Tulsi Gabbard made hundreds of thousands of dollars from Republican-friendly media and advocacy groups in 2024, according to a personal disclosure.
While canvassing the country as a top MAGA surrogate, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii earned more than $1.2 million.
That includes nearly $200,000 from her role as a Fox News contributor and nearly $120,000 from the Christian legal advocacy group American Center for Law & Justice, which has steered millions of dollars to a prominent ex-Trump lawyer who defended the president at his 2020 impeachment trial.
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Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, earned $80,000 in total from five addresses given to local Republican Party chapters. That made up just over half of the $170,000 she earned from speaking engagements, which included an address to the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, surprised Trump at at an October rally by pledging her full MAGA fealty and announcing she had become a Republican.
The Trump nominee also netted an advance of just under $300,000 for her book For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind from Skyhorse Publishing.
Other Skyhorse releases include Melania Trump’s memoir Melania, a hagiographic book on former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, and a conspiratorial book about former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci by Trump nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On top of her writing, media, and speaking work, Gabbard raked in $373,000 from her company Tulsi Media LLC, the holding company for her podcast The Tulsi Gabbard Show, and $36,000 from her production company TOA Studios LLC.
In a Jan. 15 letter to an ethics official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard pledged that Tulsi Media LLC will remain dormant during her tenure as director. She said she would transfer full ownership of TOA Studios to her husband.
The former congresswoman’s disclosure also shows that she poured earnings back into MAGA causes: She holds a stake worth $100,000 to $250,000 in right-wing YouTube competitor Rumble and a $100,000 to $250,000 stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Gabbard pledged to divest her interests in both, as well as holdings in Apple, Bitcoin, and Nvidia, during her appointment as director of national intelligence.
According to her filing, she is also the owner of three apartment complexes in Texas, one worth $5 million to $25 million, and two worth between $25 million and $50 million each.
Gabbard has faced scrutiny for meeting with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and expressing foreign policy views critics have alleged echo the Kremlin’s worldview. She is expected to be challenged on those views during confirmation hearings, where her support among even some top Republicans is not guaranteed.
She has expressed skepticism of intelligence agencies and has long advocated against foreign interventions, previously calling her critics “warmongers.”
Several of her former aides told ABC News last year that she was a regular consumer of Russian news site RT, including “long after” they advised her it wasn’t a credible source of information. The Trump transition team called their allegations “false.”
