With Gabbard Out, Trump Needs Another Ally to Pursue Conspiracy Theories

Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard notified Donald Trump on Friday that she will have to leave her position to tend to her husband, who was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. Until the president can find a replacement as willing to do his bidding as she was, her departure leaves a void in his efforts to pursue his political enemies and prove that he was the victim of various purported conspiracies as well as a “stolen” election in 2020.

In a social media post announcing her decision, Trump praised Gabbard for “having done a great job” and added that she will be missed.

This is undoubtedly true.

After all, Gabbard has played a key role in the president’s efforts to find a pretense that will allow him to rig the midterms.

In January, she was present when the FBI seized Fulton County ballots from the 2020 election. After Trump lost that race to Joe Biden, he invented the Big Lie and attempted a coup that culminated in the January 6 attack on Congress.

Why was Gabbard there? That’s a great question because that raid ostensibly had nothing to do with her responsibilities as DNI. After she was spotted, the administration couldn’t even get its stories straight.

In a letter to Congress, Gabbard stated that she was there at the request of the president.

However, Todd Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time, claimed that “she wasn’t at the search” but rather “in the area where the search took place,” and Trump said he did not know why she was there.

In other words, at least two of the three are lying – it’s just not easy to know who since all of them do so frequently.

Our best guess is still that Trump will use the raid as a pretense to try to interfere in the administration of the midterms in some way.

Gabbard has also proven useful in furthering another one of the president’s conspiracy theories – the so-called “Russia Hoax.”

As Trump and his loyal DNI tell it, President Barack Obama conspired with others to mislead Americans into believing that Vladimir Putin’s regime changed the outcome of the 2016 election by hacking voting machines.

In reality, Obama was very clear “that the votes that were cast were counted, they were counted appropriately, we have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with.”

However, there was lots of evidence that Russia did try to swing that election Trump’s way through an influence campaign that included hacking Hillary Clinton’s emails and spreading misinformation. That, for example, was the conclusion of a report compiled by a committee current Secretary of State Marco Rubio chaired at the time.

The only aspect of this that has not been proven is whether Russia and the Trump campaign worked together, which is immaterial.

What is not, however, is whether the president will find another sycophant as willing to help him with his schemes.

For now, that task will fall to Aaron Lukas, who will serve as acting DNI when Gabbard leaves her position at the end of next month.

Lukas is a relative unknown but has spent two decades in the intelligence community, including as a CIA station chief in “a former Soviet country.”

While it is unclear whether he will aim to advance the nation’s interest or Trump’s, he certainly lacks Gabbard’s high profile and, as such, we can only hope that he will be an improvement.