Donald Trump has reportedly polled cabinet officials on whether he should fire his director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard over her stance on the war in Iran.
Gabbard is said to have attracted the president’s displeasure after failing to condemn former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent following his dramatic exit last month, in which he quit his post and criticised the administration’s decision to take the U.S. to war with Iran.
According to two people briefed on the discussions, Trump has disclosed his frustrations with Gabbard to other senior members of the administration and asked them whether he should replace her, The Guardian reports.
It comes shortly after Kristi Noem was removed from her role as Secretary of Homeland Security, due to growing backlash over her handling of ICE immigration crackdowns in Minneapolis. And it came as Trump was preparing to axe Pam Bondi as attorney general, which he did on Thursday.
Gabbard, a member of the Democratic party until 2022, previously deployed to Iraq for 12 months in 2004-5 as a medical specialist in the U.S. Army and was later stationed in Kuwait.
But she appears not to have been as publicly supportive of the Iran war as the more gung-ho members of the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, and previously cautioned against such a conflict.
Days after Kent’s departure, Gabbard gave testimony at a Capitol Hill hearing on worldwide threats, where she declined to criticise his decision or his claims that Israel was pushing the U.S. for war and that Iran did not present an imminent threat.
According to the two people The Guardian spoke to, this angered Trump.
Nonetheless he has indicated he is currently standing by her, telling reporters aboard Air Force One Sunday: “She’s a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn’t make somebody not available to serve.”
“I would say that I’m very strong on the fact that I don’t want Iran to have a nuclear weapon because if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it immediately. I think she’s probably a little bit softer on that issue, but that’s okay.”
Sources told Politico that Bondi is likely to be replaced by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin.
That report came hours after the New York Times said Trump was considering replacing Bondi amid backlash over her botched handling of the Epstein files.
Trump had campaigned on a platform of releasing more from the investigation into his one-time friend, before later dismissing the substance of the files as a “Democrat hoax”. Last summer, Bondi said there would be no new information released.
Congress then passed a law requiring the total release of the files. The Department of Justice did not release the full files by the deadline and many of the thousands of pages were heavily redacted.
Despite the private suggestion that Bondi will be out of the role “imminently”, in public Trump has also expressed his support for her.
“Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job,” the president said in a statement to The Times this week, while a source told CNN that the pair were conducting “business as usual.”
The Independent has contacted The White House, Gabbard’s office and Bondi’s office for comment.
