America's director of national intelligence under Donald Trump. A former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and a presidential candidate in 2020, Gabbard became a Republican in 2024, saying her former party was "led by an elitist cabal of woke warmongers" who "don't believe in freedom". Trump swore her in as director of national intelligence in February 2025, saying she would "restore honesty, integrity and trust to the national-security state".
Gabbard oversaw an assessment published in March 2025 by America's 18 intelligence agencies that elevated the threat of drug cartels over that of jihadists.
She is among the hawks in the White House who are unconvinced by Ahmed al-Sharaa's transformation in Syria, insisting the country remains a counter-terrorism issue.
On August 19th 2025 Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 serving and former intelligence officials accused of "betray[ing] their oath to the constitution". Among them were some of the most senior serving career intelligence officials, including the CIA's top Russia and Eurasia analyst (who had overseen a 2016 report on Russian election meddling), Shelby Pierson and Vinh Nguyen. Nguyen had been the chief data scientist at the NSA and was described by insiders as "the most thoughtful person on AI in the federal government". That same month Gabbard declassified a House Intelligence Committee review of the CIA's 2016 Russia report, co-authored by Kash Patel, over the CIA's objections; the declassified document included verbatim quotes from intercepted material and descriptions of human sources in Russia.
On March 18th 2026 Gabbard delivered her office's annual survey of threats facing America to Congress. Her written remarks noted that America's attack on Iran the previous year had "obliterated" its nuclear-enrichment programme and that Iran had made "no efforts" to rebuild it—claims that undercut Trump's justification for the war, that Iran was two weeks away from a bomb. Gabbard omitted those lines from her spoken testimony. When pressed on whether Iran had been an "imminent nuclear threat", she replied: "The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president." That would have come as a surprise to thousands of American intelligence officials; the CIA was established in 1947 with the express purpose of avoiding strategic surprise.
In her March 2025 testimony to Congress, Gabbard relayed the intelligence community's consensus that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon and that Ali Khamenei had not reauthorised the weapons programme he suspended in 2003. She warned, however, that Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium had reached a level "unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons" and that a taboo had eroded against discussing nuclear weapons in public, "likely emboldening nuclear-weapons advocates within Iran's decision-making apparatus".
Trump gave greater credence to an Israeli claim that its intelligence showed Iran had reached a "point of no return" in seeking a nuclear weapon. He publicly dismissed Gabbard—"I don't care what she said"—and declared: "My intelligence community is wrong." Gabbard fired two senior career officers who oversaw a separate intelligence assessment that undercut Trump's claims about Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang; her office said they had politicised the work.
Hatred, n.: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.