Tulsi Gabbard has fired two top intelligence officials for misconduct, sending a clear message that the era of unchecked politicization in America's spy agencies is over.
“The Director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the Intelligence Community,” a spokesperson told the Washington Post.
Gabbard, the National Intelligence director, fired Michael Collins, the acting chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Maria Langan-Riekhof, who served as Collins’ deputy.
The firings came after intelligence leaks to the New York Times and Washington Post, both reliably anti-Trump newspapers, as well as the publication of a National Intelligence Council report on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
The intelligence report claimed that Tren de Aragua is not tied to the government of Venezuela, undercutting Trump's rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport members of the gang.
An FBI assessment found some evidence that Tren de Aragua is acting as a proxy of the communist Maduro regime.
A spokesperson for Gabbard, Alexa Hanning, said in response to the Washington Post that the two "Biden holdovers" were sacked for leaking and politicizing intelligence and not simply for contradicting Trump.
You are genuinely bad at your job but that is likely a prerequisite for WaPo.
No one from ODNI told you that, so of course you inject your own politically motivated opinion. That’s wrong but who cares about facts, right?
These Biden holdovers were dismissed because they… https://t.co/kccRnpUBrQ
— Alexa Henning (@alexahenning) May 14, 2025
The sackings were first reported by Fox News, which noted that Collins has ties to a former CIA deputy director who coordinated the notorious letter speculating that Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation.
During Trump's first four years in the White House, the intelligence community emerged as one of his chief antagonists and a key player in the undemocratic, elite-driven "Resistance" that sought to effectively nullify his 2016 election victory. Trump was cleared of "Russian collusion" charges after an exhaustive FBI investigation that dominated the news for much of his term.
Gabbard, a longtime critic of the intelligence community and a former Democrat, joined forces with Trump as the weaponization of government continued to escalate under the Biden regime.
The political corruption that has long run rampant in the intelligence community was on full display Thursday as former FBI Director James Comey sent out a coded threat to Trump on Instagram. Comey, who Trump fired in 2017, has long been unafraid to weigh in on politics, but the post brought his anti-Trump commentary to a new and dangerous extreme.
Gabbard said Comey should go to jail over the quickly deleted post, which featured the message "8647", widely interpreted as a call to eliminate or kill Trump.
“We’ve already seen assassination attempts. I’m very concerned for his life,” Gabbard said on Fox News. “And James Comey, in my view, should be held accountable and put behind bars for this.”
