Chris Butler has directed Tulsi Gabbard's political career from the beginning. After she became Director of National Intelligence in 2025, she systematically dismantled the offices and removed the people whose job was to protect the United States from foreign cyber attacks, election interference, and espionage.

What follows are the documented actions she took in that role, drawn from official government announcements, congressional testimony, and mainstream reporting. Each one reduced America's ability to detect and respond to foreign threats, at the very moment those threats were intensifying.

Tulsi cut the ODNI by 40%

On August 20, 2025, Gabbard announced "ODNI 2.0," a restructuring plan that cut the agency's workforce by more than 40%. ¹

ODNI is not a spy agency. It coordinates intelligence across 18 agencies so that the CIA, NSA, FBI, and others actually share information with each other. It was created after 9/11 specifically because intelligence failures killed nearly 3,000 Americans. The 9/11 Commission found that agencies had critical pieces of the puzzle but never put them together. ² That coordination function is what Gabbard cut by 40%.

Tulsi eliminated centers that tracked foreign threats

ODNI 2.0 shut down three offices. Each one existed to protect the United States from a specific category of foreign threat.

1. The Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC). Created by Congress in 2019 to track foreign governments trying to interfere in American elections and manipulate public opinion. Operationally dismantled under ODNI 2.0, even though Congress's authorization for the center runs through 2028. Congressional Democrats on the Select Committee on the CCP wrote to Gabbard in September 2025 raising concerns. ³

2. The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC). The office responsible for coordinating cyber threat intelligence across all agencies. Disbanded under ODNI 2.0. ODNI claimed the National Intelligence Council would absorb CTIIC's functions, but Michael Daniel, the former White House cyber coordinator who helped create CTIIC, told Federal News Network that the NIC "won't be able to perform the functions that the CTIIC did," and that the decision "continues the trend of weakening U.S. government cyber capabilities." ⁴

3. The Strategic Futures Group. The unit that produced the "Global Trends" report every four years since the late 1990s, forecasting emerging threats over the next 20 years. Gabbard cancelled the 2025 Global Trends report and shut down the unit, accusing it of pushing a partisan agenda. ⁵

The office tracking foreign election interference, the office coordinating cyber defense intelligence, and the office forecasting future global threats were all shut down in a single restructuring plan.

Tulsi pushed out experienced intelligence officials

National Intelligence Council leadership fired. In May 2025, Gabbard fired Mike Collins (acting NIC chair, nearly 30 years in intelligence) and his deputy Maria Langan-Riekhof (30+ years, including Middle East expertise). The firing came after the NIC produced an intelligence assessment that contradicted the administration's claims linking Venezuela's Maduro regime to the gang Tren de Aragua, an assessment being used to justify invoking the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. ⁶

Two career intelligence officials with a combined 60 years of experience produced an honest assessment. They were gone within days.

37 security clearances revoked in a single memo. On August 19, 2025, Gabbard issued a memo revoking the clearances of 37 current and former national security officials, accusing them of "politicization or weaponization of intelligence." The list included former DNI James Clapper and multiple Biden-era NSC members. The memo provided no specific evidence. ⁷

Gabbard then posted the list to X. One of the 37 names belonged to a senior CIA officer who had been working undercover for more than 20 years, specializing in Russia and Eurasia. The Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard did not consult the CIA before publishing the list. Knowingly revealing the identity of a covert intelligence officer is a federal crime under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. ⁸

Tulsi's shifting testimony on the Signal war-plans chat

In March 2025, The Atlantic reported that senior Trump administration officials discussed war plans for U.S. strikes in Yemen in a Signal group chat on their personal phones. The magazine's editor-in-chief had been accidentally added to the chat. ¹⁷

On March 25, Gabbard testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that she was "not aware of anything related to weapons packages, targets, and timing" in the chat. She refused to confirm whether she was even part of it. ¹⁸

The next day, after The Atlantic published the full messages, Gabbard changed her story. She admitted she was in the chat and had replied "Great work and effects!" after the bombs dropped. She reframed her previous testimony as being "based on my recollection, or lack thereof, of the details that were posted there." ¹⁹

FBI counterintelligence cut, experienced agents reassigned

CI-12 dismantled. FBI Director Kash Patel fired approximately a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, a Washington D.C. counterintelligence unit that specialized in foreign espionage threats, including Iran. A source described the impact as "devastating to the FBI's Iran program." The firings came days before Operation Epic Fury, the U.S. military operation in Iran. ⁹

Agents pulled from counterintelligence and reassigned to immigration. The Washington Post reported in October 2025 that nearly one-quarter of the FBI's approximately 13,000 agents were reassigned to immigration enforcement. In the largest field offices, that number reached 40%. This included specialists whose job was tracking Chinese, Russian, and Iranian espionage operations inside the United States. ¹⁰

Tulsi's role in the Fulton County ballot seizure

On January 28, 2026, FBI agents executed a search warrant at the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center in Georgia, seizing 2020 election ballots. Gabbard was physically present during the raid. ¹¹

The DNI's job is foreign intelligence. Domestic election ballots from a U.S. county have nothing to do with foreign intelligence coordination, and there is no obvious reason for the nation's top intelligence official to be in that room. She inserted herself into the handling of sensitive American election data while systematically dismantling the agencies that protect Americans from foreign espionage.

