Tulsi Gabbard, US intelligence chief involved in 2020 election probes, resigns

Tulsi Gabbard, the top U.S. intelligence official who played a central role in President Donald Trump’s efforts to investigate the 2020 presidential election, announced Friday that she will resign from her post as Director of National Intelligence later this summer.

In a letter to Trump posted on social media, Gabbard wrote she needed to step away from the position to care for her husband, who she said “has recently been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of bone cancer.”

Gabbard’s resignation, which will officially take effect on June 30, comes following months of speculation that she would soon leave office or be fired after Trump sidelined her from national security operations, most notably his war against Iran.

“Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her,” Trump said on social media, adding that her principal deputy, Aaron Lukas, would serve as acting director.

Though marginalized from national security operations, Gabbard has been heavily involved in probing conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election — an extremely bizarre task for the country’s top intelligence officer.

Gabbard took part in the FBI’s extraordinary raid on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year, during which the bureau obtained original ballots and other sensitive voting information.

Gabbard told lawmakers during a congressional hearing in March that Trump directed her to take part in the raid and implied he had advance knowledge of the raid against the county, which has long been a top target of the president’s conspiracy theory-fueled campaign against the 2020 election, which he lost.

In addition to her activity in Fulton County, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) also seized voting machines from Puerto Rico and probed them for security vulnerabilities. That probe was based on claims that Venezuela had hacked the machines, an assertion long pushed by election deniers and far-right influencers.

Throughout Gabbard’s term, ODNI has worked closely with Kurt Olsen, an architect of Trump’s 2020 election denialism, who was hired by the White House to investigate claims related to that vote.

Last year, one of Gabbard’s senior aides was involved in Olsen’s effort to ban widely used voting machines by having the Department of Commerce declare their components national security risks, according to Reuters.

Beyond the 2020 election, Gabbard has also used her position to downplay and rewrite the history of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

She claimed to reveal in a series of declassified documents last summer that the FBI’s Russia probe wasn’t initiated because of actual interference — despite U.S. intelligence community probes, a bipartisan Senate review, and multiple special counsel investigations all concluding Russia attempted to interfere in the election to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Instead, Gabbard claimed the FBI’s investigation was part of a “treasonous conspiracy” and “coup” that former President Barack Obama and his top intelligence officials tried to stage against Trump.

Citing her claims, Trump said Obama and other former officials were guilty of treason, a crime punishable by death. 

The Department of Justice also opened a criminal investigation based on Gabbard’s allegations. The status of that probe is unknown.

This story has been updated with new details throughout.