Trump administration officials and one Capitol Hill aide confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Gabbard planned to brief panel members at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon but had to attend meetings at the White House instead.
Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the briefing will be rescheduled as soon as the committee provides possible dates, as “there was a bipartisan agreement to do so given schedules on the Senate side.”
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Senate Intelligence Committee, not Gabbard, first requested the rescheduling, saying that “at least seven senators wouldn’t have been in attendance because they were leaving D.C. before or during.”
The Senate held its last vote of the week on Wednesday afternoon as Washington takes off for the Thursday Juneteenth holiday.
Gabbard was the subject of multiple negative headlines on Tuesday as Trump signaled the United States’s possible entry into the conflict between Israel and Iran. During his abrupt trip back to Washington early Tuesday morning, Trump shot down a question regarding Gabbard’s March testimony on the timeline for Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump testily shot back after being asked about Gabbard saying that “Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.”
“I think that they’re very close to having one,” Trump continued.
Later in the day, Fox News reported that Gabbard was not invited to meetings at Camp David following Israel’s first targeted strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities, though Trump administration officials maintain that Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, was known to have been on duty that weekend.
On Tuesday night, more reports surfaced that Trump was outraged by a video Gabbard posted on June 10 in which she said the “political elite and warmongers” are pushing the world toward “nuclear annihilation.”
White House officials downplayed any apparent space between Gabbard and Trump. A senior aide told the Washington Examiner that Gabbard has been a constant presence on campus recently, sitting in on meetings with Trump in and outside the Situation Room and working out of the White House rather than ODNI’s offices in McLean, Virginia.
One White House official said Tuesday’s coverage of Gabbard’s March testimony “frankly sucks.”
“She said they’re not building [a nuclear weapon], but then she goes on to say they’re at unprecedented levels of enriched uranium,” the aide said. “So I feel bad for her, but she has been in the Situation Room every single meeting in the past week.”
Upon his Tuesday return to the White House, Trump suggested the U.S. could take significant military action against Iran. In a series of social media posts, he said “we” took control of Iranian airspace, that the U.S. knows the secure location of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and could easily “kill” him if necessary, and called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”
However, U.S. warplanes did not join Israel in striking Iranian targets Tuesday night, and Trump suggested Wednesday morning that he might still consider negotiating a diplomatic solution with Tehran.
“You don’t seriously think I’m going to answer that question,” Trump responded when asked when the U.S. might enter the fray. “You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. You don’t know. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do. I can tell you this — that Iran’s got a lot of trouble and they want to negotiate.”
TRUMP: ‘NOBODY KNOWS WHAT I’M GOING TO DO’ ON IRAN
Trump additionally said Iranian government officials reached out to him and suggested they would travel to the White House to resume negotiations on a new nuclear deal.
“Why didn’t you negotiate with me before all this death and destruction? Why didn’t you negotiate? I said to people, ‘Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine. You would have had a country.’ It’s very sad to watch this,” Trump continued, adding that it isn’t “too late” to stop the fighting.
