The Intelligence Chief Who Ran Against Politicized Intelligence Spent Her Last Night Politicizing Intelligence

There is a tell in how a document drop is timed. Thursday night, June 18, with her resignation already filed and her successor not yet settled, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a trove of declassified records aimed at Dr. Anthony Fauci. By the next morning Fox News had it, under a headline calling it her "final act." The accompanying ODNI press release carried the title "Fauci Funded Wuhan Lab Research That Sparked COVID." It was the kind of sentence an intelligence agency is not supposed to write, stated as settled fact about a question its own analysts still rate at low confidence.

None of this should be read as a reformer who lost her way. Gabbard built a brand on accusing the intelligence community of being politicized, weaponized, hidden behind the classification stamp, and that brand sold. It was also a posture she dropped the moment it cost her something. To get confirmed she walked back her support for Edward Snowden and abandoned her old fight to repeal the government's Section 702 surveillance powers, suddenly calling the very tool she had tried to kill "crucial." The Senate confirmed her 52 to 48. The only Republican to vote no, Mitch McConnell, warned that the country should not have to worry its intelligence was "tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment." That assessment came from her own party, before she had run a single agency.

So when her tenure turned into a run of politicized document drops, it was not a fall from grace. It was the same person doing the same thing with a bigger stamp. Over fifteen months the through-line was not depoliticizing the agencies. It was pointing them, one declassification at a time, at the president's enemies. The Fauci release was the last entry, shoved out the door on the way to the parking lot, and like the entries before it, it did not buy her what she was plainly trying to buy.

What she was actually doing there

Start with the job she did not get to do. According to CNN's reporting, Gabbard was sidelined from the administration's biggest national-security decisions, including the strikes on Iran and the military operations against Venezuela, her longstanding non-interventionism quietly shut out of the room. When her own analysts assessed that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, Trump said publicly that she was "wrong" and then, for good measure, "I don't care what she said." He overrode his own intelligence chief in front of the cameras. At one point, per Axios, it reportedly took Roger Stone talking Trump out of firing her.

So she found another way to be useful. Locked out of Iran and Venezuela, she turned the declassification authority of her office into a delivery service for the president's grievances. In July 2025 she released documents she billed as proof of a "treasonous conspiracy" by Obama officials to invent Russian interference in 2016, and referred them to the Justice Department. The trouble, as CNN and the nonpartisan legal analysts at Lawfare laid out, was that the documents did not show what she said they showed. They left untouched the core finding, affirmed by a Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, that Russia ran an influence campaign to help Trump. The woman who promised to stop the selective use of intelligence for partisan ends had produced a textbook case of it.

The Fauci dump is the same move, one more time.

How legit is the Fauci material?

Here the honest part matters, and so does a warning about whose word to take.

The underlying suspicion is not a fever dream. A lab-related origin for COVID-19 has been the considered judgment of more than one part of the government for years. In 2023, under the Biden administration, the FBI assessed with "moderate confidence" that the pandemic most likely began with a lab incident in Wuhan, and the Department of Energy reached a similar conclusion at "low confidence." Those were not Trump productions. They came from career analysts, while at the same time most other agencies still leaned toward a natural origin, also at low confidence. Serious people inside the government have taken the lab-leak theory seriously for years, on the open record, with their uncertainty stated plainly.

But notice the citation that gets waved around now, and who is behind it. The CIA's January 2025 statement that a lab origin was "more likely" is treated as fresh corroboration. It was not fresh. By the agency's own account it rested on no new evidence, only a reanalysis finished in the final days of the Biden administration under then-director William Burns. What was new was the packaging: John Ratcliffe, Trump's incoming CIA director, ordered it declassified and pushed it out as one of his first acts. Old analysis, restamped by a new loyalist, sold as revelation. Sit with that, because it is the same maneuver Gabbard would run five months later with Fauci. When the agency doing the disclosing is run by the president's own appointee, the disclosure is a claim, not a verdict, and it earns the scrutiny owed any interested party. That caution applies to Ratcliffe's CIA, to Gabbard's ODNI, and to whoever holds the stamp next. It is the reason a reader should not take this release, or this newsletter's read of it, on the letterhead alone.

