Tulsi Gabbard, the DNI who called Biden a ‘warmonger’ for backing Ukraine is resigning
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told President Donald Trump on 22 May she will resign effective 30 June, citing her husband Abraham Williams's recent diagnosis with a rare form of bone cancer. Trump named Principal Deputy Director Aaron Lukas—a career CIA officer who served on Russia and Europe at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration—as acting DNI from 1 July.
Her departure removes the highest-ranking US official who publicly broke with the intelligence community's own assessments of Russia, and who used her position to limit how that intelligence reached America's allies. It does not, on its own, change Trump's pressure on Kyiv to settle the war on terms favorable to Moscow.
A career CIA officer steps in
Lukas's profile is the institutional opposite of his predecessor's. He spent more than 20 years at the CIA, first as an analyst and then as a clandestine operations officer. From 2020 to 2021 he served as Deputy Senior Director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council under the first Trump administration. Briefly, in 2020, he was chief of staff to acting DNI Richard Grenell. Trump nominated him as Principal Deputy DNI in February 2025—Gabbard's deputy by design, not by her choice.
White House officials had heard rumors for weeks that Gabbard was on her way out. Two weeks ago, she was denying it. Laura Loomer, a Trump confidante and a vocal Gabbard critic, was first to report the resignation. Gabbard is the fourth cabinet member to leave Trump's second-term administration, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi were fired, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned.
The Five Eyes block and the CIA feud
Gabbard's tenure was defined, more than anything she said in public, by what she did with the intelligence she controlled. In August 2025, CBS News reported she had signed a memo on 20 July ordering US agencies to stop sharing intelligence on the Russia–Ukraine peace negotiations with the Five Eyes alliance—the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The directive walled off America's closest intelligence partners from the talks Trump was simultaneously asking them to support.
In December 2025, she went onto her personal X account to assert that the intelligence community had concluded Russia "does not even have the capability to conquer and occupy Ukraine, what to speak of 'invading and occupying' Europe." Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin investment-fund CEO and Putin associate, replied with public praise, calling her work "exposing the deep-state warmonger machinery."
Her record on Russia and Ukraine predates the cabinet
In February 2022, days before Russia's full-scale invasion, Gabbard called Joe Biden a "warmonger" who wanted Russia to invade Ukraine to start a new Cold War for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. She wrote on X that the way Biden could "very easily prevent a war with Russia" was by guaranteeing Ukraine would not join NATO.
In March 2022, weeks into the invasion, she promoted unfounded claims about US-funded biolabs in Ukraine—talking points that mirrored a Kremlin justification for the attack—and later clarified her remarks under pressure. As DNI, she launched an investigation into 120 US-funded biolabs, dozens of them in Ukraine.
Her record is not perfectly linear. In April 2022, she posted a Facebook video addressed directly to Putin, calling his attack "reprehensible" and "a huge geopolitical error which has already cost Russia dearly," and urging him to pull Russian forces out of Ukraine.
In another video she argued Ukraine is not a democracy because Kyiv imprisoned the head of an opposition party. The opposition figure she meant is Viktor Medvedchuk—a personal friend of Putin, who is godfather to Medvedchuk's daughter. The Ukrainian TV channels being shut down Gabbard cited as evidence of authoritarianism under Volodymyr Zelenskyy were all linked to Medvedchuk. Those details were not in her remarks.
The day-to-day pressure on Kyiv is not Gabbard's project. The 20-point peace plan being advanced by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff predates her, sits outside her remit, and continues. Russia still demands roughly 5,000 square kilometers of Donbas it never captured. Ukraine has said no. The deadlock has not moved.
