Yes, Tulsi Gabbard fits the Washington joke, she wants to spend more time with her family. And I don’t doubt that for a minute. Her husband, Abraham Williams, has a rare form of bone cancer. But that’s not the most compelling reason that Gabbard had for leaving. Actually, she had two: 1. She was always an outsider. When she said, “Iran isn’t building a nuclear weapon,” Trump replied, “I don’t care what she says.” You don’t care what the Director Of National Intelligence says about a nuclear weapon? Only in Trump world is such a thing possible. 2. Gabbard does not believe in the war in Iran. In fact, she opposes it. So fate gave her an opportunity to walk away from a situation where she wasn’t suited or appreciated to begin with.
Because the president was not interested in Gabbard’s views on intelligence, she tried to get his attention in other ways. Gabbard accused former U.S. officials of mounting a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She railed against the so-called Russia Hoax and attempted to undermine the conclusion, by a bipartisan Senate committee, that Russia had indeed interfered in the 2016 presidential election. And she took revenge on Trump’s perceived political enemies by revoking the security clearances of current and former intelligence officials. None of this won the president’s public admiration, and it did lasting damage to the intelligence community. Gabbard’s decision to place politics ahead of objectivity has deterred intelligence analysts from making assertions that might run counter to the administration’s preferred storylines, current and former officials have told me.
To bolster her baseless claims, Gabbard declassified U.S. intelligence material—sometimes over the objections of the CIA—and publicly misrepresented what those documents actually said. Gabbard’s claim to have “uncovered weaponization” in the intelligence community gave Trump another dubious talking point in his unrelenting campaign of political revenge. Gabbard fired two senior intelligence analysts after they wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s efforts to link Venezuela’s president to a criminal gang. Trump’s tortured claims played a role in justifying his attack on Venezuela—a supreme irony for the supposedly anti-interventionist DNI.
By law, it was Gabbard’s responsibility to advise policy makers on life-and-death decisions and help them make sense of the torrent of intelligence that streams into U.S. spy agencies every day. Instead, she made her position a platform for promoting distortions and undermining public confidence in the very institutions she’d sworn an oath to lead.
This was the situation for fifteen months, at least on paper. Gabbard is lucky that she walked away from the job since she might have lost it anyway. Iran is a mess and Trump has no exit plan. So being a judas goat in the middle of it all was not a great place to be. John Ratcliffe is reportedly the one who has Trump’s ear in the intelligence community. Maybe he can devise a graceful exit and soon. I’m not holding my breath.
