President Trump made clear this week that Tulsi Gabbard was back in his good graces.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Trump excoriated Ms. Gabbard, one of his top intelligence officials, over a video she filmed during a trip to Asia that he saw as self-promotional, and she was left out of some meetings in the lead-up to the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, according to two people with knowledge of what happened.
But on Tuesday, at a White House event with congressional Republicans that Ms. Gabbard attended, he declared: “She’s, like, hotter than everybody. She’s the hottest one in the room right now.”
What changed? Last week, Ms. Gabbard launched a diversionary attack that relieved pressure on Mr. Trump from the never-ending Epstein file crisis, releasing documents, she claimed, that proved Obama administration officials engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy.”
Yet Ms. Gabbard’s effort to repair her standing with the president has placed the already embattled Attorney General Pam Bondi in a nearly untenable position.
Ms. Bondi was given little warning the director of national intelligence was about to demand she investigate one of Mr. Trump’s most longstanding grievances: claims without evidence that the Obama administration overstated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in order to undermine him.
Ms. Bondi, fresh off a nasty fight with a top F.B.I. official over who was responsible for the political mess around the Epstein case, felt blindsided and annoyed, according to several people familiar with her thinking. They said that in reality, however, Ms. Gabbard was acting as little more than a proxy for a president demanding action on his vengeance agenda.
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