Aboard Air Force One late Monday night, having hastily left the G7 meeting in Canada, President Donald Trump took questions from reporters about the escalating Israel-Iran conflict. In the back and forth, Trump was asked about Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, who testified to Congress in March that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon — a direct contradiction of Israel’s claims that Iran was racing toward a bomb.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump replied. “I think they were very close to having it.”
Trump’s terse rebuke of his top intelligence official set off a firestorm among the MAGA faithful on right-wing media, long divided over the issue of Iran. It also raised serious questions about Gabbard’s standing in the administration.
Just a month ago, White House officials insisted that the president not only liked Gabbard but enjoyed her company. Even as some in the administration believed that she was out of her depth, officials insisted that Trump and his team were giving Gabbard leeway to learn the ropes of her new job.
But that tone has shifted, as multiple people inside the West Wing have grown disillusioned with Gabbard’s performance, sources say.
Though she’s been among the most visible voices for the president’s national security policy, behind the scenes Gabbard has struggled to carve out her own place in the Trump White House. Recently, Trump has come to see her as “off message” when it comes to the conflict in the Middle East, according to one senior White House adviser.
Trump’s annoyance with Gabbard peaked earlier this month, this person said, when she posted a 3-minute video warning that the world is “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” and blaming “political elite and warmongers” for stoking fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”
Trump viewed the video as a thinly veiled criticism of his consideration to allow Israel to strike Iran, and many inside the White House agreed Gabbard was speaking out of turn, the person added.
“When the president thinks you are off message, he doesn’t want you in the room,” the senior White House adviser said.
On Tuesday, the White House and Gabbard both sought to downplay the moment from Air Force One. Gabbard told reporters that she and the president were on “the same page” on Iran, and the White House rapid response team shared a post on X documenting her comments.
An ODNI official called the president and Gabbard’s statements on Iran “congruent,” noting “just because Iran is not building a nuclear weapon right now, doesn’t mean they aren’t ‘very close’ as President Trump said.”
“This is just a lazy regurgitation of a fake news story that BOTH the White House and Vice President have already debunked,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence Press Secretary Olivia Coleman said in a statement. “The Director remains focused on her mission: providing accurate and actionable intelligence to the President, cleaning up the Deep State, and keeping the American people safe, secure, and free.”
Gabbard is among the newer members of Trump’s orbit. A former Democratic congresswoman who forged common cause with the MAGA coalition in part because of its anti-interventionist posture, Gabbard was a frequent critic of Trump during his first term. She attacked him for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal and even accused him of “an act of war” against Iran over his decision to kill a top Iranian general in 2020.
Now, in near-weekly appearances on conservative cable news and in her regular social media feed, Gabbard exudes an image of the perfect MAGA warrior — physically fit, focused on weeding out “deep state” haters and absolutely loyal to Trump.
But in the White House, some Trump officials have begun to question whether she has fully grasped what the job of DNI actually entails, with its oversight of the government’s sprawling intelligence community, two administration officials told CNN.
“It’s an enormous job,” one administration official told CNN. “She is still very much learning the ropes — and all the various areas that DNI touches.”
Two days before she posted her nuclear war video, Gabbard was absent from a last-minute Camp David gathering of Trump’s top national security officials to discuss Israel’s plans to attack Iran. Among those present were Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Gabbard was on National Guard duty, according to an administration official, who said that the meeting had originally not been slated to address foreign policy. But one person familiar with the session said she wasn’t invited because officials didn’t feel her presence was required.
Gabbard was back in the White House the Monday after the Camp David meeting, an administration official said. And this week, the White House deliberately moved a meeting to accommodate her schedule, said one official familiar with the episode.
“If they wanted her excluded, that’s not what you do,” that person said. An ODNI official said that Gabbard has been at every Situation Room meeting since the conflict between Israel and Iran began last week.
Gabbard maintains allies in the White House, in particular Vice President JD Vance, who issued a statement Tuesday calling her “an essential member” of the team.
When asked if Gabbard was in danger of getting fired, one senior White House official said that the president was hesitant to fire anyone, given the optics.
“He’s not interested in firing her at this moment because she’s not doing any harm,” the official said. “I think he’s questioning her viewpoint as a value, especially after that video.”
