WASHINGTON — Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declined to say if Iran’s nuclear program presented an “imminent threat,” deflecting questions from lawmakers about whether U.S. intelligence backed up White House statements on the rationale for starting the war.

Gabbard’s congressional testimony Wednesday at an annual hearing on worldwide threats came a day after a top deputy, Joe Kent, resigned in protest over the Iran war, saying that the Tehran regime posed no imminent threat and the joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign was unnecessary.

Kent and Gabbard, both military veterans, had found political common ground over their opposition to foreign military interventions and “regime change” wars like Iraq and Afghanistan. Gabbard has not publicly endorsed the decision to go to war, staying mostly silent on the U.S.-Israeli air campaign that began on Feb. 28.

Her appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee took place as the war entered its third week, with no clear end in sight. The White House has offered shifting rationales for launching the offensive, and Iran has retaliated, essentially shutting down a critical passageway for commercial shipping.

The conflict has triggered a spike in gas prices, creating political problems for President Donald Trump at home ahead of the congressional midterm elections in November.

Gabbard’s reluctance to offer a full-throated endorsement of the president’s decision to wage war on Iran, unlike other Cabinet officials, raised fresh questions about her standing in the administration.

In her opening statement, Gabbard omitted language included in her written remarks saying that Iran had not tried to rebuild its uranium enrichment capability after U.S. air strikes in June.

“Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was obliterated. There has been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” her prepared remarks read, according to her written statement posted on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s website.

That assessment appeared to contradict Trump, who has has said Iran was working to rebuild its nuclear program.

Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, asked Gabbard why she had omitted the paragraph.

She replied: “I recognized that the time was running long, and I skipped through some of the portions of my oral delivered remarks.”

Her answers remained neutral throughout the hearing on Wednesday.

When pressed by Sen. Jon Ossoff, D.-Ga., on the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program, Gabbard echoed an online statement she posted Tuesday after Kent’s resignation, saying that only the commander in chief could decide what represented an urgent threat to the country.

“False,” Ossoff replied. “You’re evading a question because a candid statement would contradict the White House.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe, though, weighed in when asked a similar question by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, saying he disagreed with Kent’s objections to the war.

“I think Iran has been a constant threat to the United States for an extended period of time, and posed an immediate threat at this time,” Ratcliffe said.

Democrats at the hearing also pressed Gabbard about what intelligence was conveyed to Trump about how Iran would react to a potential U.S. attack, saying the president has expressed surprise at Iran’s strikes on neighboring countries.

Gabbard and Ratcliffe said that before the U.S. launched air attacks on Iran, U.S. intelligence indicated that Iran would possibly launch strikes on energy sites in the Middle East region and try to close off the Strait of Hormuz.

A Ukrainian drone technology startup saw the most explosive U.S. stock market debut in the last year during its first day trading on Nasdaq. Shares in Swarmer, whose software enables single pilots to control hundreds of drones at once, soared over 700% before closing at $31 on Tuesday.

The company, based in Austin, Texas, but founded in Ukraine, has been used widely by the Ukrainian military since 2024. Erik Prince, the founder of the U.S. private military contractor Blackwater, joined Swarmer as non-executive chairman last month.

Experts say Swarmer is likely to be the first of many: a Ukrainian defense startup with an American face that leans on U.S. capital to scale production for both the Ukrainian and American militaries.

Ukrainian startups and American investors make a natural pairing. Four years of wartime innovation has made Ukraine a world leader in mass-producing cheap first-person-view (FPV) drones and the technology used in and around them.

In a letter to prospective shareholders, Prince noted that Swarmer’s value is rooted in the depth of operational data it has gathered from Ukraine’s battlefield.

“Swarmer’s platform has been deployed in Ukraine with more than 100,000 real-world missions in active combat environments, informing the software and machine-learning models that feed into it,” Prince wrote. “This cycle — deploy, observe, adapt and improve — creates a compounding advantage that cannot be replicated in laboratories or simulations.”

But Ukrainian companies have often lacked the financing needed to expand their operations. Stringent controls on exporting Ukrainian defense technology abroad have limited access to capital, leaving companies to produce at fractions of their total capacity. According to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, Ukraine’s defense industry reached a production capacity of $35 billion in 2025 but received only $6.1 billion in foreign funding.

Incorporating businesses in the U.S. and bringing in partners with ties to America’s defense industry could offer solutions. Last fall, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joined the board of the Ukrainian drone and missile manufacturer Fire Point. This week, a representative from Powerus, an American drone manufacturer backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., told CBS News that the company will pursue joint ventures with Ukrainian companies once Kyiv’s export restrictions allow it.

The Pentagon, for its part, has made clear that it is interested in Ukraine’s comparatively cheap drone technology to complement America’s more expensive arsenal. Last week, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine would be sending drone defense experts to the Middle East amid reports that American military bases were relying on expensive missile interceptors to take down cheaper Iranian drones. 

In February, the U.S. invited 25 drone manufacturers, including two Ukrainian companies, to compete on a course at Fort Benning, in Georgia, as part of the Pentagon’s “Drone Dominance” program. On March 7, Ukrainian company Sky Fall’s drones won the competition, setting it up to receive Pentagon contracts.

Prince is betting on investors seeing the same upside in Swarmer as attention to Ukraine’s battle-tested, cost-effective defense technology grows. 

“The Department of War has been asleep for dozens of years and allowed a very cartel-like defence industry to sell massively overpriced stuff,” he told Fox Business in an interview Tuesday. “I am excited to be a part of Swarmer because it is proven combat technology developed truly on the edge of battle.”