Tulsi Gabbard

Tulsi Gabbard (1981–) is an American politician, former soldier and Iraq War veteran who served as Director of National Intelligence in the second Trump Administration from February 2025 to June 2026. A former Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Hawaii (2013–2021), she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, left the Democratic Party in 2022 and joined Donald Trump’s camp in 2024. Trump appointed her as intelligence chief, a post to which she was confirmed by the Senate in February 2025. On May 22, 2026, she announced her resignation, effective June 30, citing her husband’s illness.

Gabbard has been widely criticised for echoing conspiracy narratives and Kremlin-aligned talking points, particularly on Syria, Ukraine and COVID-19. In January 2017, she made an unannounced trip to Syria, where she met Bashar al-Assad twice. After the April 2017 sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun, which was later attributed to the Syrian regime by the UN-OPCW Joint Investigative Mechanism, Gabbard voiced skepticism about Assad’s responsibility and called for an independent inquiry. On her campaign website, she suggested that the attack may have been staged by opposition forces — a claim widely promoted by Damascus and Moscow. Her Syria record later drew bipartisan concern in Washington over her access to sensitive intelligence.

Gabbard’s most prominent entry into conspiracist discourse came after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On March 13, 2022, she posted a video claiming that there were “25 to 30 U.S.-funded biolabs” in Ukraine that could release dangerous pathogens if hit. The statement echoed a Kremlin-backed narrative alleging U.S.-financed military biological programs in Ukraine. In reality, Washington had supported public biosafety and disease-surveillance laboratories under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program, created after the Cold War to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and related infrastructure in former Soviet states. The claim was sharply condemned in the United States, with Republican senator Mitt Romney accusing Gabbard of “parroting false Russian propaganda.” Russian state media channels praised Gabbard’s interventions and she was even flatteringly labelled “Russia’s favourite girlfriend” on a nightly talkshow.

In June 2026, as she was preparing to leave the DNI post, Gabbard revived the same theme. She announced that after months of searching intelligence-community files, she was releasing evidence of long-standing U.S. government funding for more than 120 biological laboratories in over 30 countries, including facilities in Ukraine. The release consisted in particular of a short press statement and four declassified slides that repackaged a storyline already pushed by Vladimir Putin’s regime rather than revealing any secret American biological-weapons program. Democratic representative Mike Levin wrote that the “big Tulsi reveal” about “secret biolabs” appeared to be recycled Kremlin propaganda, adding that the facilities had never been secret and that the United States had long funded biosafety and disease-surveillance work abroad.

The release was welcomed by several figures in the pro-Trump and conspiracist ecosystem, including Rand Paul, Michael Flynn, Anna Paulina Luna and Jack Posobiec. The episode also intersected with broader MAGA and Moscow-fueled conspiracy theories about the Deep State, distrust of public-health institutions, and claims that U.S. officials had concealed dangerous research from the public.

On June 18, 2026, Gabbard opened a second front by releasing a video, an official Director of National Intelligence press release and 392 pages of partially redacted documents accusing epidemiologist Anthony Fauci of having funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that, according to her, caused COVID-19. She also accused the former chief medical adviser to the President of manipulating intelligence and lying to Congress, and described the alleged concealment as being “straight from the Deep State playbook.” The wording presented the laboratory-escape hypothesis as established fact, even though it remained disputed in both the scientific community and within U.S. intelligence assessments.

In her own words:

“There are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world.”

Source: X, March 13, 2022.

“Today I’m revealing new evidence of the U.S. government’s long-standing funding of over 120 biolabs in more than 30 countries.”

Source: X, June 12, 2026.