February 12, 2025 11:51 AM UTC

Why DNI Tulsi Gabbard Should Scare The Hell Out Of You

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• by: Colorado Pols

USA TODAY reports on the confirmation today of one of the most controversial of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii to serve as Director of National Intelligence–a position with access to the nation’s deepest secrets, control over American intelligence and covert operations around the world, and too many other vital functions that Vladimir Putin would love to have insider access to list in this space:

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence, adding the previously Democratic former Hawaii legislator to President Donald Trump’s inner circle after lawmakers raised pointed questions about her views on Russia, ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information.

Gabbard secured confirmation on a 52-48 vote. In her new role, Gabbard will oversee the 18 agencies within the U.S. Intelligence community, serving as the president’s top adviser on intelligence matters…

In 2022, Gabbard faced bipartisan condemnation for, to quote former Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, “parroting false Russian propaganda” regarding supposed bioweapons labs in Ukraine. In 2017, Gabbard traveled to Syria to help the Bashar al-Assad regime cover up the well-documented use of chemical weapons against civilians. Gabbard’s propensity for sympathy for the nation’s enemies and unequivocally bad actors like Assad makes her choice to lead the nation’s intelligence agencies not just questionable, but deeply troubling.

Despite this, only a single Republican voted against Gabbard’s nomination today:

Former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, the only Republican to vote against Gabbard’s confirmation, said in a statement that Gabbard was not ready for the job.

“In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust,” McConnell said. “The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment.” [Pols emphasis]

Colorado’s Sen. Michael Bennet elaborated further on the Senate floor:

In all these years over all these decades I never imagined we’d see somebody like Tulsi Gabbard approved on the floor of the United States Senate. Over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to support the interest of the United States, I hate to say it versus those of our adversaries time and time again, she picks our adversaries. She went to Syria and famously came back disputing our own intelligence agency’s findings about Assad’s gassing of his own people. To this day she hasn’t really taken that back.

But the thing that drives me the craziest, Mr. President is that she has been an apologist for what Vladimir Putin has done since the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. [Pols emphasis] The fact that she has the idiosyncratic views that she has, whether it’s Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or her writing a bill in the house to give Edward Snowden a pardon, that doesn’t qualify her to be the intel, the lead intelligence official for the United States of America. The American people need the president to get intelligence in a way that’s trustworthy, that is not shaded in one direction or
another and we all need to be able to trust each other in the delivery of that intelligence.

The confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard to lead the nation’s intelligence services raises national security questions that are not easily answered, least of all by flyover-state political bloggers with no security clearance. But a basic understanding of the whys and wherefores of American foreign policy make it clear that Gabbard’s sympathy for intractable adversaries and susceptibility to propaganda are, or at least should be, disqualifying for the position she will now hold.

What comes next is hard to predict, but it’s nightmare fuel for Mitch McConnell and Michael Bennet alike.