In the end Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t pushed out of her job as Director of National Intelligence, as Washington’s cognoscenti were expecting (they had started punning that DNI stood for “Do Not Invite”). Instead, Gabbard is leaving for a good and noble reason: to stand by her husband, who has been diagnosed with an “extremely rare form of bone cancer.” I wish them both the best.
And yet, Gabbard’s departure must also be the occasion to take stock of so much that has gone wrong in the intelligence community (IC) that she was tasked to oversee, and by extension in the second administration of President Donald Trump generally. After all, she is leaving just a few months into an unnecessary American war against Iran that both the old Gabbard and the honest current Gabbard would have opposed. Like so many others who have or could have the president’s ear, Gabbard had a duty to tell truth to power. She did not rise to the occasion.
Like some other cabinet members, she was unqualified for the job by any traditional definition. By temperament a free thinker who had dabbled in conspiracy theories and appeared unburdened by the constraints of consistency, she knew she would instead have to prove her worth to Trump in the category that matters most to him: personal loyalty. With misguided attempts to win the president’s trust and favor, she did lasting damage to the IC.
Under the cynical guise of ending “the weaponization of government against Americans,” Gabbard politicized the 18 intelligence agencies in her remit, which are supposed to be apolitical and hyper-professional. When analysts strayed from a line coming out of the White House, she revoked their security clearances or ended their careers.
When Trump became louder about his interest in seizing Greenland, a Danish territory which poses no threat to the US, she diverted resources to investigate it. When Trump was looking for legal loopholes in his campaign against Venezuela, Gabbard asked her National Intelligence Council to rewrite an inconvenient assessment; when the rewrite was still inconvenient, she fired the council’s top officials.
Still unable to break into Trump’s inner circle but eager to please, she in effect became his puppet. For example, she was recently spotted at an elections center in Atlanta during an FBI raid where voter records were confiscated because Trump was still determined to use the machinery of government to give credence to his lie that the election of 2020 was stolen from him. At a time when the United States had just abducted a Venezuelan dictator, was threatening Greenland, and was planning a war in Iran, a serious DNI would have had other priorities.
But by this time Trump had all but frozen her out anyway. Again and again, Gabbard had shown herself tone-deaf in appealing to him. After visiting Hiroshima, she put out a melodramatic video warning about nuclear annihilation. In substance, it was a sensible message. But her boss didn’t like her references to “political-elite warmongers” who are “carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.” After that, she was in the dog house.
Trump was especially irked, it seems, that Gabbard, when under oath in Congress, had the nerve to restate the intelligence community’s assessment that Iran was not actively planning to build a nuclear weapon. That ran counter to the White House shtick, according to which Iran posed an “imminent threat” that amounted to a casus belli. (One of Gabbard’s former advisers, Joe Kent, even resigned on this point, stating that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.”)
And yet Gabbard never took the next obvious step and advised the president against attacking Iran. When pressed in Congress, she tried to dodge her responsibility, claiming that the president is “responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat.” He is, of course. But the director of national intelligence is responsible for educating him on exactly that question.
On that occasion as on others, Gabbard betrayed herself. As a veteran of the Iraq war, she has long been against entanglements and wars of choice in the Middle East, or anywhere. In that she is not alone in the administration. No newspaper headline has ever aged more ignominiously than that on an op-ed written in 2023 by JD Vance, who is now vice president: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”
From day one, the second Trump administration has been a clown shop of advisers who are either unqualified or cowardly or both, and Gabbard was one example. For now, her deputy, Aaron Lukas, will take over in an acting capacity. In subject expertise he already outshines Gabbard; in mettle, his tests are yet to come. But the intelligence community has already paid the price in intelligence.
Gabbard did the right thing for her husband by resigning. It’s too bad she didn’t do the right thing for America much earlier.
This column is generated from Bloomberg news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.