Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is notably absent from a major intelligence briefing with the Senate on Thursday.
Gabbard’s sidelining comes shortly after President Donald Trump bluntly said that her testimony from March, when she asserted Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, was “wrong.” It also comes amid a damning intelligence leak that weakened the White House’s claims regarding the effectiveness of Trump’s strike on Iran.
“I don’t care what [Gabbard] said,” Trump said aboard Air Force One last week. “I think they were very close to having one.”
It is unusual for a Cabinet-level intelligence official to be excluded from a briefing with lawmakers on national security and military action in the Middle East. The Washington Post first reported on her absence, and the White House confirmed to the Daily Beast that Gabbard, a 44-year-old former Democrat who once sold t-shirts emblazoned with “NO WAR ON IRAN,” is not attending.
A senior White House official downplayed Gabbard’s exclusion.
“CIA Director Ratcliffe will represent the intelligence community tomorrow while Tulsi Gabbard continues her critical work at DNI,” the official told the Beast. “The media is turning this into something it’s not.”
Michael Wolff, a Trump biographer, told the Daily Beast Podcast on Wednesday that Gabbard is on thin ice with the administration after the intelligence leak on the efficacy of the strike on an Iranian nuclear site embarrassed the administration.
Officials attending Thursday’s briefing include Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
The Associated Press reports that Gabbard was initially scheduled to attend a briefing with senators on Tuesday. However, that meeting was postponed to Thursday for unknown reasons, and Gabbard was pulled from attending. The postponement came just as a CNN report revealed that a leaked assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies determined the strike on Iran may have been a $2 billion flop.
It is unclear whether Gabbard will attend a briefing with House members scheduled for Friday.
Many lawmakers have raged at the Trump administration for bombing Iran without congressional approval. The Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require Trump to get the OK from Congress before striking Iran in the future, and administration officials attending Thursday’s hearing appeared headed for a tongue-lashing.
Gabbard has publicly backed Trump’s decision to strike Iran and has parroted his claim, which is refuted by both U.S. intelligence and nuclear experts, that the nation’s nuclear facility and enriched uranium were “completely and fully obliterated.”
“New intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed,” she said Wednesday, adding that it would take Iran “years” to rebuild facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan.
Like others in the administration, Gabbard has claimed that the media is attacking U.S. service members who carried out the strike from B-2 bombers.
“The propaganda media has deployed their usual tactic: selectively release portions of illegally leaked classified intelligence assessments (intentionally leaving out the fact that the assessment was written with ‘low confidence’) to try to undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership and the brave servicemen and women who flawlessly executed a truly historic mission to keep the American people safe and secure,” she said.
Unlike Trump’s first term, this time the president appears to be sticking by his Cabinet appointees even as they battle scandal and publicly make mistakes.
MAGA 2.0 has yet to experience significant turnover among top officials. National Security Adviser Michael Waltz was appointed to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations instead of being fired, despite being responsible for mistakenly adding the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine to a classified Signal group chat in March.
Elon Musk is the only notable departure from the White House’s inner circle so far, but he never held a permanent role during his chaotic four months guiding the Department of Government Efficiency.
