In Tulsi Gabbard’s time as director of national intelligence, she drifted in and out of President Trump’s good graces.
When she expressed doubts about military action against Iran, Mr. Trump criticized her publicly. But repeatedly she won back his favor by pivoting to election matters, including intelligence agencies’ examination of Russian interference in the 2016 and Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
At Mr. Trump’s direction, Ms. Gabbard showed up in Georgia to supervise an F.B.I. raid that seized ballots in Fulton County, and then put the president on the phone with agents carrying out the raid. She also began an inquiry looking for vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines, even taking a voting machine in Puerto Rico for examination by her office.
Bill Pulte, one of Mr. Trump’s aides who has most relentlessly pursued the president’s passions for retribution, is likely to take over from Ms. Gabbard on an acting basis. Officials are bracing for the potential for even more efforts by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to influence the midterm elections.
The agency has had the important role in recent elections during the Trump and Biden administrations of gathering information from the nation’s spy agencies about attempts by foreign adversaries to influence the vote.
The Trump administration and Democrats in Congress have differed on how far the powers of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence go in terms of election security. Democrats have said they are limited to foreign threats. The Trump administration has claimed a larger mandate, looking at broader security concerns.
In 2020, the office outlined attempts by Iran and Russia to manipulate American voters’ views. In 2024, the office was even more aggressive, debunking false videos pushed by Russia alleging voting fraud and calling out efforts to falsely malign the Democratic ticket or spread election-related chaos.
Those 2024 efforts earned the scorn of many Trump supporters. Once in office for his second term, Mr. Trump’s aides began dismantling the infrastructure at the F.B.I., State Department, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. In Ms. Gabbard’s office, the Foreign Malign Influence Center, which had briefed reporters and local officials during the previous election, was all but shut down, its work folded under another department.
Mr. Pulte has not said much about his priorities as acting director. His record shows that he has a keen sense of what Mr. Trump is focused on and an equally strong desire to please the president. That leaves open the possibility Mr. Pulte could continue Ms. Gabbard’s election work.
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