Megyn Kelly, in her opening monologue on the episode that later featured John Kiriakou, reported that Donald Trump was privately polling advisers about replacing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and offered her own opinion that he shouldn’t.[1]
A family friendship going back decades
John Kiriakou says he has known Tulsi Gabbard since she was 12 years old and was close friends with her parents. Her father led the 1990s campaign to protect traditional marriage in Hawaii — a position that made him widely hated — while Kiriakou, then chairman of the college Republicans, worked closely with him.[2]
”An inspired choice”
Kiriakou calls Gabbard’s appointment as Director of National Intelligence “an inspired choice,” saying he likes and trusts her and knows people who work for her who vouch for her honesty.[3][4] He nonetheless disagrees with her decision to join the Republican Party, arguing she could have remained an independent.[5] John Kiriakou explains that as Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard nominally oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies and holds “everything of everything,” serving at the pleasure of the president with no fixed term. But he notes the DNI was, until recently, really in charge only of budgets — and not even fully those, since most agencies sit inside the Pentagon or State Department.[6][7][8]
His earliest assessment, given in February 2025 before her confirmation had been tested, rested on qualification and temperament rather than politics: “she’s got guts, first of all. She’s qualified, which is wonderful.” He cited her willingness to stand up to the DNC and to the Democratic leadership in Congress, her commission as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, and her record on transparency — she had supported Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, and had said several favourable things about Kiriakou himself, though he was careful to note he did not know her well enough at that point to ask her for a favour.[9][10]
He describes the DNC as having actively engineered her out of her own presidential run: every time she inched up in the polls, the committee changed the rules for qualifying for the next debate, setting the threshold one or two percentage points beyond her reach each time — the same treatment, he says, that was applied to Bernie Sanders. His explanation is that her message threatened them and she would not get with their programme. Of the later campaign against her he is blunt: “that’s why the Democrats tried to destroy her.” See superdelegates.[11][12]
He attributes the charge that she is a Russian or Syrian stooge to the same independence: “because she bucks the official DNC line.” The specific count against her was that she travelled to Syria and met Bashar al-Assad — which Kiriakou regards as a point in her favour rather than against, on the principle that heads of state are exactly who American officials should be meeting.[13][14]
The limits of the office
Kiriakou’s structural objection is that the DNI’s authority is largely nominal, and that this — rather than any failing of Gabbard’s — is what would render her ineffective. Of the eighteen or nineteen U.S. intelligence agencies, he notes, almost all are components of the Defense Department: Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, DARPA, the NSA. Over those she has “zero” jurisdiction; the Secretary of Defense does. What she does control is two things — the intelligence community budget, and the President’s Daily Brief, which had been transferred from the CIA to the ODNI only in the preceding couple of years.[15][16]
The practical consequence is that she is at the mercy of the people who choose what to read her in on, and that cutting her out carries a ready-made justification: the agencies can say they report to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary has been briefed, and no separate briefing is owed. Her nominal authority over the CIA is subject to the same gap — “if you look at the wiring diagram she’s technically above the CIA director, but in practice… it’s more of a dotted line.” Kiriakou’s forecast was that remaining relevant at the CIA would be her defining bureaucratic fight.[17][18][19]
He offers a precedent for how such fights go. In the Obama administration, the president announced he would begin appointing NSA and DIA officials as station chiefs overseas — making the role a genuinely community-wide one rather than a CIA preserve. John Brennan said he would resign if it happened. Obama backed off, and station chiefs remain almost everywhere CIA officers. Kiriakou’s aside on the threatened resignation: “that would have been nice… would have been good for me.”[18][19]
The nominal authority he describes as a dotted line he nonetheless treats as real where it counts. Asked in May 2026 whether the CIA could overrule the president, he extended the answer to the DNI unprompted: “No, this CIA cannot overrule the president. The CIA cannot even overrule the Director of National Intelligence.”[20] Put to him that agency personnel had removed boxes of files from the DNI’s own offices, he treated the act as a category error rather than a jurisdictional dispute — “the CIA can’t raid offices, least of all the offices of the Director of National Intelligence” — and did not affirm the underlying account, confining himself to the principle: “Real life is not supposed to work this way. This is crazy.”[21]
Section 702
Kiriakou says Gabbard appeared to give up her prior opposition to Section 702 surveillance in order to secure her Senate confirmation, one of several instances he cites of the security state pressuring incoming officials to drop reform positions.[22]
Leak accusations
Kiriakou notes Gabbard has, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, been accused of leak-related problems involving war-plan information.[23]
The impossible position (March 2026)
During the Iran war, Kiriakou argued that Gabbard had been placed in a role with two mutually exclusive mandates. “Number one is to provide the president with an honest and complete assessment of the intelligence. But the other mission is to protect the president. Well, those two missions are mutually exclusive.”[24]
The choice, as he frames it, was binary: “do I tell the truth and rat out the president, or do I lie to Congress and protect the president?” His reading of what she did is blunt — “She chose to lie to Congress and protect the president.”[25]
