May 15: Gabbard Wrests Control of the Daily Brief

Israel's response to Trump turning his back; Republicans advance Trump's budget; Newsom scales back migrants' health coverage

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The Big Story

The New York Times published an article Wednesday documenting Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s effort to consolidate control of the president’s Daily Brief by moving it from the CIA headquarters to her own office complex. The brief, a “summary of intelligence and analysis of global hot spots and national security threats,” is presented to the president by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), but CIA officers write much of the analysis and produce the document. Gabbard’s office announced the move in a memo published Tuesday.

As with almost everything that happens in this administration, the motives from all sides are hard to decipher. It’s clear that Gabbard is concerned about power—President Donald Trump has wondered aloud about the point of the ODNI—and is looking for ways to gain more of it, or at least protect what she has. Maggie Haberman and Julian E. Barnes write:

President Trump has openly mused to aides over time about whether the office she leads—which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to improve interagency coordination—should continue to exist, according to two people with knowledge of his remarks.

In the wake of Russiagate and other alleged efforts to undermine President Trump—not to mention two assassination attempts, the details of which remain suspiciously cryptic almost a year later—it might make sense to wrest some power from the CIA.

Still, the CIA is currently run by two Trump loyalists who have served the president as honorably as anyone else who has worked in either of his administrations. In 2016, while still serving Texas as a congressman, current CIA Director John Ratcliffe brutally questioned former FBI Director James Comey about the bureau’s decision not to charge Hillary Clinton in the email controversy (per Fox News). Ratcliffe later proved to be a star while serving on Trump’s impeachment team in 2020. And CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis was the lawyer who discovered that the Obama administration had been spying on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (per The New York Times).

This is not the CIA of the “deep state” that Trump has so often railed against; it’s now the CIA of MAGA. Which is why, while Gabbard’s move might seem in line with the “anti-CIA” and anti-deep state thinking of some around Trump, what she’s actually doing is targeting two of her boss’ most trusted longtime consiglieres—people who backed him long before she did (hell, long before she was even a Republican.) “It’s another case of MAGA schemers going against the real MAGA loyalists,” one source told The Scroll.

There are many reasons why Gabbard might feel insecure in her role at the ODNI. For one, the DNI is largely a ceremonial position. Ratcliffe served as ODNI director at the end of Trump’s first term, and some sources say he could have taken that position again in the second administration if he had wanted. Instead, he opted for the CIA. Why?

The ODNI was established after 9/11 as a means of addressing the CIA’s intelligence failures on the day of the World Trade Center attacks. Officially, it is meant to “improve intelligence coordination and integration within the entire Intelligence Community,” but had those planes not hit the towers, it would not exist. 9/11 turned the Intelligence Community into a boondoggle, bringing more money and power to those agencies than ever, ultimately leading to a bloated and wasteful intelligence sector. Given Trump’s desire to curb government waste, it makes perfect sense that he’d want to eliminate the agency created to oversee the CIA in the wake of an intelligence failure from decades ago. Now, our source says, the ODNI has become nothing more than an additional layer of imprudent intelligence bureaucracy. Gabbard, who just weeks ago refused to rule out the possibility of running for president in 2028 while speaking for an interview with Megyn Kelly, now finds herself leading an agency that the current president wants to dismantle.

There’s also a possibility that Trump is retaliating for a recent staffing kerfuffle. You might recall that Trump blocked a senior fellow at the Koch Brothers-funded Defense Priorities, Daniel Davis, from serving as Gabbard’s deputy director at the ODNI in March. Nevertheless, William P. Ruger, a self-styled foreign policy “realist” who served as the vice president of the Charles Koch Institute and openly opposed Trump’s tariff policies in a series of since-deleted tweets in 2019 (per The Washington Free Beacon), got the job instead in April. Our source believes that Trump, seeking to avoid the perception of high turnover and chaos that plagued his first term, is instead choosing to punish those who welcome schemers into his administration through more covert actions, like diminishing the power of the ODNI.

Gabbard’s power as ODNI director has always been on shaky ground. Some even speculate that she may not have been given her position, as many believed, as a quid pro quo for her 2024 endorsement of the president, but rather as a favor to donor Omeed Malik. Malik told the Washington Reporter that he was Gabbard’s biggest donor during her 2019 presidential run in the Democratic primaries. Attempting to take full control of the president’s Daily Brief would be a smart way for her to maintain any position in the administration at all.

