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Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard ended her first of two high-profile Hill appearances on Wednesday with the continued confidence of the White House, even as she offered mixed signals about one of its central rationales for the Iran war.
Gabbard, testifying in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the Iranian regime “appears to be intact but largely degraded” weeks into its conflict with the US and Israel. “Even if the regime remains intact,” she added, “internal tensions are likely to increase as Iran’s economy worsens.”
But Gabbard, a longtime critic of US foreign intervention, omitted from her verbal remarks — citing time restrictions — a portion of her written statement that asserted that “Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated” by last year’s 12-day Iran-Israel war. The omitted portion also stated that the regime has made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated that he began the war with Iran because the country was just weeks away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, describing the threat as “imminent.” One of Gabbard’s top aides, Joe Kent, cited opposition to the war in his public resignation on Tuesday, and the Washington Post has reported that she joined Kent in a meeting with Vice President JD Vance where the resignation got discussed.
“The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capabilities,” Gabbard later said when senators pressed her about whether there was an imminent threat assessment. “The only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president.”
That’s in line with the carefully worded statement Gabbard released after Kent’s resignation, which did not include a line about whether she believes that Iran posed an imminent threat. Instead, she specified that Trump “concluded that the terrorist Islamist regime in Iran posed an imminent threat.”
Earlier Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that “to her knowledge” Gabbard’s position is not in jeopardy.
“I haven’t heard the president say that,” Leavitt said. “So obviously that’s a question for him, but I haven’t heard him say that at all.”
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Gabbard’s verbal remarks throughout the hearing were at times more forceful in her defense of the goals of the war than the portions of her written statement she didn’t read aloud.
She told senators that the intelligence community determined that, if a “hostile regime survives” the war, “it will likely seek to begin a years-long effort to rebuild its” military infrastructure.
And she indicated at one point that Iran “was trying to recover from the severe damage to its nuclear infrastructure” during last year’s conflict, a softened version of her written explanation.
She is slated to testify again in the House on Thursday morning.
Notable
- Kent’s resignation laid bare the rift within Trump’s base over the Iran war, Semafor reported.