Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard furiously warned in 2020 that President Donald Trump was taking the U.S. to the brink of war with Iran.
Now that the one-time Democratic congresswoman has gone full MAGA and joined the second Trump administration as its intel chief, she’s been noticeably silent on the president’s “Operation Epic Fury.”
Gabbard was pictured with Vice President JD Vance inside the Situation Room at the White House as the U.S. launched its strikes on Saturday in an image released on social media.
But apart from that one photo of Gabbard huddled with other top administration officials, the DNI has been absent.
The Daily Beast asked her office about her whereabouts as the war rages and expands into a wider conflict in the Middle East, but her lack of public engagement has been stark.
Gabbard frequently posts and reposts on X. She also regularly shares photos from her life on Instagram, and she’s been known to defend the president in videos on YouTube.
But the last time Gabbard posted to her personal account on X was the day after the president’s State of the Union address last Tuesday. Her other social media accounts have also been quiet.
The Office of the DNI account shared information from the State Department for Americans struggling to get out of the Middle East as drones and missiles flew overhead, but Gabbard is not publicly discussing the war.
Her director at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Joe Kent, said the center has been operating at full capacity since the conflict began. But Gabbard has not weighed in on her office’s crucial work since the U.S. and Israel began striking Iran.
“We are tracking developments in real time, assessing any potential risks to the homeland, identifying emerging threats, and providing timely, actionable intelligence to the White House, law enforcement, and interagency partners to detect and prevent attacks against the American people,” Kent wrote on X.
Addressing the conflict would put Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran, in an extremely awkward position. The former Hawaii lawmaker’s past comments, deeply critical of the president and sounding the alarms over an Iran war, have resurfaced in the wake of the strikes launched this week.
“This president and his chicken-hawk Cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran,” Gabbard said on the debate stage in June 2019. “The American people need to know that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything we ever saw in Iraq.”
In another 2019 video, she even laid out Trump’s steps to war with Iran, and insisted: “We’ve got to stop Donald Trump from starting a war with Iran.”
Gabbard is not the only member of the second Trump administration whose past words have resurfaced in light of the escalating military operation against Iran.
Vance once wrote an op-ed titled “Trump’s best foreign policy? Not starting any wars” in 2023 and came into political prominence as another Iraq War veteran anti-interventionist.
Critics have observed the vice president largely remaining behind the scenes as the bombings have continued for nearly a week.
The vice president was in the Oval Office when Trump met with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and was spotted walking into the West Wing on Friday, but didn’t speak with reporters.
Perhaps it’s not completely surprising since the nature of Vance’s job is different from that of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has spoken to the media multiple times as he rushed to the hill to brief lawmakers, or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has held multiple Pentagon press briefings this week.
But Vance has become known as somewhat of a keyboard warrior who has fiercely jumped in to defend the administration on social media since the president took office. When it comes to the war in Iran, the vice president has almost completely stopped engaging on the internet.
The vice president’s personal account has only shared the president’s announcement video and a clip of himself appearing on Fox News, where he insisted Trump would not let the U.S. get into a multiyear conflict. The official VP X account has also stuck to reposting the rapid response team and White House.
“He saw that the Iranian regime was weakened, he knew that they were committed to getting on that brink of a nuclear weapon, and he decided to take action because he felt that was necessary in order to protect the nation’s security,” Vance argued on Jesse Watters Primetime on Monday night.
While the program is one of the most watched shows on a top viewed network, the vice president has not spoken publicly since his Monday TV appearance.