His prediction was that it would cost her nothing immediately and everything eventually: “There won’t be any fallout for her, but it makes her look weak and it makes her look sycophantic. So I think she’s short for this job.” Asked what he would have done, he had already said it — “if I were Tulsi, I would resign.”[24][25]
He added that he was already surprised she had lasted: “just based on the last 6 months, I’m surprised that she’s still in the position. I can’t imagine she makes it until the end of the war.”[26]
2026 leak about post-midterm resignation
On the PBD Podcast on 23 April 2026, John Kiriakou flagged a report circulating the day before — a “leak,” he said, of the kind used to “test the market” — that Donald Trump “reportedly wants” the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to resign after the 2026 midterm elections. Kiriakou treated the report as unverified and cautioned that the pattern of trial-balloon leaks made its status uncertain.[27][28]
The resignation
Asked in June 2026 whether Gabbard’s departure was connected to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s warning about Israeli espionage, Kiriakou said his answer had changed in the previous week: “I know now firsthand that she resigned because her husband really is sick.” He reported that her husband had undergone apparently successful surgery days earlier but had a rare cancer requiring extended care.[29][30]
What he takes from it is a judgement about character rather than politics: “Most people who are sort of aggressive and protective of their political futures would never have resigned. They would have hoped for the best and you hire home health care and you squash any stories in the media. But Tulsi is not like that. Tulsi is one of the most genuine human beings that I’ve encountered in Washington. And when she said that she was resigning to care for her husband, she actually meant she was resigning to care for her husband. It was a beautiful thing.”[30][31]
He confirmed separately that she had been involved in the DIA decision to warn against Israeli espionage, and was dismissive of the coverage it attracted. Inside the community, he says, such a report is routine — “oh, the Israelis are spying on us again. Okay. Well, is it worse than it usually is? Yeah, it’s worse. Well, we should probably put out a report.” In the media “it’s like, oh my god, this means at DIA they’re anti-semitic. And it’s like, no, you morons. It means the Israelis are spying on us.”[31][32]
On her replacement, see Bill Pulte.
On the non-interventionist side of the Iran split
A month into the 2026 Iran war, Kiriakou named Gabbard as one of the people “who reportedly have been opposed to these foreign interventions” whom Donald Trump had surrounded himself with, set against “others like Marco Rubio” — an arrangement he said left the party and the president “not knowing which direction to go.” See the Republican split over the Iran war.[33]
Standing beside Ratcliffe, and a rumour of a move
Comparing the two intelligence chiefs in December 2025, Kiriakou judged the contest quiet and one-sided in presentation rather than substance: “so far this has been very quiet in the Trump administration, but it looks like John Ratcliffe has not had the PR problems that Tulsi Gabbard has had.”[34]
He then passed on a report he did not vouch for: “I”ve heard rumours recently that Pete Hegseth will likely not be Secretary of Defense for very much longer, and that Tulsi Gabbard might become the Secretary of Defense. We have to wait and see.” He separately noted her position on Venezuela — that regime change does not work and the United States does not benefit from it — as running against the direction of the administration she serves in.[34][35]
Testifying under oath into a vacuum
Asked in March 2026 whether Gabbard should stay in a job where her assessments were publicly overruled, Kiriakou described the mechanics of the dismissal rather than her position. She testifies under oath with the written material in front of her in case members of Congress want to see it, “and Trump just dismisses it and says, I don’t care what she says.” Kiriakou’s translation: “what he means is Netanyahu doesn’t want to hear this. That’s really exactly what it means.”[36]
What he expects to follow is not her removal but the analysts’: “if there is an assessment published that he doesn’t like or approve of, he’ll fire everybody that was involved in the assessment” — which the agency’s employment status permits without recourse, as set out at serving at the pleasure of the president.[37]
The confirmation itself was in doubt
Days before the vote, Kiriakou thought the nomination might fail. His reading of why inverted the obvious one: the Democrats were united against her, but the danger was that “she’s having trouble keeping the Republicans united, because this whole MAGA thing is already beginning to wear thin among some Republican senators.”[38]
Defending the nomination (2024)
When Gabbard was named for Director of National Intelligence in November 2024, Kiriakou wrote a piece defending her and was asked about the opposition — John Bolton, Representative Abigail Spanberger and the wider establishment. His answer was that she should welcome it: “I would consider that to be a badge of honor, and I think she already does consider it to be a badge of honor.”[39]
On the 2017 Damascus trip, the charge most often raised against her, his defence was procedural before it was political. “First of all, members of Congress can go literally anywhere in the world that they want as part of their own personal fact-finding.” She was on the armed services committee at the time, in the majority party, “and she wanted to see the situation on the ground for herself.”[40] As for the government she met, he set aside the question of approval — “whether or not you like Bashar al-Assad’s personal politics, God bless, that’s your personal business” — and argued the material point was that the Syrian state had been secular, with a Christian vice president, Christians in the cabinet, and “Christians and women and minorities in the Syrian Parliament.”[41][42]
He placed her nomination in a sequence, arguing that Trump’s second-term picks were “far better than they were the first term” — against Gina Haspel, Mike Pompeo and Bolton the first time, which he summarised as “are you out of your mind?” — and calling Gabbard “an inspired stick-it-to-the-man choice, where you pick somebody who really is going to shake things up but is qualified and knows what she’s doing.”[43][44]