Tulsi Gabbard’s Dangerous War

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testifying at the US Capitol on March 19. Sipa via AP Images

On Saturday, Donald Trump convened a meeting on the Iran war in the White House situation room. At the table, according to news reports, were Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, envoy Steve Witkoff, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Missing from this list: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. This was another opportunity for administration officials to snicker that DNI stands for Do Not Invite.

You might wonder what’s the point of having a director of national intelligence who’s routinely not included in major deliberations about national security. Gabbard’s value for Trump is not in her oversight of the 18 agencies in the intelligence community, which is ostensibly her job. Nor in her intelligence experience, which is slight. It is in her willingness to serve Trump’s lust for vengeance against those he deems his political enemies. That includes her enthusiasm for politicizing and weaponizing intelligence to an extent never seen in US history.

Last summer, she did this by releasing highly classified intelligence documents that she claimed proved that President Barack Obama, his CIA chief John Brennan, and other Deep Staters had committed “treason”—a crime punishable by death. She accused them of falsifying intelligence to show that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had covertly intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Trump. The memos clearly did not show that. (Investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, the Justice Department, and the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee have confirmed Putin attacked that election to boost Trump.)

Gabbard’s stunt was a despicable act of immense gaslighting. And she and Trump each called for Obama, Brennan, and others to be prosecuted. Trump went so far as to post an AI-generated video of FBI agents violently handcuffing and arresting Obama and tossing him into a prison cell. In the video, Obama is on his knees before Trump. Never has intelligence been so abused by an administration for purely political purposes. Gabbard’s move led the Justice Department to mount a criminal investigation of Brennan and others that is ongoing.

At the time, Gabbard also declassified and made public a secret report that cited Russian intelligence material from 2016 that claimed Hillary Clinton suffered from “intensified psycho-emotional problems,” was on a daily regimen of “heavy tranquilizers,” and had schemed to set up the Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email controversy. But US intelligence analysts and FBI agents had previously judged this Russian material to be unreliable and possibly disinformation. So here was the top US intelligence official deploying unsubstantiated or phony Russian material—over the objections of CIA officials who worried its disclosure could compromise sources and methods—to smear an American politician. It was disgraceful.

Trump loved it. Gabbard had been on the outs with the White House prior to this for several reasons, including her release of a video that implied she opposed military action against Iran. Now Trump proclaimed her a “star.”

Recently, Gabbard was again in the hot seat. In March, the day after her ally Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center over the Iran war, Gabbard testified before Congress on threats posed to the United States. Trump, according to Axios, was displeased that Gabbard at this hearing did not wholeheartedly endorse his war in Iran and personally scolded her. He was also apparently mad that she had protected Kent, who had publicly undercut his rationale for the war. (In his resignation letter, Kent said Iran posed no “imminent threat” to the United States.) Trump began asking his top advisers if he should give Gabbard the boot.

MAGA activist Laura Loomer tweeted that “Tulsi was done” and that the White House was about to show her the door. But this didn’t happen. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser who was found guilty of lying to Congress during the Trump-Russia scandal (and subsequently pardoned by Trump), took credit for interceding with Trump and rescuing Gabbard. Axios quoted “a source familiar with Trump’s thinking” saying, “Roger sealed the deal. He saved Tulsi.”

Whether Stone’s influence mattered or not, Gabbard last week showed that she had learned the lesson of how to survive in Trumpland: She released more intelligence documents to discredit a Trump foe and to reveal yet another purported Deep State conspiracy against the president.

This time, the target was the whistleblower who in 2019 filed a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, about the infamous phone call during which Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to launch investigations to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was then running for president, and to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election. The whistleblower maintained that Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

When the acting DNI, John Maguire, declined to share this classified complaint with Congress, Atkinson informed Congress of its existence, triggering a brouhaha that soon led to Trump’s first impeachment. 

Trump was not convicted by the Republican-controlled Senate, but he has always been steamed by the impeachment. Just as Gabbard is trying to airbrush away Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, she’s now attempting to delegitimize and erase that first impeachment.

Last week, she released a handful of documents that she asserted exposed “a coordinated effort by elements within the Intelligence Community (IC), including a former Inspector General (IG), to manufacture a conspiracy that was used as the basis to impeach President Trump in 2019.” She insisted these records show that Atkinson “did not follow standard IG procedures and relied upon politicized, manufactured narratives” and that he took “actions to weaponize the Whistleblower process and exceed his statutory jurisdiction.”

