Where Is Tulsi Gabbard?

The Trump administration is running a war with a skeleton crew, a small group of insiders and officials whose official roles seem to matter less than their loyalty to Donald Trump. When the president was making his decision to go to war with Iran, he met in mid-February with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Other people in the room included White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; the secretaries of State and Defense, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth; and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.During this crucial meeting, Vice President Vance was out of town. Also missing? Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, the person who is in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence community, and who is technically Ratcliffe’s superior. When the war began, the White House put out a picture of Gabbard and Vance meeting with a few Cabinet officials in the Situation Room, looking like they’d been sent to the kids’ table at a wedding.Since then, Gabbard has made herself scarce: She was, after all, once an anti-war Democrat who sold T-shirts opposing a conflict with Iran. Trump is also irritated with her because of her closeness to Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center; Kent was her chief of staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), and he was her pick to run the NCTC. After less than eight months on the job, Kent resigned to protest the war and has since gone public with blistering criticisms of the administration. (Trump reportedly believes that Gabbard was shielding Kent from the White House.) But Gabbard was apparently in poor standing with the administration even before the war began: In early February, she opposed renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; Trump ignored her advice and is pushing Republicans to extend the law.Despite her senior position in the government, Gabbard seems to have little influence—something of a relief to people who, like me, were concerned about her nomination. For