In a letter addressed to President Trump, Gabbard announced last week she is stepping down as DNI after her husband, Abraham, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer.
After telling President Trump she is “truly grateful” for the opportunity to be DNI, she further wrote “I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming post.”
According to media reports, she informed the president she was stepping down during a May 22 private meeting in the Oval Office.
Director of National Intelligence, a key Cabinet position, was created after the Sept. 2001 U.S. terrorist attacks. The federal agency oversees 18 agencies, including the CIA and numerous military intelligence sources, to deliver an intelligence briefing to the U.S. president, known as the President’s Daily Brief.
Despite the stated reason for stepping down, numerous news outlets have pointed out Gabbard did so after several public disagreements with Trump over Iran’s pursuit of enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon.
Back in March, weeks after “Operation Epic Fury” began destroying Iran’s military from the air, Gabbard was testifying before a Senate committee when she ran into trouble over her assessment Iran was no longer pursuing nuclear materials.
Democrat senators noticed the written testimony she had submitted stated Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was “obliterated,” and there was no effort to restart it. During her oral testimony, however, she left that statement out and the senators went nuts after noticing it.
"It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat," she told the committee.
Back in June 2025, Gabbard ran into similar disagreement with President Trump after she told a congressional committee U.S. intelligence suggests Iran is not pursuing nuclear weapons.
“I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it,” President Trump, criticizing his own intelligence chief, told reporters.
Trump was publicly complaining about Gabbard being wrong on the eve of “Operation Midnight Hammer,” when B-2 bombers hit key nuclear facilities in Iran.
According to media reports, despite her important role Gabbard had found herself outside Trump’s inner circle of advisors when discussing the capture of Nicolas Maduro, the current Iran war, and Cuba.
Before becoming DNI under Trump, Gabbard's career including serving as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii before declaring herself an independent.
A military veteran, Gabbard also denounced the modern Democratic Party as "warmongers" after the party historically had an anti-war stance. She took that same anti-war stance into the Trump administration for Trump's second term.
Reacting to Gabbard’s resignation, AFR host Jenna Ellis told American Family News she’s conflicted over why she is stepping down.
Ellis said she knows Gabbard personally, and knows her family is important to her, but Ellis is also aware Gabbard has run into numerous issues with the White House, including the release of secretive documents on the John F. Kennedy assassination, the origins into Covid-19 virus, and UFOs.
Gabbard oversaw a task force, the Director’s Initiative Group, that worked to declassify documents tied to those controversial topics.
Considering her “bold statements” on releasing those documents, and her stance of Iran and nuclear weapons, Ellis said, “she may have crossed some of the same people that Thomas Massie and others crossed who have been targets of the Trump administration.”
