Tulsi Gabbard resigns as director of national intelligence

In a statement posted online, Gabbard said she was leaving the post due to her husband’s diagnosis of a rare bone cancer.
May 22, 2026 at 5:17 p.m. EDTToday at 5:17 p.m. EDT

By Warren P. Strobel, John Hudson and Ellen Nakashima

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is resigning from the Trump administration, she said Friday, after her husband was diagnosed with an extremely rare bone cancer.

Gabbard informed the White House that June 30 would be her last day as the U.S. intelligence czar.

Her departure ends a stormy 15-month tenure in which the former Democratic congresswoman was largely excluded from President Donald Trump’s inner national security circle, even as she pushed his political priorities on election security, declassification and Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential contest.

“Unfortunately, I must submit my resignation, effective June 30, 2026. My husband, Abraham, has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer,” she wrote in a letter to Trump. “At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle.”

Gabbard’s husband, Abraham Williams, is a cinematographer. The two married in 2015. Williams is from Hawaii, where Gabbard was raised and which she represented in Congress for eight years.

Gabbard is the latest of several Cabinet officials — all women — who have exited the Trump administration in recent weeks. Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, while Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned.

A person familiar with the situation said that Williams’s diagnosis notwithstanding, Gabbard had been pressured to depart by White House officials increasingly unhappy with her actions, which had brought unwelcome publicity or diverted attention from Trump’s messages. The person, like some others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal administration dynamics.

Trump, in a social media statement, praised Gabbard, saying she “has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.” Aaron Lukas, her top deputy, will serve as acting director of national intelligence, he wrote.

Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who has long voiced opposition to U.S. intervention abroad, never seemed to click with the president or his top security advisers. She was not included among key decision-makers for critical meetings with Trump on military action against Iran or the raid that seized former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

An oft-repeated administration joke was that DNI, the abbreviation of her title, stood for “Do Not Invite.”

On other matters, she took actions highly unusual for the U.S. intelligence czar, a position that generally focuses on foreign threats. In at least two domestic instances — in Georgia and Puerto Rico — she and her office were involved in the seizure of voting material related to the 2020 presidential election, which Trump falsely claims he won.

For months, senior administration officials speculated about when Gabbard would depart, because of widespread frustration within the White House about how ODNI has been run under her leadership. Among the early frustrations was a messy declassification process surrounding files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which resulted in the dissemination of people’s private information including Social Security numbers, said a senior U.S. official.

In a statement, Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his thoughts were with Gabbard and her husband.

He added: “At a time when the boundaries between verified intelligence and politically convenient claims have too often been blurred, it is critical that the [DNI] office remain grounded in facts, independence, and the rule of law. The next DNI must be committed to restoring trust in the office.”

Gabbard’s departure appears to increase the clout of CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who is closer to Trump. The CIA and ODNI have jockeyed over authorities for years, and there has been significant friction among the two organizations in Trump’s second term.

Gabbard was no longer viable as an intelligence chief, said Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer. “She had no role anymore. If you don’t have the president’s ear, if you don’t have his trust, you can’t be effective. That’s intel chief 101 in Washington,” he said.

Because the DNI’s role is principally one of overseer, Gabbard’s departure has little impact on intelligence operations such as electronic intelligence gathering or human spying. “NSA, Cyber Command and the CIA will continue to be hard at work,” said Polymeropoulos, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council.

Gabbard’s office, meanwhile, has been beset by major departures in recent months. Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, a deputy and ally, stepped down this week. Joe Kent, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned in March in protest of the Iran war.

One name that has circulated as Gabbard’s replacement is that of Michael Ellis, Ratcliffe’s deputy, three people familiar with the matter said.

Lukas, 55, now the acting DNI, is a former undercover CIA officer and station chief who served on the National Security Council staff during Trump’s first term.

Though Lukas is somewhat junior, he came up through the CIA’s Directorate of Operations so has “real field experience and an appreciation for operations instead of bureaucracy,” said Ralph Goff, a six-time CIA station chief. That would be a first for anyone serving in the DNI role.

Gabbard and her allies claimed successes during her tenure, including what they said is a 40 percent cut in ODNI’s size, declassification of nearly 500,000 pages of historical documents and a reorientation of the counterterrorism center to focus on global drug cartels.

The intelligence czar, a one-time presidential candidate, spent much of her time publicly and privately campaigning against what she alleged is a “deep state” of national security professionals determined to undermine Trump.

Early in her tenure, Gabbard purged the director and deputy director of the National Intelligence Council, after the council wrote an assessment that contradicted Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.

Last July, Gabbard took the unprecedented step of appearing in the White House briefing room to allege that Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign was manufactured by President Barack Obama and his aides as part of a “treasonous conspiracy.” The allegations came despite a years-long, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee probe, a special counsel investigation and a U.S. spy agency assessment that all concluded Russia had meddled in the election, probably with the goal of helping Trump.

Gabbard’s anti-war foreign policy views regularly found her out of step with the president.

Last June, she posted a video on social media in which she described a recent visit to Hiroshima, Japan, which the United States struck with a nuclear weapon at the end of World War II. “As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers,” she said in the video.

The video appeared days before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran’s principal nuclear sites. Trump confronted Gabbard at a White House meeting with others present, telling her, “I saw the video, and I didn’t like it,” an outside White House adviser said.