U.S. Intelligence Chief Reportedly Forced to Resign
Donald Trump announced Friday that his Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had resigned, citing her husband Abraham’s diagnosis with a rare bone cancer. Trump thanked her, said she’d done an incredible job, and named her deputy Aaron Lukas acting director.
According to Reuters, the illness may not be the real reason behind the resignation, citing one person familiar with the matter, they are reporting that the White House forced her out.
Gabbard had been a poor fit for the regime's story on Iran almost from the start. As the war ground on, Trump kept insisting Tehran had posed an imminent threat, but the intelligence community never backed him, still insisting that Iran has serious military capabilities to this day.
Gabbard told Congress the determination of what counted as imminent was the president's to make, not theirs, and the assessment she carried in cut directly against his account: where Trump declared Iran "literally obliterated," its air force gone, its navy gone, its leaders gone, the IC's conclusion was a regime "intact but largely degraded," still capable of striking U.S. interests and likely, if it survived, to spend years rebuilding its missiles and drones.
Democrats made it clear that not one intelligence agency had produced a single report finding Iran posed an imminent threat. Nor was the dissent only Gabbard's. Joe Kent, who ran the National Counterterrorism Center, had already resigned over the war, writing that Iran posed no imminent threat at all.
So she leaves a thinning Cabinet, after Noem, after Chavez-DeRemer, after Bondi and the Epstein files. The woman whose job was to certify the threat behind the war never would, and now she is gone, on a Friday, with a kind word and a family tragedy to see her out. Her replacement could very well offer the justifications that she wouldn’t sign off on.
Her title has always been an oxymoron