Dennis Blair, the US Director of National Intelligence, has announced his resignation after frequent clashes with White House officials.

His resignation came as he was put under pressure from the White House, ending a tumultuous 16-month tenure marked by intelligence failures and spy agency turf wars.

In a message Thursday to his work force, Blair said his last day would be May 28.

“It is with deep regret that I informed the president today that I will step down as director of national intelligence,” Blair said.

The administration has been interviewing candidates for the job for several weeks now. The likely candidate to replace Mr. Blair is James R. Clapper Jar a retired Air Force lieutenant general and the Pentagon’s top intelligence official, the New York Times reported.

In addition to Clapper, other likely candidates to replace Blair include John Hamre, undersecretary of defense from 1993 to 1997; Chuck Hagel, a former senator who co-chairs Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board; Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the September 11 Commission, Reuters reported.

In his 16-month tenure as the DNI, Blair had angered the White House several times.

He was widely criticized in the case of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Abdulmuttalab, in which the White House laid particular blame on the National Counterterrorism Center, an agency supervised by Mr. Blair.

A recent Senate report on this plot was also particularly critical of the NCTC’s failures to piece together the information that could have prevented Abdulmuttalab, a young Nigerian man who nearly detonated a bomb on a trans-Atlantic flight on Dec. 25, from boarding the plane.

Dennis Blair is the first high-ranking member of the Obama national security team to leave.