—Adam Lehrer

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The Rest

→On Monday, The Scroll asked: “Will Trump knife Israel?” and documented the myriad ways in which President Trump has appeared to abandon the successful foreign policy of his first term. Yesterday, Reuters published an article reporting on how Israeli officials have responded to Trump’s focus on cutting deals across the Middle East and in Qatar (which Israel has long accused of helping Hamas), relaxing of sanctions on Syria, negotiating with Hamas to free Edan Alexander from captivity, and other decisions that have created the impression that Trump might be turning his back on the Jewish state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the article says, has faced widespread public perception that Israel, under international pressure over the war in Gaza, has been left behind by its best ally. “The United States is a sovereign country,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman said to Reuters after being asked if there was concern that Israel had been sidelined over the release of Alexander in particular. “Israel’s ‘intimate dialogue’ with the United States would be conducted directly and not through the media.”

While some Israeli officials have been dispatched to Doha to join cease-fire talks coordinated by Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, Netanyahu has signaled that Israel will continue its intensified war campaign in Gaza.

To read the full article, click below
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/bypassed-by-trump-israel-dismayed-silent-2025-05-14/

→Congressional Republicans advanced elements of President Trump’s budget package on Wednesday, with key committees approving tax cuts that some analysts warn could add to the U.S. debt, Reuters reports. With Democrats boycotting the package’s spending cuts on health care, Republicans relied on their majorities in the tax-writing House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce panel overseeing Medicaid and other health care programs to advance the controversial package of bills. Republicans managed to defeat all of the Democrats’ proposed amendments to the spending bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson says that Congress hopes to pass the bill before Memorial Day.

→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1, as part of Tablet’s shift to becoming a premium, subscription-based product and the preferred in-flight reading of Qatari Air Force One.

Scroll readers who subscribe before June 1 will receive one free gift subscription. And if you subscribe this week you can use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

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→California Gov. Gavin Newsom called for his state to scale back health coverage for illegal immigrants Wednesday, in an effort to balance the ballooning state budget—relinquishing his stated desire to deliver “universal health care for all” and giving Republicans the immense satisfaction of a “we told you so,” according to The New York Times. The announcement came two days after the Trump administration targeted a separate state program for immigrants and signaled it would continue to scrutinize benefits for illegals. Newsom proposed freezing the enrollment of illegal immigrants in the state’s version of Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, as of January. People who remain in the program will from that point be charged $100 a month and long-term care and dental benefits for undocumented adults and other noncitizens will be eliminated.

→The Department of Health and Human Services launched a civil rights investigation into allegations that Jewish students at Northwestern University have faced discrimination, according to The Washington Free Beacon. On Tuesday, the HHS’s Office for Civil Rights announced that it will probe whether Northwestern "complied with its obligations under Title VI not to discriminate against Jewish students, such that it denied them an educational opportunity or benefit." While the announcement didn’t name Northwestern directly, referring to it instead as a “prestigious Midwest university,” a spokesman from the school confirmed that the institution was being investigated. In March, the school released a progress report documenting what it holds are policies better ensuring Jewish students aren’t faced with discrimination at the school, including “mandatory antisemitism training” and enforcing all violations of its discrimination policy appropriately, whatever that all means.

→Video of the Day

No one appreciates a good Qatari sword dance ceremony quite as much as President Trump does.

→Minnesota Rep. Shri Thanedar, the Indian American politician whom you likely never heard of, has already pulled his Trump impeachment resolution after being humiliated on the national stage, according to the Washington Examiner. Filed on Tuesday and scheduled for a vote on Wednesday, Thanedar was forced to delay the proceedings so he could “rally the support of Republicans and Democrats.” That support never came, and even Democrats have lambasted Thanedar for his “unserious” approach, especially after the congressman equated his push for impeachment to historic civil rights movements such as the abolition of slavery and the right to vote for women at a press conference Wednesday. Democratic leadership isn’t supportive of Thanedar’s approach, with Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., saying Wednesday that there are more important issues to focus on than another Trump impeachment. Thanedar admitted yesterday that members of his own party have taken to agreeing with President Trump that he is a “lunatic.” Given how quickly the Congressman’s effort was shut down, one could assume that the Democrats are perhaps reconsidering their approach to Trump during his first administration, when they impeached him twice.

→Have you tried the new Ben & Jerry’s flavors Gooey Gaza Goop, Martyrmelon, or Global Intifudge?

Here is Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen scaring the crap out of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. yesterday at a Senate Health Committee. To be fair, the Secretary of Health has reason not to like surprise outbursts in political settings. We all scream for ice scream, indeed.

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→REMINDER: The Scroll is leaving Substack and moving behind a paywall on June 1, as part of Tablet’s shift to becoming a premium, subscription-based product and the preferred in-flight reading of Qatari Air Force One.

Scroll readers who subscribe before June 1 will receive one free gift subscription. And if you subscribe this week you can use the discount code CHAITABLET for 18% off.

Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/subscribetablet