President Trump is reportedly relying on a small group of lower-profile aides as he weighs military intervention in the Middle East
President Donald Trump has excluded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from high-level discussions on the ongoing Iran-Israel conflict, NBC News and The Washington Post have reported, citing senior administration officials.
Gabbard’s sidelining, according to NBC, reportedly stems from her public and internal pushback against the official US and Israeli narrative that Tehran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Meanwhile, Hegseth has also been edged out of operational discussions, with The Washington Post reporting that two four-star generals overseeing the deployment of additional US military assets in the Middle East have taken the lead.
Trump is now said to be relying on a smaller, more experienced ‘Tier One’ advisory group – comprising Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Joint Chiefs Vice Chair General Dan Caine – which is now reportedly shaping US policy on Iran, rather than the traditional civilian defense and intelligence leadership.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has denied the reports, insisting that Hegseth is “speaking with the President multiple times a day each day and has been with the President in the Situation Room this week.” Gabbard also told reporters that she and the president were “on the same page.”
Israel launched a large-scale bombing campaign against Iran last week, claiming Tehran was close to producing a nuclear weapon. Trump will decide whether to join the Israeli campaign “within the next two weeks,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday.
However, US intelligence still assesses that Iran, while it has stockpiled enriched uranium, has not taken concrete steps toward developing nuclear weapons, according to Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. This view has remained unchanged since March, when Gabbard told Congress that the US intelligence community “does not believe Iran is building a nuclear weapon.”
Trump contradicted this assessment on Tuesday, stating that Iran was “weeks away” from obtaining a bomb and dismissing Gabbard’s remarks by saying, “I don’t care what she said.”
A former Democratic congresswoman and Iraq War veteran, Gabbard has long been critical of the US intelligence community she now oversees, and she was known for supporting NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Her release of a video warning about the horrors of nuclear war following a visit to Hiroshima reportedly annoyed Trump’s advisers. Her absence from a key June 8 meeting at Camp David on Iran policy has fueled speculation about her diminished influence, with multiple sources telling NBC that she has not participated in recent strategic discussions.
