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Photos of President Donald Trump’s Situation Room released by the White House in the hours since he authorized a U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, appear to hide the participation of one key member of his military and intelligence apparatus.
The photos show Trump in a red MAGA cap watching the proceedings while surrounded by his top officials. Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were all shown taking part.
But U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was nowhere to be found in the images.
It seems unlikely that Gabbard's absence from the situation room photo release is a coincidence, considering the president has repeatedly tossed her under bus on the very issue of Iran the past week.
According to a New York Times report, Gabbard has been in trouble with Trump since the start of the month. Earlier in June, Gabbard posted a video on social media talking about a trip she took to Hiroshima, Japan and sharing a warning against war in an age when nuclear weapons threaten global annihilation.
“As we stand here today, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” she says in the video.
The clip continues, with Gabbard warning that "political elites and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tension between nuclear powers."
Trump reportedly had a problem with her comments. According to sources who spoke to the Times, Trump took Gabbard's video as a sign she was only using her time in his White House as a stepping stone. He reportedly told her if she wanted to run for president then she shouldn't be in his administration.
His issues with Gabbard — who according to CBS was among the officials in the Situation Room Saturday — became more obvious after Trump was forced to respond to testimony she gave in March in which she said Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons through its refinement efforts.
"She's wrong," Trump told reporters on Friday after he landed in New Jersey.
It wasn't the first time he dismissed her commentary either; Trump told another reporter on Monday during an Air Force One flight that "I don't care what she says" after he was asked about Gabbard's testimony.
During his Friday comments, Trump made clear any action the U.S. took would be under the pretense of stopping Iran from creating a nuclear weapon.
“It looks like I’m right about the material that they’ve gathered already. It’s a tremendous amount of material. And I think within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter of months, they were going to be able to have a nuclear weapon," Trump said. "We can’t let that happen.”
After the strike, Hegseth told reporters that Trump had looked at the intelligence he reportedly had received about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and acted.
"I would just simply say that the president's made it very clear he's looked at all of this, all of the intelligence, all the information, and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear Program is a threat," Hegseth told reporters on Sunday. "He looked at all of it, understood the nature of the threat, and took bold action."
On Friday — the same day Trump threw her under the bus — Gabbard broadly pointed to unspecific “intelligence” justify why she was flipping from her own testimony in March in order to back Trump’s Iran agenda.
On X, she claimed that the "dishonest media" was "intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division." She also insisted — despite saying Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons in March — that the U..S. had intelligence saying that Iran "can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly."
"President Trump has been clear that can't happen, and I agree," Gabbard wrote.
Unfortunately for Gabbard, it seems like she started playing Trump ball a little too late to get invited to the situation room on Saturday night.
