Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard addresses national convention.
Addressing the 2025 American Legion National Convention in Tampa, Fla., the head of the U.S. intelligence community urged those in the organization to continue their service to help the nation overcome its challenge.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, herself a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve with a combat tour in Iraq, delivered her remarks to an almost full house in the Tampa Convention Center.
“We face many challenges and threats across this country. These are challenges and issues that affect us all,” Gabbard said. “Not just one party or another party, or one group or another group. We can overcome these challenges. We can face these threats when we stand together as one.
“And there are not better leaders and examples of that bond than you. Those who have worn the cloth of this country. Those who have borne the battle. It’s both our opportunity, our challenge and our responsibility to carry that oath that every one of us took, that we swore when we enlisted in the military, to continue that mission for as long as we live.”
Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021, is the highest-ranking Pacific-Islander American in the history of the U.S. government. She told Legionnaires her agency has a clear focus.
“We are tasked with a core national security mission,” she said. “Finding the truth and telling the truth, and making sure that the intelligence the president is getting – for him to be able to make some of the most critical decisions about our nation’s security – is accurate, unbiased, not politicized and relevant to the task at hand.”
And she said that when possible, President Trump doesn’t want the result of that intelligence to lead to military action.
“He wants his legacy as president to be one of a peacemaker,” Gabbard said. “He wants to be the president to make sure that our brothers and sisters in uniform are no longer sent to fight in stupid wars that do not serve the interests of the American people and our nation’s security. And in wars and conflicts in different parts of the world where we don’t have U.S. troops serving, he has still already made historic progress, negotiating peace deals sometimes between countries that have been at war or in conflict with each other for decades.
“President Trump understands what our military is for. The sacrifices that not only our servicemen and women make, but the sacrifices that their families make alongside them. He understands and applies through his policies what it means to put the American people’s interests first and foremost.”
- Convention