Clearing a path
Since taking office in February, Gabbard has been fighting to clear a path inside the thorny bureaucracy of the intelligence community. An ODNI official claimed to CNN that Gabbard has identified savings totaling approximately $150 million in contracts, including roughly $20 million by cutting diversity programs and roles.
The job is a tall order for anyone: The DNI has a notoriously fuzzy mandate.
Created after 9/11 to facilitate information sharing and coordination across the now-18 agencies that make up the intelligence community, the office lacks budgetary and operational authority over the CIA and the other agencies it nominally oversees. Past directors have struggled to define its role in the US government, and Trump officials have considered disbanding it entirely in both his first and second terms.
Gabbard has sought to wrest control of the President’s Daily Brief from the CIA. The powerful document has long been under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but it was produced at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Now, Gabbard has directed the document to be put together at ODNI, located a few miles down the beltway from CIA, as part of what an official said was a streamlining effort designed to get vital intelligence in Gabbard’s hands faster.
In a job that is explicitly supposed to be apolitical, Gabbard has been overt in her public focus on Trump’s political objectives.
She launched a high-profile effort called the Director’s Initiatives Group designed to look into political priorities of the president, including what the administration has deemed the “weaponization” of the US intelligence community under the Biden administration. She’s also fired top career officials she accused of leaking and participating in an office chat group devoted to trans support issues.
Gabbard declassified documents about domestic terrorism in an effort to show the Biden administration targeted its political opponents, revoked security clearances for former intelligence officials critical of Trump, and made referrals to the Justice Department for criminal leak investigations.
She also called for former FBI Director James Comey to be jailed after he posted an image of seashells that read “86 47” — a matter of domestic law enforcement, which the ODNI, as a foreign intelligence-focused organization, is not traditionally supposed to be involved in.
The view from inside the building
Gabbard and her allies say she is working to restore trust in the US intelligence community by purging it of “rot” that she says “runs deep.”
But inside the organization she leads, some career officials say Gabbard appears more focused on the image of leadership than actually leading. Like several others in the Trump administration, Gabbard has embraced an online persona that at times has more in common with a fitness influencer than the nation’s spy chief. Her Instagram is punctuated with stylized photos of her working out. In one post in early May, she answered a comment from a follower who wanted to know what workout shoes she was wearing.
There’s also the sheer breadth of her media appearances. Gabbard is a regular guest on Fox News. On one occasion in late May, she appeared on the network for nearly half an hour.
Multiple career officials who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity said it’s not clear to the rank-and-file what Gabbard is doing day-to-day beyond posting to social media and trying to root out intelligence officials she believes have become “politicized.” Her husband, a videographer named Abraham Williams, has appeared on campus and has been known to film Gabbard for her personal social media, according to two sources familiar with the pattern.
Gabbard has surrounded herself with a small, insulated team that has largely cut senior career officials with experience running the agency out of the loop, sources familiar with the dynamic said. That has created a very small circle of people who have insight into her day-to-day running of the intelligence community.
It’s all made Gabbard somewhat of a Rorschach test: to her supporters, she’s a MAGA warrior tackling entrenched corruption; to her opponents, she’s a naive crusader, warping the ideal of apolitical intelligence in her zeal to support the president.
Democrats say, far from depoliticizing the intelligence community, Gabbard is doing the opposite — wielding the office for Trump’s own political advantage. By involving herself so directly in the politics of his administration, Gabbard risks compromising the objectivity and integrity of the intelligence analysis that national security leaders rely on to make decisions.
The top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees last week sent a letter to Gabbard demanding information on her decision to fire the top lawyer to the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and place a “senior advisor” in an office that is, under statute, supposed to conduct independent oversight of the intelligence community.
And the firing of the top two officials on the National Intelligence Council — the senior most analytical group in the intelligence community, whose job it is to understand and assess the biggest threats facing the United States — has also drawn fierce scrutiny from Democrats and former intelligence officials.
In April, one of Gabbard’s top advisers, Joe Kent, demanded that the NIC “update” an assessment that undercut the president’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to speed up deportations — an interference that former intelligence officials and Democratic members of Congress say was a disturbing example of a political leader inappropriately politicizing intelligence conclusions.
“She believes she was hired to do the political aspect of this job,” one source close to Gabbard told CNN.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report
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