Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told President Donald Trump in a February meeting that she did not support a clean reauthorization of FISA Section 702, putting her at odds with the president on one of the most contentious surveillance tools in the federal government's arsenal, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported, citing Politico's Morning Cyber newsletter.
The disagreement, sourced to two anonymous officials by Politico, reportedly produced no meaningful compromise. Trump continued to push for a clean extension of the provision, no amendments, no new restrictions, while Gabbard held to her long-standing skepticism of the program's civil liberties safeguards.
The tension matters now because House Speaker Mike Johnson is aiming for a new vote on the surveillance measure following extended Republican resistance to the bill. Talks between White House officials and GOP holdouts were ongoing as of this week, but Politico reported no deal was in place.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to monitor communications between foreigners and, in some cases, American citizens without a warrant. Intelligence officials call it indispensable. Civil libertarians, and a growing number of Republicans, call it a gateway to mass warrantless surveillance of Americans.
Trump himself once urged Congress to "KILL FISA," arguing the law had been illegally used against him and his 2016 campaign. But as president, he has shifted firmly toward supporting the program's renewal. On Wednesday, Trump posted to Truth Social that he backed a clean extension of Section 702 with no amendments, framing the issue in national security terms.
The president wrote that military personnel "desperately need FISA 702" and that it "is one of the reasons we have had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield." He warned that no one should be "willing to risk the giving up of [his] Rights and Privileges."
That framing puts Trump squarely on the side of the intelligence community, and squarely against the position Gabbard held for years before she became his DNI pick.
Before joining the Trump administration, Gabbard built a public record of opposition to Section 702 that would make any civil-liberties hawk proud. In 2020, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii co-sponsored legislation with Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie that sought to end data collection under the program. That same year, she introduced separate legislation to destroy Americans' data swept up under FISA and to require warrants for collecting information from U.S. service providers, the New York Post reported.
Her language at the time left little room for ambiguity. Gabbard wrote in 2020:
"Unfortunately Congress just passed a bill allowing continuation of intel/law enforcement agencies to infringe on your civil liberties. Patriot Act & Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) needed real reforms to prevent these constitutional abuses. Congress failed to do this."
She called the surveillance authority "an overreach." For years, that position aligned her with a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers who believed the FBI and intelligence agencies had abused their warrantless search powers against ordinary Americans.
The reported February disagreement with Trump suggests those convictions did not evaporate entirely, even after Gabbard publicly softened her stance to win Senate confirmation. It's a pattern that has surfaced in other reported clashes between the DNI and the White House.
Gabbard's path to becoming DNI required her to walk back years of anti-FISA rhetoric. Upon being promoted to the role in 2025, she shifted her public tone dramatically. She called Section 702 "crucial" and said it "must be safeguarded to protect our national while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans," as Punchbowl News reported at the time.
That reversal came after lobbying and discussions with Republican senators, including Tom Cotton and James Lankford, Fox News reported. Cotton publicly vouched for Gabbard, saying she had "assured me in our conversations that she supports Section 702 as recently amended and that she will follow the law and support its reauthorization as DNI."
Gabbard herself told ABC News that her prior concerns "were based on insufficient protections for civil liberties, particularly regarding the FBI's misuse of warrantless search powers on American citizens." The implication was that recent amendments had addressed her objections.
But the Politico report now suggests the reversal was less complete than the confirmation-era statements implied. If Gabbard privately told Trump in February that she could not support a clean reauthorization, her public assurances to senators look like they papered over a genuine disagreement rather than resolving it.
It would not be the first time Gabbard's relationship with the White House hit a rough patch. Reports earlier surfaced that Roger Stone intervened to prevent Trump from firing Gabbard over a separate policy dispute involving Iran.
A White House official pushed back on the idea of any rift, telling the Daily Caller News Foundation:
"President Trump's entire exceptional national security team is in lockstep with the President in advancing his efforts to achieve a clean reauthorization of FISA 702."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to the DCNF's request for comment.
That silence is notable. If Gabbard were fully aligned with the president's position, a simple on-the-record statement would have settled the matter. Instead, the White House spoke for her, and used the kind of boilerplate "lockstep" language that often signals the opposite of what it claims.
John Sakellariadis, who flagged the Politico report on X, noted that Gabbard's reported opposition "helps explain while she's largely been MIA as White House tries to sell skeptical lawmakers on the program." If the DNI cannot champion the surveillance tool the president wants renewed, her absence from the sales pitch makes strategic sense, but it also raises questions about her standing within the administration. Those questions have lingered through earlier rounds of public reassurance from the White House about the president's confidence in her.
The broader fight over Section 702 extends well beyond the Gabbard-Trump dynamic. Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee has introduced a bill that would force agencies to obtain a warrant before buying Americans' data or accessing private communications, a reform that goes further than anything in the current reauthorization push. A group of bipartisan senators has raised concerns about AI-driven mass surveillance of Americans' personal data.
These are not fringe objections. They reflect a genuine and growing tension on the right between national security hawks who view Section 702 as essential and constitutional conservatives who see it as an invitation for government overreach. The FBI's documented history of misusing warrantless search authorities against Americans, the very abuse Gabbard cited for years, gives the skeptics real ammunition.
Speaker Johnson faces the task of corralling enough Republican votes for a Thursday floor vote while these objections remain unresolved. The Washington Examiner previously reported that Gabbard's FISA stance had been a speed bump during her confirmation process, and the underlying policy disagreement clearly did not go away once she took office.
The fact that the president's own intelligence chief reportedly could not agree to a clean extension of the very tool the president wants renewed, and that the meeting "repeatedly ended with no meaningful compromise", tells you something about how deep the fault lines run inside the administration on surveillance policy.
Several questions hang over this story. What specific reforms did Gabbard propose in the February meeting? Did she offer a counter-proposal, or simply refuse to endorse a clean bill? And how does her private dissent square with the White House's insistence that the entire national security team is "in lockstep"?
Gabbard has not made any on-the-record public statement to the Daily Caller on this matter. The Politico report relies on two anonymous sources. That means the full picture remains incomplete, but the trajectory is consistent with a pattern of internal friction that has surrounded Gabbard's tenure at ODNI.
The real issue here is not whether Gabbard was right or wrong in February. Reasonable conservatives disagree about Section 702. The issue is whether the person running America's intelligence community can function effectively when she privately opposes the president's top surveillance priority, and whether the White House's "lockstep" talking point is a description of reality or a wish.
Americans who care about both national security and the Fourth Amendment deserve a straight answer. So far, they're getting bureaucratic silence and anonymous leaks, which is exactly the kind of Washington behavior the current administration promised to end.
