Trump Backed Tulsi Gabbard on Air Force One While the Deep State Threw Everything at Her

Tulsi Gabbard sent criminal referrals to the DOJ and FBI implicating Barack Obama in the Russia collusion hoax.

Now the CIA, the FBI, and every establishment media outlet with an anonymous source is trying to destroy her before she can finish the job.

It is not working.

Trump Stood by Her When the Rumors Said He Wouldn't

The chatter in Washington has been loud for weeks.

Gabbard is done.

Trump is angry.

She is about to follow Pam Bondi out the door.

None of it held up.

When reporters asked Trump about Gabbard during an impromptu press conference on Air Force One last week, he was direct – she thinks a little differently than he does, but that does not make somebody unavailable to serve.

That came after the most turbulent stretch of her tenure – the resignation of Joe Kent, her director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who quit in protest over the Iran war and blamed Israel for manipulating Trump into the conflict.

Trump did not extend Kent the same grace.

He called Kent a "nice guy" but "very weak on security" – and said Kent's own claim that Iran posed no threat proved it was a good thing he was out.

She backed Kent who was her hire and her ally when they thought the FBI should look into any possible links to foreign intelligence operations as part of the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assasination.

The Deep State apparently went to war over that suggestion and FBI Director Kash Patel quickly declared his agency’s investigation shut.

The Agencies Are Fighting Her – and Each Other

Miranda Devine's reporting in the New York Post this week pulls back the curtain on how ugly it has gotten inside the intelligence community.

It is not just the Democrats and their media allies trying to take Gabbard down.

It is the very agencies between which her office stands as the hub connecting and clearing all intelligence products for the President and entire federal government.

The CIA tried to block Gabbard when she moved to declassify a 2020 House Intelligence Committee report on Russia's interference in the 2016 election – hiding behind the "sources and methods" line to complain to friendly reporters.

When Gabbard advised Trump to strip security clearances from 37 current and former intelligence officials who had weaponized intelligence against him, unnamed CIA officials accused her of exposing an undercover officer.

The officer in question – Julia Gurganus, who oversaw the politicized Obama-era intelligence assessment at the center of the Russia hoax – had her photo on her public biography at The Atlantic and cited her CIA credentials at public conferences.

She was reportedly designated "undercover" just two months before her clearance was pulled, as a last-minute shield against accountability.

The FBI has not been much better.

There was friction over Gabbard's involvement in the bureau's sluggish investigation into election irregularities in Fulton County, Georgia – an investigation Trump himself asked her to oversee.

Behind the scenes, Devine reports, senior White House officials were brought in more than once to settle disputes between the agencies.

The people who spent years burying the documents now control those same documents – and they are making Gabbard fight for every page.

What She Has Already Found

Last summer, Gabbard held a press conference announcing criminal referrals to the DOJ and FBI implicating Obama in what she called the "seditious conspiracy" of the Russia collusion hoax.

Trump went on Devine's podcast afterward and made clear exactly what it meant to him.

He said Gabbard went deep into the files and found it – that a lot of people would not have found it, would not have thought it was politically correct to find it, and it would have been easier not to.

Those are documents that could send people to prison.

Documents that explain exactly how the Obama administration used the intelligence community to target a presidential campaign, a transition, and then a sitting president.

Gabbard is also sitting on 2019 transcripts from closed congressional hearings with former Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson – the man whose whistleblower referral triggered Trump's first impeachment.

Those transcripts are expected to drop soon.

She also forced the CIA to release information documenting its failure to vet 18,000 known or suspected terrorists allowed into the United States during the chaos of Biden's Afghanistan withdrawal.

Every one of these releases is a body blow to institutions that spent years claiming they exist only to protect America.

The Deep State Picked the Wrong Target

The intelligence bureaucracy has destroyed careers for decades using one playbook.

Leak to the Times.

Get friendly former officials on CNN.

Slow-walk document requests until the political appointee gets frustrated and leaves.

It works on politicians who fear the headlines.

Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party because she refused to be controlled.

She walked away from a safe congressional seat rather than stay inside the lines.

She is a combat veteran with three deployments and more than two decades in uniform.

She is being shot at by people with press credentials and government paychecks – and she is not blinking.

As Devine makes clear, with only months left before Democrats may retake the House and begin impeaching Trump again, accountability for the Russia hoaxers – Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and the nameless bureaucrats still burrowed inside the agencies – is still not guaranteed.

Gabbard is the only person in Washington actually trying to deliver it – and that is exactly why they are so desperate to get her out the door before she finishes the job.

Sources:

• Miranda Devine, "Tulsi Gabbard keeps her focus on revealing deep state's dirty secrets, even as they try to take her down," New York Post, April 8, 2026.
• "How Roger Stone persuaded Trump not to fire Tulsi Gabbard," Axios, April 10, 2026.
• "DNI Tulsi Gabbard shuts down Joe Kent's resignation letter claims," Gateway Pundit, March 17, 2026.
• "DNI Tulsi Gabbard says Trump acted because he concluded the Iranian regime 'posed an imminent threat,'" Fox News, March 17, 2026.
• Trump 47 Administration, "Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – Official Biography," WhiteHouse.gov, 2025.