Due to public outcry from Trump allies on Capitol Hill, prominent media and social media figures, and donors, Davis was replaced before he even officially started. Gabbard’s second pick for the same job was William Ruger, who worked at the Charles Koch Institute. Recently, Gabbard hired another former Defense Priorities adviser, Dan Caldwell, who worked under Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth before he was removed from his post for reportedly leaking to the media.

She wasn’t just staffing DNI with aides intent on protecting Iran from Trump. According to U.S. officials, she was also freezing out pro-Israel candidates. “She and her team actively campaigned against people going into the administration who saw Israel as a key ally,” one senior government official told Tablet. “And they viewed the Koch implants across the administration as an ally in that mission.”

Last year, Gabbard tried to move the country’s counterintelligence (CI) mission from the FBI to the ODNI. “Thanks to Kash Patel fighting Gabbard’s empire-building attempt, control of CI operations remained with FBI, which has the deep expertise in countering foreign espionage threats,” the senior government official told Tablet. “Had Tulsi succeeded in moving FBI CI ops to DNI, our country’s premier counterespionage service would have been in disarray and unable to respond to the surging Iranian threat.”

Or she would’ve buried the threat altogether for fear of giving the president and his top national security officials more reason to end the 47-year threat for good. Indeed, last March, she undercut Trump when she testified on Capitol Hill that the U.S. intelligence services “assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

If, as Gabbard testified, Iran wasn’t building a bomb, then Trump’s vows to end Iran’s nuclear program either through diplomacy or force were ridiculous. But Iran didn’t suspend the program in 2003, as Israel’s 2018 seizure of Iran’s nuclear archives made plain. And by the time of Gabbard’s testimony, Iran had enough material to make at least 10 bombs.

On an X post that gave video evidence that she’d testified Iran wasn’t building a bomb, she gaslighted Trump supporters by blaming the media for “intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree.”

And yet in June, with preparations for the first round of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in their final stages, she posted a video warning of a “nuclear holocaust” and chastised “warmongers” for bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” Trump was angry. And when reporters asked questions about Gabbard’s earlier assessment that Iran was not building a bomb, the president chafed. “She’s wrong,” said Trump. “I don’t care what she said.”

Sources told Tablet that Gabbard “doesn’t get invited to meetings anymore.” Kent essentially confirmed that when he told one podcaster that the images of Gabbard in Washington while Trump and top national security officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe were directing the war from Mar-a-Lago accurately represent the fact that she’s been locked out. Gabbard brought it all upon herself.

After Kent published his resignation letter, Gabbard posted on X to explain that her job is to help “coordinate and integrate all intelligence to provide the President and Commander in Chief with the best information available to inform his decisions. After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat and he took action based on that conclusion.”

What was missing was the Trump appointee’s public support for her boss’s decision, whether she privately agreed or not, and criticism of the accusations her former deputy leveled at her boss. Later, reports surfaced that she met with Kent and Vice President JD Vance before the former NCTC director posted his letter. Vance, according to the reports, “encouraged him to be respectful to POTUS.”

It seems Kent ignored the vice president’s advice, because accusing the commander in chief of being fooled into a war that serves the interests of a foreign power is a calculated insult. Yet when asked about Kent’s letter, Vance simply replied, “If you are on the team and you can’t help implement the decisions of his administration—he has the right to make those decisions—then it’s a good thing for you to resign.”

This is something like passive-aggressive insubordination. The United States is joined with Israel in a major military campaign against Iran, and two of the president’s Cabinet members can’t bring themselves to denounce the abject lies published by a former Trump aide that characterize the president as a lackey of a foreign power and vilify a wartime ally—charges clearly designed to drive down support for the Iran campaign.

Gabbard’s testimony on Capitol Hill last week was similarly jarring. Yes, as she said under oath, the job of an intelligence chief is to give the president the information he needs to make decisions to protect American lives and defend our interests. But as a political appointee testifying before a congressional panel comprising Trump opponents, she must also defend the policies of the president she serves. That she did not, while failing to call out the destructive conspiracy theories of a former subordinate, is more evidence that her priority is not to advance the president’s Iran policy, but rather to undermine it.

When asked this weekend about Gabbard’s future, Trump told the media she’s doing a good job. That’s not evidence that her post is safe, but that the president’s top priority right now is to win a war to secure American peace and prosperity, not confront an official whose efforts have repeatedly gone in the other direction.