President Donald Trump has told Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that she should resign before the midterm elections, according to a report citing two sources who spoke to Sherwood News in recent weeks. The White House, those sources said, "has made it clear" to Gabbard that they want her gone before voters head to the polls later this year.
Gabbard's departure has not been confirmed. But the reported directive caps weeks of visible tension between the president and his intelligence chief, tension rooted in a fundamental disagreement over U.S. military action against Iran.
The rift matters because a director of national intelligence who is publicly at odds with the commander-in-chief on the defining national security question of the moment is not a minor bureaucratic headache. It is a structural problem. And Trump appears to have decided to solve it.
Earlier this spring, the United States launched strikes on Iran. Gabbard, whose entire political identity, from her 2020 presidential campaign onward, was built around opposing what she called perpetual "regime change wars" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, found herself on the wrong side of the president's decision.
The New York Post reported that Gabbard was excluded from a June 8 Camp David national security meeting where Trump began shaping plans for strikes related to the anticipated Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program and ballistic missile launchers. CIA Director John Ratcliffe delivered the classified congressional intelligence briefing afterward, not Gabbard.
"She's been wrong on the big stuff," one administration official told the Post.
Trump himself publicly dismissed Gabbard's prior testimony that Iran was not close to building a nuclear weapon. National Review noted that Fox News had reported on Gabbard's absence from the Camp David meeting, and that Trump told reporters bluntly: "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one."
On June 10, Gabbard posted a video warning that the world was "closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before." That kind of public dissent from a sitting intelligence director, while the president is executing a military campaign, is not something any White House can quietly absorb.
The Iran disagreement was not the only friction point. In March, Gabbard's deputy, Joe Kent, resigned from his post at the National Counterterrorism Center. Kent cited disagreement over U.S. involvement in the Iran war and what he described as the influence of Israel and the Israeli lobby in domestic politics.
Kent's resignation letter, as the Washington Examiner described it, contradicted Trump's stated justification for striking Iran and accused pro-Israel pressure of driving the decision. That alone would have been a problem. What made it worse, the reporting suggests, was Gabbard's refusal to condemn Kent when she appeared before the Senate intelligence committee on Capitol Hill.
Gabbard chose her words carefully in that appearance. She told senators that her briefing "conveys the intelligence community's assessment of the threats facing US citizens, our homeland and our interests", and pointedly added that these were "not my personal views or opinions."
That distinction may have been technically precise. But it also signaled distance from the president's position at the worst possible time. As the administration had previously tried to downplay Cabinet shake-up talk, the gap between Gabbard's hedging and Trump's certainty became harder to paper over.
The Washington Examiner put the problem plainly: "Vance got in line. Gabbard has not. And in her position, that is not a minor character flaw, it is a national security liability." The outlet explicitly argued that Trump should "reshuffle the deck" and begin by finding a director of national intelligence whose vision aligns with his.
Gabbard is not the first senior official to face pressure under this administration. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are all listed among notable figures who have departed in what the reporting describes as shock exits.
The White House has not been shy about moving officials who fall out of alignment. When Kent left in March, Trump was characteristically direct. As covered in our earlier reporting, the president dismissed the departing counterterrorism chief with a blunt assessment that his exit was a good thing.
Yet even as the friction with Gabbard escalated, Trump told reporters he still had faith in her leadership. "Yeah, sure. I mean, she's a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn't make somebody not available to serve," the president said.
That quote reads differently now. If the Sherwood News reporting is accurate, Trump's patience ran out sometime in the weeks that followed. The White House had earlier rejected reports that Gabbard faced removal. The current reporting suggests the calculus has changed.
Gabbard is not the only intelligence community figure drawing scrutiny. FBI Director Kash Patel has been identified as another high-profile official some are betting could face pressure next.
This week, The Atlantic published an article that suggested Patel was suffering from an alcohol problem causing unexplained absences from duty. Patel responded by filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine, accusing it of publishing "false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel's reputation and drive him from office."
The lawsuit's filing details, including the court and exact date, have not been publicly specified. But the size of the claim and the speed of the response signal that Patel, unlike Gabbard, intends to fight publicly rather than go quietly. Earlier reporting had already suggested Patel might face pressure from Trump following the Bondi shakeup.
Several important details remain unclear. It is not known whether Trump told Gabbard directly to resign or whether the message was delivered through White House staff or intermediaries. The specific date of the reported conversation has not been disclosed. And Gabbard herself has not publicly confirmed or denied that she has been asked to leave.
Nor is it clear who would replace her. The director of national intelligence oversees the entire 18-agency intelligence community. The role demands both the president's trust and the ability to deliver assessments that may conflict with policy preferences, a tension Gabbard navigated by drawing a line between the intelligence community's findings and her own views.
That line, it turns out, was not enough. The administration's broader intelligence-related controversies have only added to the sense that the president wants officials who share his instincts, not just his party affiliation.
Gabbard's situation illustrates a straightforward principle that Washington's permanent class often forgets: a Cabinet officer serves at the pleasure of the president. When the intelligence director's public posture on the central national security question of the day diverges from the president's, and when she declines to distance herself from a subordinate who publicly accused the administration of being manipulated by a foreign lobby, the relationship becomes untenable.
Gabbard built her brand on opposing interventionism. That brand served her well in a presidential primary and earned her a Cabinet appointment from a president who shared her skepticism of forever wars. But when Trump decided to act on Iran, Gabbard's brand became a liability rather than an asset. She was excluded from the room where the decisions were made, publicly contradicted by the president she served, and left defending a position the administration had already moved past.
None of that makes Gabbard dishonest or disloyal in some grand sense. It makes her a poor fit for a job that requires lockstep alignment with the commander-in-chief on matters of war and peace. Trump, to his credit, appears to have recognized the mismatch and acted on it, even if the public messaging lagged behind the private reality.
A president who demands alignment from his intelligence chief is not conducting a purge. He is doing his job.