Once more, she insisted that Trump was the victim of a nefarious cabal: “Deep state actors within the Intelligence Community concocted a false narrative that was used by Congress to usurp the will of the American people and impeach the duly-elected President of the United States.”  

Yet again, Gabbard is pulling a big con. The materials she released do not back up the charge that Atkinson mishandled this case, and they certainly don’t prove a narrative was manufactured. In fact, the whistleblower’s complaint was largely confirmed when the Trump White House, under pressure, released a summary of his call with Zelenskyy. And that summary played a more critical role in the impeachment proceedings than the whistleblower’s complaint. During the Trump-Ukraine controversy, Maguire testified that the whistleblower “did the right thing.” Maguire also testified that Atkinson’s handling of the whistleblower complaint was done “by the book” and consistent with the law. 

Gabbard went further then pumping out more disinformation. She sent the Justice Department criminal referrals for Atkinson, who Trump fired in April 2020, and the whistleblower, who has never been officially identified. (Conservative media, Donald Trump Jr., and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul revealed his name during the impeachment.)

This is another dangerous action from Gabbard, who once again is abusing intelligence to gin up a criminal case to feed Trump’s revenge fantasy. There is no case here. There was no Deep State plot. This is all about payback—and Gabbard keeping her job.

A few days ago, a pro-Trump conservative activist who believes Gabbard should be ousted told me that it’s obvious Gabbard is gathering intelligence records she can strategically release when necessary to protect her position. This MAGA influencer called this conduct reprehensible, noting that if Gabbard has evidence of Deep State conspiracies, she ought to put it all out.

But none of the material Gabbard has released so far proves the conspiracy theories she’s peddling. As an apparatchik for Dear Leader, she’s misrepresenting once-classified material to set up show trials and demonstrating she will lie and cheat for Trump—and to stay employed. Such a disingenuous DNI is a threat to national security. Nothing she says—in private to the president or in public—can be trusted.

Gabbard’s most recent efforts to deceive the public have not received the media attention they deserve. They ought to be front-page news, for Gabbard also is leading the administration’s effort to find evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Remember when she was photographed at the Atlanta site when FBI agents seized voting records and machines?

If Gabbard will manufacture false narratives and bogus evidence to support baseless criminal prosecutions of supposed Deep State conspirators and Trump critics, what might she do to cook up proof of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 elections or to concoct phony evidence of fraud in the coming midterm elections?

Gabbard is a careerist chameleon. In 2018, as I revealed last year, she spoke at the Bernie Sanders Institute and slammed Trump as a supporter of “genocidal war.” In 2019, when she was running for president as a progressive Democrat, she blasted Trump for being “on the brink of launching us into a very stupid and costly war with Iran.” Now she’s a Trump loyalist. She clearly will flip positions and jettison supposed principles to attain power. And she has demonstrated she’s willing to go far beyond that.

Gabbard may not be in the room when the big decisions about war are being made. But she’s prosecuting her own war on the truth to score retaliation for Trump. To date, her war has targeted a handful of people whom Trump craves to see crushed. But with her focus also on elections, it’s a war that could affect the future of American democracy.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

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What a stupid era the Trump Age is, and largely because of him. Each week, this newsletter holds the Dumbass Comment of the Week contest, which is included in the version that premium subscribers receive. The judges try not to focus overly on Trump. There are so many others who deserve recognition. But Trump could take the prize just about every week. If there were not a mercy rule for Trump, he likely would be our next winner for a remark he made on Saturday that I’d like to give special attention to. Speaking at a Turning Point USA conference, Trump said, “I ended eight wars…[I]f we add Iran and Lebanon, that will be 10 wars ended.”

He keeps repeating the falsehood that he has peacefully resolved eight conflicts. He has not. His administration has been involved in some conflict resolution overseas, but he is misrepresenting and exaggerating his role and impact in several of these instances. (You can read a fact-check here.) But what’s truly absurd is that he is now (almost) taking credit for ending a war that he launched (the US and Israeli attack on Iran) and a war that he enabled (Israel’s assault on Lebanon). This is akin to an arsonist seeking kudos for stopping the conflagration he ignited.

It remains a mystery why such idiocy doesn’t discredit Trump for all Americans.

Also, at that conference of young cons, Trump encouraged the crowd to boo NATO.

