using weasel words to avoid stating publicly a thing she really wants not to be true: That Iran has a nuclear weapons program, even if it’s not yet at the point of assembling a weaponizable nuclear device.
If she were doing her job as DNI, then 1 or 2 could be correct, and she should consider resigning because the president isn’t listening to her—and, by extension, the intelligence community. More to the point, if he doesn’t trust her to give him accurate information, then he should fire her.
Gabbard insists that she and Trump are on the same page. But there are some signs he’s inching away. Gabbard was reportedly absent from the “lengthy” strategy session the president held at Camp David with senior national security officials on June 8. He should have someone as his principal intelligence advisor whose judgment means something to him at such meetings. The issue may be that such a person doesn’t exist.
OF COURSE, GABBARD ISN’T going to resign, and of course Trump isn’t going to fire her—not for this, anyway.
The position of DNI, the existence of the intelligence community, the very notion of intelligence itself is built on the assumption that the elected leaders of the country—primarily the president—need good information to make good policy decisions. But that’s not how things work in the Trump administration.
Trump’s policies aren’t based on good information. They are based on his whim. And as long as Gabbard is willing to submit herself to his whim, she’s safe in her job(s). But that job is not as DNI. It’s as Trump’s lackey. And in that post, the truth—the truth about what the expert analysts say and the truth of what’s really going on in Iran—doesn’t really matter. Instead, the solution to past weasel words is more weasel words.
Lo and behold, on Tuesday, we got this.
@sarahnferris
DNI Gabbard tells us she and Trump are “on the same page” when it comes to Iran nuclear timeline “Pres Trump was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March. Unfortunately too many people in the media don't care to actually read what I said” |
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