Tipsheet

Tulsi Gabbard Resigns

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  May 22, 2026 1:08 PM

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has resigned. It wasn’t over any deep disagreement with President Trump over policy, nor was it some shambolic exit a la Joe Kent from the National Counterterrorism Center. It was over family reasons: her husband was diagnosed with bone cancer. Her last day on the job will be on June 30 (via Fox News):

Tulsi Gabbard is resigning from her post as Director of National Intelligence to support her husband through his battle with "an extremely rare form of bone cancer," Fox News Digital learned.

Gabbard notified President Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office Friday. Her last day at ODNI is expected to be June 30.

Fox News Digital exclusively obtained her formal resignation letter, in which Gabbard says she is "deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half."

[...]

Gabbard said her husband "faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months."

"At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle," she said. 

Gabbard added: "Abraham has been my rock throughout our eleven years of marriage — standing steadfast through my deployment to East Africa on a Joint Special Operations mission, multiple political campaigns and now my service in this role."

Gabbard was reportedly on the chopping block around the time Trump was considering firing Pam Bondi as attorney general last April. Supposedly, Roger Stone, a trusted adviser and ally of the president, convinced him to keep her in her role. The family health update certainly changed things.

Sure, Gabbard has policy disagreements with the president, especially on Iran, which were publicly discussed. She did declassify large caches of documents related to Russian collusion that revealed the extent of the fake news scheme designed to undermine Trump's first term. It also expanded the role of former President Barack Obama, who ordered the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that incorporated flawed, unverified information from the Steele Dossier— the document from which all this nonsense originated— into the report to give the Russia hoax a veneer of credibility. Former CIA Director John Brennan would try to claim that the Steele Dossier was never heavily used in the agency’s analysis, but that was simply not true. 

She was also overseeing the FBI’s operations in Georgia, where they seized boxes of ballots from Fulton County, which triggered Democrats. Her department oversees the FBI and DHS, and she was there in an observer capacity.