The White House has set the record straight on Tulsi Gabbard’s presence in the Situation Room as President Trump ordered strikes on Iran.
New photos released by the White House’s Rapid Response Team on Sunday showed that Gabbard was one of many officials who sat in the Situation Room as the U.S. struck three Iranian nuclear sites on Saturday night.
“President Trump’s intelligence team in the White House Situation Room (June 21, 2025),” the White House captioned the photo, tagging Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was seated next to her.
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The photo was released following a night of rampant speculation over Gabbard’s involvement in the unprecedented attack.
Reports were quick to point out that Gabbard was noticeably absent from a series of photos from the Situation Room released by the White House shortly after the strike.
The photos showed Trump donning a MAGA hat as he was surrounded by Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, State Secretary Marco Rubio, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine.
White House sources confirmed to CBS News, Fox News, and Semafor that Gabbard was in the Situation Room along with multiple other officials who were not in the photos, including Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.
Speculation surrounding Gabbard’s involvement heightened after Trump dismissed her earlier Congressional testimony that countered the administration’s rationale for bombing Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites.
“The intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” Gabbard said in March.
Her comments resurfaced this month after Trump repeatedly insisted that “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed—right after his own strike—that the Iranian nuclear program posed an existential threat to Israel.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said of Gabbard’s comments last week. “I think they were very close to having them.”
Trump doubled down on Friday, telling reporters that Gabbard and his intelligence community were “wrong” about the issue.
Gabbard quickly fell in line.
“The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division,” she wrote on X. “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.”
But it wasn’t just her comments in March that resurfaced as tensions escalated over the Israel-Iran conflict. X users also dug up a post made by Gabbard in January 2020, when she was a Hawaii lawmaker gunning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“To all who voted for Trump bc of his antiwar rhetoric, it’s time to realize he lied to u,” she wrote. “Stand with me against Trump’s Iran War!”
