By Yoko Kubota

Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, resigned Friday. She came to the post with little experience of espionage and was increasingly sidelined from important decisions, The Wall Street Journal has reported. A former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who pursued the party's presidential nomination in 2020, Gabbard later came to endorse President Trump. Here are key moments from her tenure.

Yoga on the beach as Trump prepared for Venezuela operation

In January, as Trump's national-security team made final preparations for the operation to snatch Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, Gabbard posted social-media photos of herself on a beach in Hawaii, where she grew up, ignorant of the operation's details. "My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha, and peace," she said in an Instagram post.

Gabbard, a combat veteran who had been an outspoken critic of past foreign interventions, had been excluded by White House officials from Venezuela planning since last summer, the Journal reported. Before becoming DNI, Gabbard was critical of any potential U.S. intervention in the Latin American country, saying in 2019 that "the United States needs to stay out of Venezuela."

Disagreement with Trump over Iran and nuclear weapons

Gabbard and Trump disagreed on assessments over Iran and whether it was building a nuclear weapon.

In March 2025, Gabbard said the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran wasn't building a nuclear bomb and that its supreme leader hadn't authorized the restarting of a nuclear-weapons program that had been dormant since 2003. Three months later, Trump publicly rejected Gabbard's assessment. "I don't care what she said," Trump told reporters, adding that he thought Iran was "very close" to having a nuclear weapon.

In March this year, after the start of the U.S. war with Iran, Gabbard said in a written statement to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, that "there has been no efforts" by Iran to reconstitute its nuclear-enrichment program since attacks last June on three nuclear sites. She didn't read that part of her remarks aloud during a hearing, saying reading the entire statement would take too much time.

Some 10 days later, Trump said of Gabbard: "She's a little bit different in her thought process than me, but that doesn't make somebody not available to serve."

Her close ally -- the top U.S. counterterrorism official -- quits over the Iran war

The abrupt departure in March of Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center was the first significant public sign of dissent within the Trump administration over the president's handling of the conflict.

It also served as a moment to remind the public, and the administration, about Gabbard's past criticisms of entanglements in the Middle East.

Video warning about nuclear war

In June 2025, Gabbard posted a video on her personal X account in which she warned about threats of a nuclear war. The video contained scenes that simulated what a nuclear attack could look like, including what appeared to show the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It had scenes from her visiting Hiroshima, the Japanese city over which the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb in 1945.

"As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear intentions between nuclear powers," she said, as solemn music played in the background.

The video came shortly before Israel's 12-day campaign of airstrikes in Iran and U.S. strikes that inflicted severe damage on Iran's main nuclear facilities.

Her Own Election-Fraud Investigation Project

As director, Gabbard spent months investigating the results of the 2020 presidential election that Trump lost, but that he said had been stolen.

In January, Gabbard joined a raid conducted by Federal Bureau of Investigation of an election center in Fulton County, Ga. Trump has focused on the county for years, alleging it had produced a fraudulent statewide win for Joe Biden. (Audits and recounts ordered by state and local officials following the 2020 vote found no evidence of widespread tampering or fraud.)

The move drew criticism from Democrats who asked why the top U.S. intelligence officer was spending her time on the probe, rather than focusing on terrorism threats.

Write to Yoko Kubota at yoko.kubota@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 22, 2026 15:23 ET (19:23 GMT)