Sorry, Tulsi Gabbard. You can’t polygraph your way out of this.

My second open letter to the director of national intelligence.

By Brian O’Neill

(Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock.com)

Director Gabbard,

In February, I published a letter to you in The Contrarian. I didn’t argue against reform of the intelligence community, but I warned that if reform was used as a vehicle to politicize its mission, it would do more harm than good: “Change must be deliberate, targeted, and grounded in intelligence realities.”

You emphasized reform throughout your Senate confirmation hearing, and there’s no question the intelligence community has seen plenty of it over the years: some long overdue, some badly executed, and some pushed by political winds more than strategic need. Your role as director of National Intelligence was born from one of those moments—when Congress, after 9/11, decided the community needed centralized leadership.

The need for the post has long been debated—whether it clarified or complicated coordination. But few imagined it could become a political instrument to override what it was meant to protect: coherence and integrity. No one foresaw such recklessness. That’s why it never entered those discussions. But then, Donald Trump got a second term.

I wrote the February letter because it was already clear this administration intended to redefine objectivity—not as a standard of professional judgment but as a tool for reinforcing the president’s narrative.

Now, on May 22—your 100th day in the job—it’s worth stepping back. Headlines have focused on Trump’s executive orders, legal fights, curbs on due process, mass removals, and agency overhaul. But your impact has been just as real—shaping the environment in which intelligence is now being produced.

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, delivered to Congress in March, showed that professional standards had not yet collapsed. It offered unfiltered assessments on Russia and China, even as it elevated drug trafficking and transnational crime to top-tier threats. The integrity of analytic tradecraft held—but the shift in emphasis signaled how the framework shaping these assessments was changing.

A National Intelligence Council memo on findings circulated in February—declassified in April—found it not credible that the Venezuelan government was directing the Tren de Aragua gang into the United States. This undercut the administration’s claims and deportation rationale. The fact that its findings were delivered to the administration was encouraging.

But before its declassification, you posted on social media your office “fully supports” the administration’s position. You called the leak a “politicalization of intelligence.”

Once released, it was clear: You hadn’t just misstated the assessment. You had reversed its judgment, then used that distortion to justify a deportation campaign.

Isn’t that “politicalization of intelligence”?

And then you added insult to injury and removed the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council (NIC)—the acting chair and his deputy, both of whom I know and about whose objective professional and commitment to U.S. national security I can attest. They were not accused of misconduct. Their crime was analytic judgment.

The NIC has always been the community’s collective conscience—drawing the best minds across agencies to reach consensus or document dissent. You’ve dismantled that. And by doing so, you’ve signaled that assessments contradicting the president’s claims are not just inconvenient, they’re grounds for dismissal.

And though the Central Intelligence Agency is quietly being hollowed out—through early retirements and shuttered mission centers—you’ve taken similar steps at your headquarters (ODNI). At an April 30 Cabinet meeting, you announced the office is now “25 percent smaller,” having shut down core centers without explanation of what will replace them.

You also recently added another layer: relocating the President’s Daily Brief office from Langley to the ODNI’s campus. The move asserts control you already possessed. It’s not about workflow. It’s about optics.

The brief remains written largely by CIA analysts. The ODNI already has a managing editor. But now, with your staff occupying the same space as the briefers, the message is unmistakable: Oversight isn’t enough—you want proximity.

Some of my retired colleagues have said the move will cause disruption. That’s overstated. The process can adapt. What can’t be explained, however, is the rationale. You had authority already. What this offers is something else entirely: the appearance of control, the performance of reform, and a pretext to justify your office’s future by making it appear indispensable to the president.

The firing of NIC leadership combined with your relocation of the brief reveals a coherent design. This is not reform. It’s preemption: removing any remaining friction between professional analysis and political obedience. No one should confuse this with restoring trust. It is the opposite: replacing institutional confidence with personal fealty.

You’ve framed your broader agenda as part of a campaign to “restore trust” in the intelligence community. In April, you created the Director’s Initiatives Group to root out leaks, politicalization, and “wasteful spending.” But trust isn’t restored by punishing, nor is transparency achieved by selectively declassifying files or revoking clearances from political opponents.

Nor is loyalty earned by demand. Inside the intelligence community, loyalty is quiet, methodical, and brutally honest—owed to mission, not narrative. Professionals deliver what’s accurate, not what flatters power. When that discipline bends, it doesn’t break cleanly. It fractures, functioning but without insight.

You treat internal dissent as if it were espionage— referring leak cases for prosecution, accusing unnamed insiders of sabotage, and labeling them “deep-state criminals.” To treat whistleblowing as espionage, you will get neither loyalty nor silence. You will get resistance—and not the quiet kind.

At the FBI, the climate you’ve fostered is already taking hold: polygraphs to find leakers, reassignments for past disloyalties, and a creeping suspicion that what’s being judged is no longer the work, but the worldview behind it.

And through it all, there is the Signal chat: the private conversation over an unsecured app among senior officials, including you, discussing a military operation. Accidentally including a journalist. Then pretending no harm was done.

Polygraphs for analysts, but Signal for the Cabinet?

You still have time. The structure of the intelligence community is bruised but not broken. Across agencies, analysts still write with precision, and collectors still operate with discipline. They flag uncertainty. They distinguish between evidence and assumption. Unlike you, who sees one social media posting by the former FBI director and demands his imprisonment, absurdly assessing the picture to mean a cabal is readying to assassinate the president.

By the way, Merriam-Webster defines “86” as “1930s soda-counter slang” for getting rid of something—not killing someone. As I would have told one of my analysts applying such poor tradecraft: check your sources!

If you want to lead them, protect your intelligence officers. Speak the truth about what they produce. Shield them from politicization.

And stop assuming dissent is betrayal. It is the last warning sign before failure.

One final note. In January, I wrote in The Hill that whoever took this job would face a hard test: to protect truth under pressure and preserve the President’s Daily Brief as a source of insight, not affirmation. I acknowledged that intelligence failure is inevitable—no director can eliminate that risk entirely.

But what you are doing isn’t error. It’s distortion.

The next failure won’t be circumstantial. It will be structural—produced by a leadership culture that rewards conformity and punishes accuracy.

And when it comes—and it will—you won’t be able to blame the staff. You’ll try. But you’ll be alone.

You’ll own it—because you dismantled the safeguards, rewrote the rules, and made loyalty the filter.

U.S. national security will be weaker—because of you.

And more concerning, that failure might well cost the lives of Americans. I just hope you will be ready to use your insatiable need for ongoing YouTube proclamations to take ownership of such losses.

Sadly, based on what I’ve seen to date, I don’t expect that to happen.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.

---