Trump routinely displays utter disregard for American allies. Has he ever asked a crowd to jeer Vladimir Putin, the war criminal who is still launching strikes at civilian targets in Ukraine?

Hamnet. I only just got around to watching the much-acclaimed Hamnet, the drama based on the novel of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell that imagines William Shakespeare’s family life and its impact on his work. Precious little is known of the guy who wrote masterpieces that amazingly are still an essential part of our culture more than 400 years after the ink dried. That provided O’Farrell plenty of runway for her fictitious depiction of the Bard’s off-stage life—and that of his wife, who we know as Anne Hathaway but whom O’Farrell calls Agnes. (That’s how her name appeared in his father’s will.)

It is easy to obsess about Shakespeare. He presents a grand mystery: How did this fellow manage to write all these magnificent plays, full of drama, comedy, and sophisticated wordplay, which illuminate so many universal themes and ideas that resonate centuries later? Hamnet does not answer that question. It doesn’t even try. In this account, Shakespeare is a scribbling scholar, tutoring local lads in Latin, and treated as a ne’er-do-well by his father, who runs a glove-making business. Yet somehow he becomes a genius playwright.

The query answered—fictitiously—is how did he come to pen Hamlet, the tragedy that confronts the big question: Why bother to live? The movie, directed exquisitely by Chloé Zhao, turns to Agnes for an answer; more specifically, to the death of her and Will’s only son, Hamnet, who died at the age of 11, several years before Shakespeare is believed to have written Hamlet. In those olden days, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” were used interchangeably. No doubt, there’s a link between the real-life tragedy and the tragedy Shakespeare produced.

Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, who deservingly won an Academy Award for this performance, is depicted as a witchy (in a good way) herbalist, an unconventional boho-ish gal in Elizabethan England. She has a pet hawk. She is open-minded and frank. She is rather modern, and she bears the brunt of her hubby’s tormented-artist schtick and his failure to strike the right work-life balance. When Shakespeare, who is spending much time away in London focused on his career, is absent for Hamnet’s death, it breaks their relationship.

Watching Hamnet, I had a tough time keeping in mind that this is all O’Farrell and Zhao’s concoction. That’s to their credit, for the tragedy of Hamnet’s death (due to the plague that took many) is so visceral and its effect on Will and Agnes so consequential—in the way that we today might experience such circumstances. And the film’s painstaking recreation of late-16th-century England buttresses Hamnet’s verisimilitude.

Shakespeare takes a knock or two in Hamnet. But by the marvelous ending of the film—when Agnes witnesses a performance of Hamlet—he is redeemed, and Agnes’ agony is abated. It’s as if she now realizes that her lost boy will be immortalized and that people many years later will still be talking about the tale his death inspired. And indeed we are.

“Boots on the Ground,” Massive Attack and Tom Waits. Earlier this year, after Bruce Springsteen released his “Streets of Minneapolis” tribute to Renée Good and Alex Pretti, I wondered why more musicians hadn’t challenged the horrors of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Weeks later, I noted that U2, Nils Lofgren, and others had subsequently weighed in. And now comes Tom Waits.

Waits is one of the great American songwriters. He has forged an eclectic blend of jazz, blues, rock, folk, and avant-garde sounds into a unique oeuvre spanning more than 50 years, full of tales of down-and-outers, shadowland dwellers, has-beens, and never-was-ers. A Waits song can transport you to a late-night dive at the end of the world where melancholy is matching you shot for shot at the bar or provide a discordant soundtrack for a journey to an imaginary netherworld. He may be the last of the post-Beat poets. Much to the regret of his fans, he has not toured since 2008 and has not produced a new album since 2011.

Last week, he and Massive Attack, an English trip hop collective, released a haunting song, “Boots on the Ground,” with a majestic accompanying video full of images of ICE’s war on America and of the protests against these Trump thugs. (Also included: January 6 and demonstrations against police violence.) The tune is classic Waits, his raspy voice reciting hard-edged lyrics over a marching beat.

The saying “boots on the ground” is one of my least favorite media clichés. It’s useful when discussing the possible deployment of soldiers. But it has a euphemistic ring. What—or who—is in those boots? I have the sense Waits agrees, for he sings, “Mold your world, a soldier’s just clay / How much does every soldier weigh? / Cut you off at the ankles and they throw that away.”