President Donald Trump has privately raised concerns about Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard's leadership and sought input from Cabinet members on whether to replace her, Newsmax reported, citing a Guardian account published Thursday. The reported discussions follow weeks of internal friction over intelligence assessments tied to the administration's military posture toward Iran.
No final decision has been made. Advisers caution that no clear replacement has emerged, and the White House has publicly defended Gabbard's work while pointing to the administration's broader national security successes. But the reported conversations mark a significant moment of tension between a president who demands loyalty on core national security judgments and an intelligence chief who, by multiple accounts, found herself on the wrong side of his position on Iran.
The dispute centers on whether Iran posed an imminent threat, and whether the intelligence community's leadership backed the president's conclusion firmly enough. National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent publicly disagreed with the administration's position that Iran represented an imminent danger. Kent resigned. The Associated Press reported that his departure reflected divisions within the intelligence community.
Trump called Kent's exit "a good thing." But the fallout did not stop there.
Sources cited by The Guardian said Trump grew frustrated when Gabbard appeared to defend Kent or failed to strongly back the administration's justification for the Iran operation. That frustration reportedly led the president to privately question Gabbard's leadership in recent weeks and to canvass Cabinet members about a possible change at the top of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The tension became public when Trump flatly contradicted Gabbard's assessment on Iran's nuclear program. Breitbart reported that Trump said Gabbard was "wrong" after she had previously testified that U.S. intelligence believed Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. "She's wrong," Trump said, a blunt, two-word public rebuke of his own intelligence director.
That kind of open disagreement between a president and his DNI on a matter of active military significance is unusual. It raised immediate questions about whether Gabbard retained the president's confidence on the issue that mattered most at that moment.
The New York Post reported that Gabbard was absent from a key congressional intelligence briefing on the Iran strike. CIA Director John Ratcliffe briefed lawmakers instead. Gabbard was also reportedly not invited to the June 8 Camp David national security meeting where Trump and top aides began shaping plans for Iran.
An administration official offered a pointed assessment. "She's been wrong on the big stuff," the official told the Post.
When a DNI is excluded from the planning sessions and briefings that define the nation's most consequential security decisions, the title starts to matter less than the access. Ratcliffe's rising prominence as the face of intelligence briefings to Congress suggests the practical authority of the office may already be shifting, regardless of whether Gabbard keeps the job.
Trump himself underscored the gap on June 17 when he rejected Gabbard's nuclear assessment outright. "I don't care what she said. I think they were very close to having one," Trump said, as the Post reported.
Gabbard has not gone quietly. In a March 17 post on X, she framed the president's authority as the central issue, writing that Trump was "overwhelmingly elected" and bears responsibility for determining threats and taking action to protect the nation. She also addressed resignation rumors directly in the weeks that followed.
"After carefully reviewing all the information before him, President Trump concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat."
That post reads less like a defense of her own intelligence judgment and more like a public pivot, aligning herself with the president's conclusion after the fact, even as reports suggested she had privately questioned it or failed to champion it when it counted.
The White House, for its part, has defended Gabbard's work. Officials pointed to the administration's broader national security successes, and Trump himself has offered a measured public response, expressing confidence in Gabbard while acknowledging differences in their views. That language, "confidence" paired with acknowledged disagreement, is the diplomatic version of a yellow card.
Gabbard also moved to end an intelligence task force she had previously established, a decision that drew attention to her management of the intelligence apparatus at a time when her standing within it was already under scrutiny.
Gabbard is not the only senior official facing reported pressure. Multiple recent reports indicate Trump has also considered replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin. The pattern suggests a president willing to move pieces on the board when he concludes that his appointees are not aligned with his priorities, or not performing at the level he expects.
Advisers note that Trump has shown a preference in his second term for reassigning officials rather than dismissing them outright. That distinction matters. A reassignment preserves the relationship and avoids the political cost of a firing. It also signals that the door is not entirely closed, but that the room has gotten smaller.
The broader context around Iran adds urgency to the personnel question. Trump suggested it would be "very hard" to push Israel to halt its strikes on Iran for ceasefire talks, reflecting a more aggressive stance toward Tehran. The White House said Trump would decide within two weeks whether to directly involve the U.S. military in the Israel-Iran conflict. These are not decisions a president makes with an intelligence director he does not trust on the core question.
Meanwhile, Gabbard has faced other internal disputes. She pushed back on a whistleblower complaint that added another layer of friction to her tenure, and she publicly addressed comments made by an aide following a resignation that further exposed fault lines within her office.
Several questions hang over this story. Which Cabinet members did Trump consult? What specific replacement options, if any, were discussed? And what exact public statement did the White House issue in Gabbard's defense? The reporting so far relies on unnamed sources and leaves the most operationally important details, who would replace Gabbard, and when, unresolved.
It is also unclear whether Gabbard's March 17 post on X represented a genuine alignment with the president's Iran assessment or a damage-control exercise after the internal rift became apparent. The timing and tone suggest the latter, but the facts do not settle the question.
What the facts do show is a DNI who was absent from the room when the biggest decisions were made, publicly contradicted by the president on the biggest intelligence question of the moment, and described by an administration insider as having been "wrong on the big stuff." That is not a portrait of someone whose position is secure.
A president is entitled to an intelligence director who shares his threat assessment on the most pressing national security challenge of the day, or at least one who does not publicly undercut it. Trump built his second-term Cabinet to execute his agenda. When appointees diverge on the questions that define that agenda, the president has every right to make a change.
The job of the DNI is to give the president the best intelligence available and then support the decisions he makes with it. If Gabbard could not do both, the question is not whether a change is coming, but what took so long.
