Tulsi Gabbard abandoned intelligence standards with Obama ‘treason’ allegation
Credit: AP
Strategic intelligence doesn’t speak in absolutes. It lays out what is known, what isn’t and the level of confidence that can be placed on the analytic judgments.
It makes room for ambiguity, dissent and uncomfortable possibilities. It doesn’t shout “gotcha.” It builds the case brick by brick.
To ensure that rigor, the U.S. intelligence community follows clear guidelines. In 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued Intelligence Community Directive 203 — ICD 203 for short.
It codifies what sound analysis must include: sourcing transparency, acknowledgment of uncertainty, confidence levels and, above all, analytic objectivity.
Bipartisan investigation conclusions, a conspiracy claim was made
ICD 203 was born from failure — specifically, the Iraq weapons of mass destruction controversy. It was meant to guard against assumption creep or politicized framing. Today, it remains the foundation of analytic discipline and is taught to every incoming analyst.
Credit: Handout
My course on strategic intelligence includes a block of instruction on the directive to ensure students understand its role in preventing opinions being dressed up as conclusions.
And that’s exactly what makes Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s remarks at the White House recently so alarming: they ran directly counter to every core principle ICD 203 was created to uphold.
Standing before the press corps, Gabbard accused the Obama administration of orchestrating a “treasonous conspiracy” against Donald Trump. Her evidence? More than 100 pages of declassified files — mostly recycled emails and partisan staff memos — and a Republican-authored 2017 House Intelligence Committee report.
She claimed these documents showed the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment, which concluded that Russia interfered in the election to help Trump, was a deliberate effort to subvert the president-elect.
The ICA’s findings — produced by senior analysts at the CIA, FBI and NSA — were later affirmed by a yearslong, bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation completed in 2020, yet Gabbard claimed to have uncovered a coordinated conspiracy.
Criticism of analytic judgments is fair game. Intelligence isn’t sacred. But tradecraft standards apply whether you’re producing intelligence or publicly interpreting it. And in this case, Gabbard invoked the language of tradecraft without applying its discipline.
Trump’s top intelligence official flouted norms and violated the discipline
Credit: AP
If held to ICD 203, the House report would not pass. It omits alternative explanations, fails to structure confidence levels, misrepresents sources and ignores corroborating analysis. Yet, Gabbard presented its conclusions as definitive.
ICD 203 requires analysts to distinguish what is known from what is inferred. Gabbard cited fragments of internal communications from 2016-17 without context or corroboration.
She accused officials of selectively quoting or suppressing intelligence — without acknowledging that selective citation is standard. What matters is whether the selection is transparent, justified and consistent with tradecraft, not whether every fragment appears.
Her rhetoric — “shoddy,” “irrefutable,” “dubious” — wasn’t the language of objective critique. It was a prosecutorial script. That matters. Intelligence doesn’t operate in absolutes.
When the nation’s top intelligence official uses emotive, politicized language to describe contested assessments, she isn’t just flouting norms — she’s modeling behavior every analyst knows violates the discipline.
No analyst could use that framing in a secure briefing without being flagged.
Even Trump’s CIA director did not support new claims
Gabbard also misrepresented the process. She claimed the ICA was drafted by a single analyst, implying the process was engineered to produce a predetermined conclusion. But most intelligence community products begin that way.
Review and coordination shape the final version, which is precisely what happened with the ICA — reflected in the NSA’s documented “moderate confidence” compared to the CIA and FBI’s higher judgments.
Even more troubling, Gabbard alleged that the intelligence community “misled and conspired.” That’s not critique. It’s an indictment — leveled without applying the same standards she claims were ignored. She disparaged the institution she now leads, using tradecraft language stripped of its grounding.
And the irony: even the CIA’s internal review — commissioned by Trump-appointed Director John Ratcliffe and released just before July 4 — did not support her claims.
It noted some concerns about speed and sourcing but concluded the ICA “was robust and consistent with Intelligence Community Directive 203” and that its “analytic rigor was evident in its extensive sourcing.”
It also reaffirmed the core analytic conclusions that Russia sought to help Trump.
Gabbard said she wanted to keep politics out, then politicized the issue
The issue is no longer about the ICA. It’s about whether Gabbard sees her role as leading an intelligence enterprise — or advancing a political narrative. Former senior intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, have warned of this shift. Once objectivity is replaced by advocacy, the system breaks.
Gabbard says she wants to root out politicization. But politicization isn’t just about what’s said, it’s also about what’s left out, misrepresented or framed with false certainty. If she truly believed in analytic tradecraft, she would have applied it in her press briefings and in reviewing the House report.
But she didn’t. She accused, editorialized and politicized — abandoning not just tradecraft, but her duty to protect and represent the intelligence community.
Errors in analysis are inevitable. That’s why the intelligence community relies on reviews, lessons-learned and tradecraft discipline.
ICD 203 was written to prevent exactly what we saw in the White House briefing room: a DNI substituting allegiance for objectivity.
Brian O’Neill is a retired CIA executive who has served in such leadership roles as deputy director of analysis at the National Counterterrorism Center and as executive editor of the President’s Daily Brief. He now teaches national security at Georgia Tech and contributes to the journal Just Security and other outlets.
