Tulsi Gabbard Declassifies Evidence That Was Not Classified Nor Evidence on Ukraine Biolabs

On June 12, eighteen days before her resignation took effect, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s office released a packet of slides she said revealed “evidence of a U.S. taxpayer-funded global biolab program.” The press release named names — Dr. Fauci, the Biden national security team — and accused them of lying about labs whose existence had been “knowingly withheld from the American people,” while branding those who pushed back as “foreign assets and traitors.”

These are explosive charges, and they are not supported by the documents released. This conduct from a Federal agency is so outlandish that it needs analysis.

The ODNI press release is here, and the four slides they released as “newly found evidence” can be downloaded here.

Remember, Gabbard’s office has used specific terms of the utmost importance:

• Evidence regarding the full existence and funding
• Knowingly withheld
• Intentionally covered up by powerful people falsely, claiming

These are bombastic terms, some of which are cognizable in a court of law under criminal statutes, some of which are merely dramatic sounding.

Also, we should probably back up before beginning to remember that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is an agency that does oversight over the other intelligence agencies. It makes sure that the other agencies have what they need to conduct their missions.

That is not a stylistic point. It is the entire reason ODNI exists. Congress created the office in 2004, through the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, in response to two catastrophic failures: the 9/11 attacks, where agencies hoarded intelligence and never connected the dots, and the 2002 Iraq WMD estimate, where analysis was bent to fit a conclusion the policymakers had already reached. Lawmakers did not respond by building a nineteenth spy agency. They built a coordinator and a referee to sit above the ones we already had — CIA, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, State’s own INR, the FBI, the military service intelligence arms. Those agencies collect. Those agencies analyze. ODNI’s job is to integrate their work, settle their disputes, and guarantee its objectivity. The referee is not supposed to grab the ball and take a shot. And that appears to be what’s going on—and in very sloppy fashion.

So before we even reach the contents of these slides, the form of this release should stop you cold.

When ODNI legitimately speaks — to the public, to Congress, to the President — it does so through coordinated products built to a standard: the Annual Threat Assessment, National Intelligence Estimates run through the National Intelligence Council, the President’s Daily Brief. Every one of those carries the machinery that separates intelligence from opinion. A stated confidence level. A described sourcing basis. The contributing agencies named. And any dissents printed right there in the text, so the reader can see where the community disagreed. That scaffolding is not bureaucratic decoration. It is the product of Intelligence Community Directive 203 — the analytic-standards rulebook ODNI itself is supposed to enforce, written after Iraq specifically to keep politics out of analysis: objectivity, independence from political consideration, the honest expression of uncertainty, assumptions kept visibly separate from judgments.

A Critical Prevalence of Weasel Words

This release from ODNI abuses language in a way that is, frankly, shocking. The use of terms is, by any measure, dishonest here.

“Evidence”

Whenever I see the word “evidence” attached to an intelligence product, I break out into hives. That’s a courtroom term — what a prosecutor enters into a record to prove a fact to a judge or jury. Intelligence agencies don’t produce evidence. They produce assessments: graded judgments, hedged with confidence language, about what an adversary is probably doing. The DNI sits atop that system in an oversight-and-synthesis role. When the nation’s top intelligence officer brands an analytic product “evidence,” she is borrowing the authority of a court for something that was never tested like one. There is no other party, no contrary evidence can be entered into the record, no arguments can be made based on same. It also conveys the potential for criminal prosecution, which is not something our intelligence agencies have legit remit to do, so this is disturbing.

“Declassified”

Look at the slides themselves. Three of the four are marked Unclassified right on their face — two as (U//…) and the marquee “Web of Connections” slide as plain (U), the lowest marking there is. In intelligence marking, the symbol before the slashes is the classification level, and U stands for Unclassified. Those same three slides say, in plain red type, “APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE” — not “declassified.”

Declassification means something was a secret, and now it’s not. But nothing in those three slides indicates any of it was ever a secret. Only the remaining slide — the Kharkiv analysis we’ll come to — carries a “DECLASSIFIED by DNI Gabbard” stamp, and it is the one page they redacted heavily. So if anything in this packet was ever genuinely classified, it is the part they blacked out, not the part they are showing you.

