A growing public fallout between President Donald Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has exposed what anti-war critics are denouncing as glaring efforts to push aside inconvenient intelligence as Israel attempts to force U.S. military involvement in an all-out regional war with Iran.
Aboard Air Force One Tuesday, with American jets scrambling to the Middle East, Trump casually brushed aside assessments from his own intelligence community that Iran was not on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
In March, Gabbard testified to Congress that U.S. spies had determined Iran is not building a nuclear weapon:
The [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.
When asked about this assessment, Trump, who famously "doesn't read" his daily intelligence briefings, insisted that he knew more than Gabbard.
"I don't care what she said," Trump told reporters on Tuesday. "I think they were very close to having" a nuclear weapon.
Gabbard, a former supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) who rose to prominence as a critic of America's "forever wars," has been one of a shrinking number of Trump administration members willing to raise alarms about the risks of escalating conflict with Iran.
As the administration has begun to chart a course for that conflict, she has become increasingly marginalized from critical decisions. Fox Newsreports that Gabbard was excluded from a June 8 meeting at Camp David in which Trump "convened senior national security officials to discuss the Middle East."
That revelation shed light on a cryptic video Gabbard released two days later in which she warned that the world is "closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before" and that the "political elite and warmongers are carelessly fermenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers."
According to Politico, Trump was "incensed" by the video, "complaining to associates at the White House that she had spoken out of turn." It also may have spurred conversations about eliminating Gabbard's office entirely, placing it under the purview of the CIA or another agency.
Gabbard's testimony has been bolstered by CNN's Tuesday reporting, which quoted four officials familiar with intelligence assessments of Iran:
Not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.
Despite this, Gabbard has begun to fall back in with the Trump party line. After Tuesday's tongue-lashing from the president, she falsely asserted that "President Trump was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March."
Anti-war critics have described Trump and his pro-war allies' fanciful claims that Iran is on the verge of obtaining a nuke as a form of willful ignorance.
"Disregarding the director of national intelligence seems like an odd thing to do unless you really want to go to war," wrote Branko Marcetic in Responsible Statecraft.
Progressive Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), an outspoken critic of American foreign policy, described the administration's lies as eerily similar to those that formed the pretext to the Iraq War, a comparison made starker by the president's threats Tuesday night to "take out" Khamenei.
"We were lied to about 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq that killed millions," Tlaib tweeted.
She urged Congress to invoke the War Powers Resolution to limit the president's capability to deploy troops without congressional authorization.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to hint at direct American involvement. When asked on Wednesday whether he'd launch strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, he played coy with reporters.
"I may do it, I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do," he said.
