Overview
- Secret Pentagon memos published in recent reporting argue that Tulsi Gabbard was effectively set up to fail before she took the Director of National Intelligence job because the office lacked real control over other agencies.
- The memos claim the National Counterterrorism Center shifted toward domestic work, the intelligence budget increased, surveillance powers expanded, and the community deepened ties with private tech and social media firms.
- Those changes are framed in the memos as the product of a long history of institutional pushback, including a 2004 blueprint from then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that resisted giving the DNI full budget authority.
- Gabbard has publicly cited her husband’s cancer as the reason for her pending departure while analysts using the memos say broader institutional and political forces, not just individual choices, limited what she could do.
- If accurate, the memos raise immediate questions about oversight, civil liberties, and private-sector partnerships in counterterrorism work and the claims in the memos require independent verification before they are treated as settled fact.