WASHINGTON — Critics worried about potential intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard’s praise for foreign adversaries likely have an insurmountable problem: a soon-to-be commander in chief who shares the same and even more extreme views.
The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, now a Republican whom President-elect Donald Trump has picked as his director of national intelligence, is under fire from both parties for her years of sympathetic comments about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his allies, including recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
“I’ve got a lot of questions about Ms. Gabbard. But that’s why we have an advise and consent process, that’s why we have these hearings,” Virginia’s Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and will become the ranking Democrat in the new Congress, told reporters last month. “Some of these claims of her ties to these adversaries like Russia and Syria, there’s got to be both knowledge and explanation of that.”
Trump’s own former national security adviser, John Bolton, said Gabbard’s appointment would please America’s foes. “Her judgment is nonexistent, and the idea that somehow she would be put in charge of this critical function should be giving our adversaries in Moscow and Beijing a lot of relief,” he told CNN.
Trump aides did not respond to HuffPost’s queries about Gabbard.
Since Republicans gained four Senate seats in last month’s election to take control of the chamber and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance is available to cast a potential tie-breaking vote, Trump can afford to lose no more than three GOP senators and still win Gabbard’s confirmation.
North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis said Gabbard should be prepared for a grilling. “There’s going to be tough questions that are asked, and there should be good answers for them,” he said. “That’s how this place works around here, the nominees just have to be prepared to answer questions to the satisfaction of the committee.”
South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham met with Gabbard on Monday and said afterward he still has more to hear from her.
“I don’t think she’s a Russian agent. She may have a different view of foreign policy than I do; that’s not disqualifying,” the Republican said, pointing out that Gabbard did not support the United States’ 2020 assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani. “I’m going to ask her some questions about her thinking — she objected to killing Soleimani.”
AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson
At issue are Gabbard’s statements over the past decade that have aligned with propaganda being pushed by Putin’s Russia. In 2015, after Putin began bombing hospitals in Syria to help Assad put down a rebellion against his autocratic rule, Gabbard equated those fighting Assad with the terrorists who took down the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did,” she wrote in a social media post.
That same year, in a visit to the Syrian border in her role as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, she questioned three young girls who suffered severe burns in one of those air raids, asking how they knew it was Assad or Russia that had bombed them, and not Islamic State terrorists — even though ISIS never had any airplanes.
Two years later, she visited Assad personally, even as the United States government continued to condemn him for using chemical weapons on his own citizens. “Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said, amplifying a Russian claim that the U.S. had instigated the uprising against Assad.
More recently, she has questioned U.S. support for Ukraine’s efforts to repel the invasion Putin launched to take over his neighbor. In a video she posted to social media in 2022, she repeated the conspiracy theory being advanced by Russia that the United States was secretly funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
Adam Schiff, the former House intelligence chair and soon-to-be Democratic senator from California, posted a statement soon after Trump announced Gabbard’s appointment: “Tulsi Gabbard combines a lack of experience with poor judgment, not a good combination in someone who would lead our intelligence agencies. If our allies don’t believe she can be trusted with intelligence, they will stop sharing. And the American people will be less safe.”
Yet while Gabbard’s statements and views are alarming a bipartisan array of intelligence experts, they are in line with those of Trump, who has been at odds with American intelligence agencies since they concluded in 2016 that Russia had helped him win the presidency that year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Trump famously declared, in a summit he staged with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, that he believed Putin over his own intelligence agencies on the matter of the 2016 election. He soon afterward began trying to prove a related conspiracy theory, also disseminated by Russia, that it was Ukraine that had tried to help Clinton win in 2016. Trump’s efforts along those lines ultimately led to his first impeachment when he tried to extort Ukraine’s leader into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden, the Democrat Trump most feared as a 2020 opponent.
When Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Trump called him a “genius” for doing so, even as the United States and its NATO allies rallied behind Ukraine.
In any event, if Trump’s transition team is worried about Gabbard’s history of repeating Russian conspiracy theories, it shows no sign of it. On Monday, it released a letter signed by veterans who support Gabbard.
Democracy In The Balance
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Among the signatories: Michael Flynn, a hero of the pro-Trump QAnon cult, and Jack Posobiec, a right-wing agitator best known for pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was actually a headquarters for satanic child murder.