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Gabbard's presence should "alarm every American." Warner stated the committee had "not been informed of any foreign nexus" that would justify DNI involvement, described the role as "outward facing about foreigners, not about Americans," and called her participation "an organized effort to misuse her national security powers, to interfere in domestic politics." Trump initially offered varying explanations for why Gabbard was there, then said Attorney General Pam Bondi "insisted" Gabbard oversee the operation. ¹¹

Tulsi locked a whistleblower complaint in a safe

On May 21, 2025, an intelligence official filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Gabbard restricted distribution of a highly classified NSA intelligence report for political purposes. The complaint was filed through the nonprofit WhistleblowerAid. ¹²

Under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act of 1998, the IC Inspector General has 14 days to assess credibility, after which the DNI must forward the complaint to the congressional intelligence committees within 7 days. Instead, the complaint sat for roughly eight months. The Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal reported it was physically locked in a safe at ODNI. Congressional intelligence committee members did not learn of it until November 2025, and the IC Inspector General did not receive final clearance from Gabbard to transmit it until January 30, 2026. ¹²

She amplified a Russian propaganda narrative

The dismantling was not the end of it. On June 12, 2026, in her final days as Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard released a video and "declassified" documents claiming the U.S. government had funded more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries, including 40 in Ukraine working with dangerous pathogens. ²⁰

The "U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine" story is a known Russian disinformation narrative, one Moscow has used to help justify its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry rejected Gabbard's claims as baseless, and biosecurity experts described them as a conspiracy theory. Gabbard had pushed the same narrative once before, in March 2022, weeks after Russia invaded; at the time Senator Mitt Romney called her comments "a repetition of Russian propaganda." ²¹

The nation's top intelligence official used her final days in office to amplify a narrative that serves the Kremlin, casting Russia's invasion of Ukraine as something other than aggression.

Meanwhile, China's espionage and aggression continue

All of this happened against the backdrop of the most aggressive foreign espionage campaign targeting the United States in modern history.

The FBI has called the Chinese government the single greatest espionage threat facing the United States. Roughly 80 percent of all federal economic espionage prosecutions allege conduct that would benefit China, and at least 60 percent of all trade secret theft cases have a China nexus. From February 2021 to December 2024, more than 60 CCP-related espionage cases were documented across 20 states, targeting military secrets, technology, and academic research. ¹⁶

In 2025 alone, a former U.S. Navy sailor was sentenced to over 16 years for selling classified ship manuals to a Chinese intelligence officer; federal officials disrupted a PRC Ministry of State Security network bribing active-duty U.S. soldiers; and Chinese state hackers maintained persistent access inside American infrastructure. ¹⁶

Salt Typhoon compromised major U.S. telecommunications providers, including AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. As of December 2025, the Senate Commerce Committee concluded that U.S. networks remain vulnerable, and the telecom companies failed to provide documentation proving the intrusion had been fully removed. ¹³

Volt Typhoon burrowed into U.S. water systems, power grids, and port infrastructure across the mainland and in Guam. A CISA advisory confirmed PRC-linked actors maintained persistent access to U.S. critical infrastructure, and the cybersecurity firm Dragos confirmed the campaign continued targeting U.S. utilities through 2025. ^{14 15}

Emily Harding, Vice President of Defense and Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testified before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on January 13, 2026 that the United States has failed to establish deterrence in cyberspace. She called U.S. defenses "unacceptably weak" and called for major increases in CISA funding, including $150 million to expand threat detection and deploy teams to evict hackers from compromised networks. She testified that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea treat cyber attacks as part of a spectrum of warfare with no bright line between war and peace, and that Russia's approach, observed in its war in Ukraine, focuses on high-volume attacks on civilian infrastructure. ¹⁵

Instead of increasing cyber defense funding, ODNI 2.0 eliminated the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center.

What CSIS recommended versus what happened

The CSIS Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program published a detailed Playbook for Winning the Cyber War , calling for a shift from reactive to proactive cyber defense. ¹⁵ Among its recommendations: increase CISA funding by $150 million for threat detection and "hunt teams" to remove hackers from compromised networks; create a dedicated Cyber Force; enhance counterintelligence with AI-driven analysis to track foreign agents; and fund export-control enforcement to stop technology transfers to adversaries.

Under the current administration, the agencies responsible for implementing those recommendations have been cut, restructured, or had their personnel reassigned to immigration enforcement.

The pattern: each action reduced America's defenses

Each action documented above has a common thread: it reduced America's ability to detect, track, and respond to foreign threats. The office tracking foreign election interference, shut down. The office coordinating cyber threat intelligence, shut down. The unit forecasting future global threats, shut down. Experienced analysts who knew Russia and China, fired or stripped of clearances. FBI counterintelligence specialists, reassigned to immigration. An undercover CIA officer specializing in Russia, publicly identified. A whistleblower complaint alleging political misuse of intelligence, locked in a safe for eight months. And in her final days, the amplification of a Kremlin propaganda narrative about Ukraine.

These are documented actions, sourced to official government announcements, congressional testimony, and reporting by CNN, NBC News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NOTUS, and ABC News. They are the public record of what the Director of National Intelligence did with the power she was given.