Approving unclassified material for public release is a routine dissemination decision. It governs who you hand the paper to, not whether the paper holds secrets. You cannot declassify something that was never classified.

The use of this term is wholly deceptive.

“Intelligence”

So what is actually on the pages? It should be intelligence, information that was collected by sources and methods and then analyzed and processed for dissemination. But, it just turns out to be some internal PDF with spreadsheets and logos, which isn’t the same at all, or you’d have to classify every Microsoft Office document on earth.

Slide 3 is a construction spreadsheet — lab names, dollar figures, the contractor Black & Veatch, Ukrainian subcontractors, line items for “design and construction” and “lab equipment and furniture.” Slide 4 is a 2019 Black & Veatch country science plan with a collaborator chart full of logos: USDA, CDC, WHO, the FAO. This is the public paperwork of the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program — the Nunn-Lugar program — which since the 1990s has paid to secure Soviet-legacy pathogens so they didn’t leak onto the black market after the USSR collapsed. Black & Veatch has held the Ukraine contract since 2008. The Pentagon published a fact sheet on the whole arrangement in March 2022. None of it was hidden. You could read about it on a contractor’s website.

And the one slide that genuinely is an intelligence product cuts against her the hardest. Its own headline reads: “Veterinary Research Facility in Kharkiv Ongoing Target for Russian Misinformation.” It records that Russia accused the U.S. of bioweapons work in a “basement lab” — then notes the IC’s information indicates only that the building “has a basement level.” The analysts were debunking the Russian claim. Gabbard released their debunking as though it were a confession.

The press release also asserts “dangerous Gain-of-Function research.” No slide mentions gain-of-function. The listed projects are avian-flu diagnostics, African swine fever surveillance in wild boar, glanders monitoring — scary terms for the lay person, but it was detection work, the literal opposite of enhancing a pathogen.

And ODNI’s own published map mislabeled the location of Kyiv — a basic geolocation error Ukraine itself had to point out, on a finished product released to the world under the seal.

So: an analytic packet rebranded as “evidence.” Unclassified program paperwork rebranded as “declassified secrets.” A debunking of Russian propaganda rebranded as its vindication. A gain-of-function charge with nothing on the pages to support it. And a map that can’t find the capital of the country it’s about. Five tradecraft failures in four slides.

What is Cui Bono in Russian?

Who benefits from Gabbard’s eleventh-hour press release and PDF drop?

Not the American public, which already had access to every fact in those slides.

Not the analysts, whose careful “probably” and “almost certainly” got flattened into accusations they never made.

The single actor that gains from a sitting U.S. intelligence chief recasting a nonproliferation program as a covert bioweapons coverup is the government that has spent four years using exactly that story to justify invading Ukraine.

Within hours of the release, Russian outlets were running it as vindication. I am not linking to them here to deprive them of traffic, but Russia Today immediately grabbed it—a poor sign.

That’s the uncomfortable shape of it. Gabbard announced her resignation on May 22, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis — a real and sympathetic reason to step away. But on her way out the door, with no confirmation hearing left to face and no career consequence left to fear, she pressed the seal of the U.S. Intelligence Community onto a narrative that serves one foreign capital better than any other.

I won’t tell you what was in her head. What I can tell you is what’s on the pages — and what’s on the pages is not evidence, not classified, and not intelligence. It’s a Russian talking point wearing a borrowed badge. Ugly stuff.

The DNI’s one non-negotiable job is to protect the integrity of that badge. Her last act was to lend it out.

Sources: ODNI News Release No. 10-26 (June 12, 2026) and the released BIOLAB_Slides.pdf; DoD/DTRA fact sheets on the Cooperative Threat Reduction and Biological Threat Reduction Programs in Ukraine (March 2022); Black & Veatch BTRIC Ukraine project record; Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004; Intelligence Community Directive 203 (Analytic Standards); reporting on Gabbard’s May 22, 2026 resignation and on Ukraine’s response to the map error.

First published on Game Theory Today (Substack), June 13, 2026.