Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her cabinet position Friday to support her husband as he fights an “extremely rare form of bone cancer.” Her last day is expected to be June 30.
In her resignation letter, first obtained by Fox News, Gabbard wrote to President Donald Trump that she is “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.”
Gabbard had been under the ire of lawmakers in recent months, stemming from her defense of Trump’s war with Israel against Iran and her presence during a January FBI raid on an election center in Georgia. The high-profile firing comes in the wake of other departures in the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was shuffled over to Trump’s Shield of the Americas initiative. Trump’s Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer also resigned amid a misconduct probe.
For a while, it seemed that Gabbard would be fired, not resign. In early April, Trump had sought guidance from some of his advisers whether to replace Gabbard or not. His frustration with appears to have stemmed from her refusal to condemn the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, during a congressional hearing in March. Kent criticized Trump’s handling of the Iran war and subsequently resigned.
When asked later whether he still had confidence in Gabbard, Trump’s response was lukewarm. “Yeah, sure,” Trump told reporters. “I mean, she’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve.”
Laura Loomer, a far-right political activist, conspiracy theorist who has been cozy with Trump, seems to have encouraged Trump to fire Gabbard. However, Roger Stone, one of Trump’s oldest allies, seemingly helped save her job. “Loomer tried to convince the President that Tulsi Gabbard was about to resign — in an effort to get Trump to move preemptively to fire her. The whole thing was a hoax. Fortunately, I acted in time,” Stone wrote on X in April.
Prior to joining the Trump administration, Gabbard was a four-term Democratic representative from Hawaii and a 2020 presidential candidate. She left the party in 2022 as her views grew more conservative on foreign policy and transgender rights, among other issues. She accused the party of being “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.”
Her time as the nation’s spy chief was dominated by the need to support and facilitate the president’s intelligence agenda. For example, Gabbard launched an investigation into former President Barack Obama in July for what she called his “treasonous” use of national intelligence in investigating Trump’s ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election.
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Gabbard called Obama’s alleged actions a “coup.” Critics slammed the investigation as a distraction from simmering outrage over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, and noted her longtime admiration for Putin. In the following months, Gabbard’s investigation quietly faded away.
Gabbard was also present for an FBI raid on an election center in Fulton County, Georgia to obtain evidence supporting the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election. She told lawmakers she was there to observe parts of the raid at the “behest” of Trump, who told her about her role in the raid on the same day it was conducted.
Gabbard occasionally found herself at odds with Trump and the press, including her involvement in the March 2025 Signalgate scandal, in which a journalist was accidentally looped in a group chat of high ranking Trump administration officials discussing military operations in Yemen. She said the inclusion of the journalist in the chat was a “mistake.”
Gabbard and Trump did not see eye to eye on numerous international relations. In March 2025, Gabbard told Congress that intelligence findings assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Following airstrikes in June, Trump said that she was “wrong.”
“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one,” Trump said.
Gabbard, a veteran of overseas wars herself, had long opposed U.S. military intervention abroad, specifically in Ukraine and Syria. But she was a vocal supporter of Trump’s decision to go war with Iran in February, arguing that while Iran did not pose a threat through nuclear weapons, its long-range missiles were an “imminent threat.”
“As our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country,” she said in March.