The gain-of-function fight is real too. Fauci told Congress the NIH "has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research" in Wuhan, and yet NIH's own principal deputy director, Lawrence Tabak, told a House subcommittee that the agency had funded work that fit one accepted definition of it. The dispute turns on whose definition you use, which is a genuine and unresolved argument, not a closed case in anyone's favor.

It helps to remember what science and intelligence are for. They chase the truth as evidence comes in, and they revise when it changes. An assessment that moves from natural origin toward a lab is not, by itself, proof of a cover-up. It can simply be what honest analysts conclude when they look again, and a finding that shifts is not a confession. For this release to be the scandal its packaging claims, one narrow thing has to be true: that Fauci knowingly and directly steered funding into the specific research, understood exactly what it was, and then lied about it on purpose, under oath. Short of that, a changed scientific verdict is just science working. The documents Gabbard dropped do not establish the knowing, deliberate core. They establish a fight over definitions and a group of analysts who took pains to keep Fauci at arm's length. That is a long way from perjury.

Then there is where it landed. Gabbard did not release this to the public and let reporters dig through it. She handed it to Fox News, the outlet that has functioned for years as the administration's house organ, and it ran the ODNI's verdict close to the way the press release wrote it. Even then, Fox's own copy gave the game away: the network reported that "much of the material is familiar," already public, already chewed over. When even the megaphone concedes the bombshell is mostly a rerun, it is mostly a rerun.

And the genuinely new documents do not show Fauci steering the assessment. They show the opposite: intelligence officials considered Fauci as an outside reviewer and rejected him, specifically because they worried he would be seen as having a conflict of interest. Their internal emails debate, in good faith, how much weight to give a subject-matter expert's interview suggestions. That is a record of analysts guarding against bias, which is roughly the reverse of the cover-up the press release announces. The "Fauci lied to Congress" charge rests on a 2021 whistleblower referral and the same definitional dispute above, not on a perjury finding any court or prosecutor has made.

So the legitimacy question has a precise answer. The topic is legitimate. The specific framing on the ODNI letterhead, that Fauci "funded Wuhan lab research that sparked COVID" and "suppressed the truth," runs well past what the documents in the folder can carry. An intelligence agency stamping a low-confidence, contested question as proven fact is not the correction of politicized intelligence. It is politicized intelligence.

The other side of it, fairly stated

The strongest defense of Gabbard is that transparency is good on its own terms, that the public has every right to see how agencies handled Fauci, and that declassifying records is the opposite of hiding them. Fair enough. If the documents had been released with a neutral cover note and left to speak for themselves, that defense would mostly hold. The problem is not the release. It is the marketing wrapped around it, the verdict printed on top of evidence that does not reach a verdict. Transparency does not require the government to tell you what to conclude before you have read page one.

What it bought her

Notice what those fifteen months actually purchased. She defended an Iran assessment she did not believe, then absorbed the public humiliation when the president waved it away. She converted her office into a grievance archive. And in the end none of it secured her standing. She resigned to care for her husband, who is fighting a rare bone cancer, a reason that deserves to be taken at face value and is its own private grief. But the office she leaves behind tells the political story plainly. Trump's permanent nominee is stalled. The interim job is going to Bill Pulte, a housing official with no intelligence background, over the stated objections of Republican Senators John Thune, John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and Thom Tillis, several of whom warned in so many words against a "weaponized" DNI. The fear those Republicans named out loud is the thing Gabbard spent her tenure doing quietly.

She sold herself as the person who would take the politics out of intelligence. That was the con. The "politicized, weaponized deep state" was never the finding her movement claimed it was. It was the deflection, the line you reach for to wave off an assessment you do not like, whether the subject is Russia, or Iran, or the origin of a virus. Across fifteen months and a stack of declassifications, Gabbard never produced the rogue cabal. What she produced was herself: a director bending the agencies to the president's grievances and calling it reform. She did not let politics back into intelligence. She carried it in the door. The accusation was the blueprint, and the only real question was ever who held the stamp.