Tulsi Gabbard resigns as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence over family emergency

Tulsi Gabbard, the ex-Hawaii Democrat who found a place in Donald Trump’s cabinet as Director of National Intelligence, is stepping down from her post.

The former congresswoman notified Trump of her intent to resign as of June 30 during a meeting on Friday.

Writing on X, she said she was “deeply grateful for the trust President Trump placed in me and for the opportunity to lead ODNI for the last year and a half.”

Her resignation letter cited her husband’s diagnosis with “an extremely rare form of bone cancer” as the reason for her decision.

"Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage — standing steadfast through my deployment to East Africa on a Joint Special Operations mission, multiple political campaigns and now my service in this role,” she said.

"His strength and love have sustained me through every challenge — I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming position."

She added that she was “fully committed to ensuring a smooth and thorough transition over the coming weeks.”

Trump praised her in a separate post on Truth Social in which he wrote that she’d “done a great job” and confirmed that her resignation will be effective at the end of next month.

“Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her,” Trump said. He added that Gabbard’s principal deputy, Aaron Lukas, would serve as acting DNI following her departure.

Gabbard’s exit from Trump’s cabinet, which was first reported by Fox News, is the fourth sudden exit from Trump’s cabinet in the last two and a half months and follows the resignations of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-Deremer.

It marks the end of a tumultuous year and a half for the former Democrat, who gained a place in Trump’s orbit during the 2024 election after bolting from her party after an ill-fated attempt at running for the Democratic presidential nomination four years earlier.

During her time in Congress, she routinely drew criticism from foreign policy experts for expressing conspiratorial and often pro-Russian views, including during an infamous 2015 trip to Syria in which she parroted Russian propaganda by claiming it might have been ISIS — which did not possess an Air Force — that committed brutal airstrikes against civilians.

Gabbard often explained her conspiracy-laden worldview as the product of her “anti-war” attitude formed during her time as an Army National Guard soldier in Iraq.

After she was savaged as a “Russian asset” during Democratic primary debates in 2020, she gravitated towards the GOP on account of Trump’s purported opposition to what he called “endless war” in the Middle East.

He nominated her to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence after winning the 2024 election in what was widely seen at the time as a gesture of contempt towards the U.S. intelligence community, towards which Trump has long harbored distrust due to the role it played in multiple investigations into his campaign and his conduct as president during his first term.

But once she was confirmed on a party-line vote early last year, Gabbard spent most of her tenure largely sidelined as Trump abandoned his prior aversion towards military conflict and embraced military interventions in Venezuela and Iran.

Gabbard was rarely seen at the White House and was kept out of planning for numerous military operations, while her predecessor from Trump’s first term, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, remained firmly in Trump’s inner circle and took leading roles in most intelligence-related matters involving the president.

In February, she inexplicably participated in an FBI raid of Fulton County, Georgia election facilities after which agents seized ballots from the 2020 election as part of the president’s ongoing effort to prove that he actually won the election he lost to Joe Biden nearly six years ago.

At the time, Gabbard called Donald Trump directly on his mobile phone so he could speak with the agents involved in the search. The president later said she had attended at his request despite claims from then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that he’d had no idea why she’d been present at the site of the search.

The same month, The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a “continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle” over how to handle a whistleblower complaint about alleged wrongdoing by Gabbard that was so highly classified that it was locked in a safe and kept from Congress. A spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office later confirmed that the complaint involved Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”

During a congressional hearing in March, her measured comments were notable for their careful non-endorsement of Trump’s decision to strike Iran. She repeatedly dodged questions about whether the White House had been warned of potential fallout from the conflict, including Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, after her written testimony stated that Iran had not attempted to reconstitute elements of its nuclear weapons program that were heavily damaged during air strikes last June.

Those remarks contradicted Trump, who has repeatedly asserted that the war was necessary to head off an imminent threat from the Islamic Republic.

The contradiction led to several awkward exchanges with lawmakers who asked Gabbard for her opinion on the threat posed by Iran as the nation’s top intelligence official. She repeatedly said it was Trump’s decision to strike, not hers.“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said.

With additional reporting by agencies

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