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Donald Trump’s top spy chief refused to say whether Iran had posed an imminent threat to the US as the president claimed at the outset of the war.
Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard struggled to avoid contradicting Trump as she and other top national security officials testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday about the biggest security threats facing the country.
Pressed repeatedly on whether the intelligence community had assessed that Iran posed “an imminent nuclear threat” ahead of the start of the US-Israel attack on February 28 — one of the administration’s main justifications for the war — Gabbard said: “It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. That is up to the president.”
Gabbard’s testimony at the intelligence committee’s annual global threats hearing came a day after another top intelligence official resigned over what he claimed were the administration’s “unfounded” justifications for the war, further amplifying doubts about a conflict that has killed 13 American service members so far.
In prepared opening remarks submitted to the committee ahead of her appearance, Gabbard said that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “obliterated” by US and Israeli strikes against the country’s nuclear sites last June.
“There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” she wrote in her statement.
But she veered from her prepared remarks when she addressed the Senate panel, saying that US intelligence believed that Iran had been “trying to recover” from the “severe damage” to its nuclear infrastructure before the renewed US-Israel strikes against the country.
When Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, asked Gabbard why she had strayed from her written testimony, she responded that she had skipped the relevant section because her testimony “was running long”.
US officials have offered contradictory justifications for the war and the status of Iran’s nuclear programme, saying that Tehran was both “weeks” away from obtaining a nuclear bomb, and that its nuclear facilities had been “obliterated” by last year’s war.
At the start of her testimony Gabbard stressed she was presenting “the intelligence community’s assessment of the threats facing US citizens, our homeland and our interests” and not her personal views or opinions.
A combat veteran who has long opposed US military intervention overseas, Gabbard remained silent on the conflict until Tuesday when she posted a statement on X that repeated Trump’s justification for the war, but did not say whether she supported it.
Joe Kent, a close ally of Gabbard who was director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on Tuesday became the first senior US official to resign in protest at the war, saying that Tehran posed “no imminent threat to our nation”.
Kent’s resignation has raised questions about Gabbard’s future in the Trump administration and splits within his Maga movement which has long been opposed to US wars of regime change.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday she had no “knowledge” of whether Trump was considering firing Gabbard, but said it was “a question for him”.
Democrats expressed frustration during the hearing with the unwillingness of Gabbard and CIA director John Ratcliffe to answer questions about the information presented to the president ahead of his decision to go to war. FBI director Kash Patel and the leaders of the US defence and signals intelligence agencies also testified.
Gabbard told the committee that US intelligence had “long” assessed that Iran would likely use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage in the event of a crisis.
But both she and Ratcliffe declined to say whether they had given that assessment directly to the president ahead of the war. Gabbard did say that her agency assessed that Iran’s regime remained largely “intact” and would seek to reconstitute its military capabilities if they remained.
Trump said this week that his administration had been surprised by Iran’s retaliatory strikes against US allies in the Middle East. There appears to have been little preparation for the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil flows.
“We’re trying to figure out if the president knew what the downside was of the Strait of Hormuz being closed, and I’m having a hard time finding out whether the White House asked, or whether there was a brief, whether the president knew,” said Democratic senator Mark Kelly.
Additional reporting by James Politi