By Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco
WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – Tulsi Gabbard said on Friday she was resigning from her job as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, saying her husband had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and she was leaving her role to help him.
Gabbard advised Trump of her intention to step down during an Oval Office meeting on Friday, Fox News Digital reported earlier. The resignation is effective June 30, it said.
In her resignation letter posted on X, Gabbard told Trump she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half.”
She cited her husband Abraham Williams’ recent diagnosis of bone cancer.
“I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming post,” she said.
Trump said on his Truth Social platform that Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas would become acting director. Lukas is a former CIA officer and analyst who served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term.
Trump said Gabbard had done “a great job” but with her husband’s cancer diagnosis, “she, rightfully, wants to be with him, bringing him back to good health as they currently fight a tough battle together.”
A source familiar with the matter said that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said on X that Gabbard was departing in light of her husband’s diagnosis.
Trump has hinted in the past at differences with Gabbard on their approach to Iran, saying in March that she was “softer” than him on curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
In April, several sources told Reuters that Gabbard could lose her role in a broader cabinet shakeup.
A senior White House official said then that Trump had expressed displeasure with Gabbard in recent months. Another source with direct knowledge of the matter said the president had asked allies for their thoughts on potential replacements for his intelligence chief.
CONTROVERSIAL TENURE AS DNI
Gabbard had no deep intelligence experience when Trump tapped the former Democratic member of Congress to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an agency created to oversee the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies after the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on the U.S.
A member of the Hawaii National Guard, she served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, became an officer, transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Her departure from Congress saw her adopt conservative viewpoints, endorse Trump for president in 2024 and join the Republican Party.
She faced bipartisan criticism for comments seen as echoing Russia’s statements blaming NATO for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and for meeting former Syrian President Bashar Assad during a 2017 trip to Damascus during a brutal civil war in which he received Russian and Iranian backing.
Once she took office, Democrats accused Gabbard of using her post to advance Trump’s drive to retaliate against his perceived enemies and back his efforts to prove debunked claims that fraud foiled his re-election in 2020.
Signs of tension with the White House appeared when Trump in June suggested she was wrong in assessing there was no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon.
She has been absent from deliberations between Trump and his top national security advisers on major foreign policy issues, including the U.S. military operation that deposed former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Iran war and Cuba.
“She was pushed out by the White House,” the source familiar with Gabbard’s departure told Reuters. “The White House has been unhappy with her for quite some time.”
The person said among other reasons for the displeasure with Gabbard were the activities of her taskforce known as the Director’s Initiatives Group. The group has worked to declassify documents related to the death of former President John F. Kennedy, investigate the security of election machines and probe the origins of COVID-19.
Another source of friction, the person said, was Gabbard’s revocation last August of the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. officials that exposed the name of an intelligence officer serving undercover overseas.
Gabbard led several initiatives she cast as rooting out politicization from the intelligence community and approved the stripping of security clearances from former intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan.
Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading Gabbard critic, told reporters after a Friday event in Manassas, Virginia, that Gabbard’s job itself had become too politicized.
“This position now more than ever needs to be an independent, experienced intelligence professional,” Warner said.
The next leader should understand the “director of national intelligence should be focusing on foreign intelligence and not involving himself or herself in domestic election incidents,” he said.
(Reporting by Ismail Shakil, Doina Chiacu, Erin Blanco, David Brunnstrom, Jonathan Landay, and David Shepardson; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Don Durfee, Deepa Babington and Cynthia Osterman)
Comments