The Last Act of an Unusual Spy Chief
Tulsi Gabbard’s final act as DNI reflected the office’s shifting mission
On her final day as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard did not issue a warning about China, Russia, Iran, or terrorism. Instead, she dropped one last bombshell — on the Covid pandemic.
Gabbard released a trove of documents intended to reopen one of the most contentious debates of the pandemic era: whether government officials, intelligence agencies, and former White House adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci misled the public about the origins of Covid-19 and suppressed evidence pointing to a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.
She framed the release as a broader effort to restore public trust after years of secrecy surrounding the pandemic. “The Covid-19 pandemic caused tremendous hardship and pain for millions of our fellow Americans,” she said in announcing the release. “After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability.”
Among the newly released material was a May 2020 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory assessment concluding that a lab-origin scenario deserved serious consideration, given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s capabilities. It stopped short of concluding a leak had occurred but showed government scientists weighing that possibility earlier than the public knew.
To Gabbard and her supporters, the release validates years-old suspicions that Fauci and others created the impression that scientific consensus was more settled than it actually was.
Yet the gap between what supporters claim and what the documents actually demonstrate remains significant: they raise questions about whether officials, especially Fauci, were too quick to dismiss possibilities now taken more seriously, but they do not prove he orchestrated a cover-up, manipulated intelligence, misled Congress, or concealed the virus’s origins.
The strongest version of Gabbard’s case is not that the documents reveal a conspiracy. It is that they reveal a government and scientific establishment that often projected confidence it did not possess and discouraged debate it should have allowed — a meaningful criticism, but not the same thing as proving a cover-up.
For Gabbard, releasing the document was a fitting final act. Not because the documents dramatically altered what we know about Covid. But because they reflected the unusual trajectory of Gabbard’s tenure: a foreign policy iconoclast who arrived in office expecting to shape national security policy and ultimately became one of the administration’s most visible combatants in Donald Trump’s long-running war against the institutions of government itself.
An unorthodox appointment
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after the September 11 attacks to coordinate the nation’s intelligence agencies and assess foreign threats — not to referee America’s domestic political disputes. And Trump did not choose Tulsi Gabbard because of her views on Covid. He chose her because she represented something rare in Washington: a politician willing to challenge both parties’ foreign policy orthodoxies.
A combat veteran who deployed to Iraq with the Army National Guard, Gabbard was elected to Congress from Hawaii in 2012 and sworn in with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita, becoming the first Hindu member of the House.
She ran for president as a progressive Democrat in 2020 before leaving the party and eventually endorsing Trump. Along the way, she built her reputation criticizing the Iraq War, opposing military intervention, questioning intelligence failures, and arguing that Washington’s national security establishment had too often led the country into costly mistakes.
Her appointment signaled that Trump wanted an intelligence chief who would share his skepticism of the intelligence community and challenge what he and many of his supporters describe as the “deep state” — a network of government officials they believed had accumulated too much power, faced too little accountability, and pursued its own interests rather than the priorities of the administration.
The administration Gabbard joined was often less interested in restraining American power than many of her supporters expected. While Trump continued to criticize endless wars, he also demonstrated a willingness to use military force, expand pressure campaigns, and threaten adversaries in ways that frequently sat uneasily with Gabbard’s anti-interventionist instincts.
Iran was the clearest flashpoint. In March 2025, Gabbard testified that intelligence did not show Iran was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon — a claim directly at odds with the case for military action. Trump called her “wrong” days before ordering strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. More than a year later, in one of her last appearances before Congress, she told lawmakers the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s program and that there was no evidence of an effort to rebuild it, a statement that again complicated the administration’s continued framing of Iran as an active threat.
Over time, Gabbard appeared increasingly removed from the administration’s most significant foreign policy decisions. She was left out of the planning around the operation that seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and Iran policy was largely driven elsewhere, with major diplomatic initiatives more often emerging from the White House, State Department, or National Security Council than from her office.
From foreign policy to fighting the “deep state”
As her influence on foreign policy waned, Gabbard appeared to find another way to remain indispensable.
If she was no longer at the center of the administration’s biggest national security decisions, she could become one of Trump’s most trusted allies in a different fight: his long-running campaign against the “deep state” — institutions he believed had either abused their power or wronged him personally. She often advanced claims and narratives that critics argued blurred the line between legitimate skepticism and conspiracy.
In addition to reviving questions about the government’s handling of the pandemic, she aggressively pushed to declassify materials related to the Russia investigation and revived a long-debunked claim that the US had secretly funded bioweapons research in Ukraine, a theory with roots in Russian propaganda and the QAnon movement that she had been criticized for amplifying once before, in 2022.
Her work increasingly reflected Trump’s longstanding skepticism of the intelligence community. But even that transformation did not appear to restore her standing inside the administration.
Many of her declassification efforts generated headlines but little lasting impact. Her release of Russia-interference materials meant to show that Obama officials “manufactured” evidence against Trump did not overturn the Senate’s bipartisan findings that reached the opposite conclusion. Her final COVID document release generated interest in conservative media but barely registered elsewhere, overshadowed by the administration’s confrontation with Iran and other immediate foreign policy crises.
Gabbard’s presence at an FBI raid on a Fulton County, GA, elections office produced not clarity but six different, often contradictory, explanations from the administration for why she was there at all.
By then, Washington had already begun treating Gabbard’s future as something of a parlor game. The official explanation for her resignation — her husband’s health challenges — deserves to be taken seriously. But politically, the writing had been visible for months. The more Gabbard focused on Trump’s institutional grievances, the less central she appeared to the administration’s actual intelligence and national security agenda. One former deputy director of national intelligence joked that in the case of Gabbard, “DNI” had effectively come to stand for “Do not invite.”
Gabbard entered office expecting to help shape America’s response to threats abroad. She left office less as the foreign policy maverick who challenged Washington’s establishment than as the public face of Trump’s campaign against the intelligence agencies she led and the government institutions he believed had been politically weaponized against him.
 | A guest post by
|
My father passed away from Covid on May 7, 2020, one month prior to his 95th birthday. His scientific brilliance and innate curiosity enriched our family and contributed to our aeronautical programs in so many ways. The narcicism, evil and pure stupidity of the Twit era will not be forgotten.