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If Thursday’s confirmation hearing is anything to go by, Tulsi Gabbard may well become President Trump’s first Cabinet nominee to get voted down by the Senate.
It was a disastrous audition for the post of director of national intelligence, as all of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s eight Democrats and a few of its nine Republicans raised serious questions about her judgment, her qualifications, and her ability to develop trust with the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies that she would oversee and with their counterparts in allied nations.
From the get-go, Gabbard’s nomination to be the top U.S. intelligence official has struck many as the most startling in a string of startling nominations. Many of these nominees seem well suited to weaken the departments or agencies that they would head—or, to put it in terms that Donald Trump and his entourage have invoked on many occasions, the sort of people who would, deliberately or by dint of their incompetence, help dismantle the “deep state.”
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who turned MAGA enthusiast after a failed 2020 run for the presidency, has made waves in recent years for parroting Kremlin propaganda on the Russia–Ukraine war, for defending Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad (by disputing intelligence findings that he was behind specific chemical weapons attacks on his own people and by claiming that the rebel groups he bombed and strafed were all al-Qaida fighters), and for making various other bizarre claims.
When Trump announced her nomination, the anchors on Russia TV—the Kremlin-run news channel—greeted the news with glee, hailing Gabbard as “our girlfriend.”
Several senators noted all of these facts at Thursday’s hearing but focused still more intensely on other matters. Nearly all of them noted that she had once hailed Edward Snowden as a “brave whistleblower” who should be pardoned for all criminal offenses. Snowden was the National Security Agency contractor who stole 1.5 million highly classified documents, leaked some of them to reporters, then fled to Moscow, where he still lives as a Russian citizen.
Gabbard replied that she had only meant to highlight the “egregiously illegal and unconstitutional programs” that Snowden had exposed—specifically NSA programs that intercepted communications of U.S. citizens—and that his leaks had led to “serious reforms.”
A few senators quoted from a bipartisan House Intelligence Committee report calling Snowden’s actions “the largest, most damaging intelligence leak” in U.S. history and concluding that the vast majority of his stolen documents had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy. Rather, they revealed extensive details on intelligence “sources and methods,” doing great, lasting harm to U.S. security—and to U.S. armed forces if we went to war against Russia or China.
Gabbard acknowledged that she knew of the report’s conclusions, but she declined to answer when senators asked her five times if she viewed Snowden as a “traitor.” Nor would she grab on to a senator’s invitation to admit, at the very least, that Snowden’s actions had damaged U.S. security. Instead, she said she was focusing on “the future”—specifically, to open routes for whistleblowers to make complaints about illegal policies without having to do what Snowden did.
She was asked whether she thought professionals in the U.S. intelligence agencies—or those in the countries that share highly classified intelligence with us—would trust her, given her views on Snowden. She replied that she had received “letters” from intelligence officials who defended her nomination.
Senators of both parties also asked about her opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the U.S. to intercept communications of suspected terrorists or criminals abroad. The interceptions are sometimes done in ways that pick up calls involving Americans as well. Informed that 60 percent of a president’s intelligence comes from information gathered through Section 702, Gabbard said at the hearing that she has changed her mind on this issue as a result of reforms that were made to the law. She was asked which reforms changed her mind. She didn’t answer.
Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic vice chairman of the committee, said he didn’t “buy” her “confirmation conversion” on the issue anyway. He quoted her appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May 2024—one month after the reforms passed—saying that they “took an already bad problem and made it many, many times worse.”
Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet got into the hearing’s most forceful—and, as it turned out, damning—exchange with the nominee. He quoted Gabbard’s tweet, posted just hours after Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, noting that the war “could have been avoided if Biden had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s membership in NATO.” He also quoted her remark on a podcast not long after, saying that the United States and NATO were waging a “regime-change war against Russia … via their proxy in Ukraine.”
Bennet asked if she was aware that her comments were “in alignment with what Russians have said to justify” the invasion. She replied, “I don’t pay attention to Russian propaganda. My goal is to say the truth, regardless of whether you like it or not.”
This took even Bennet by surprise. “I’m shocked,” he said, “to hear you now saying you agree that Putin was justified in rolling over the peaceful border of Ukraine.”
He then turned to the committee’s Republican chairman, Sen. Tom Cotton, and said, “Can’t we do better than someone who doesn’t believe in 702, who can’t answer whether Edward Snowden was a traitor, who made excuses for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?”
Perhaps the second most damning moment came during questions by Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly. He started, as did the other senators, by thanking Gabbard for her service (she served in Iraq and Kuwait as a member of the Army National Guard and remains a lieutenant-colonel in the Reserves), then asked her how she would sift through all the intelligence and make conclusions. She replied that she would “build a strong team” of analysts around her.
With that, Kelly brought out the noose. As a member of Congress and as recently as this month, he noted, Gabbard cast doubt on the intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that Assad was culpable for two specific chemical weapons attacks on his own people. In fact, he went on, in 2017, then-President Trump declassified a vast trove of materials showing how the intel agencies reached that conclusion—yet Gabbard still doubted it. Why?
Gabbard replied that she feared Barack Obama—who was president at the time of the allegations—would use the intel as a “pretext” for sending “a half-million troops to do regime change” in Syria. And she relied on doubts raised in a study by MIT professor Ted Postol.
“Were you aware of Postol’s appearance on Russia TV?” Kelly asked. “Yes,” she replied. “Were you aware that Postol relied on a chemistry student who defended Assad’s regime?” he asked. “Not at the time,” she answered. “Did you attempt to weigh [Postol’s] claims against the intelligence community’s evidence?” he asked. “Yes,” she—remarkably—replied.
Kelly sighed. “So here’s my concern,” he said. At the start of the hearing, “you described a thoughtful approach to analyzing intelligence. But we just walked through how you came to Assad’s use of chemical weapons with a different approach. You started in a place of doubting the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community, then you sought out information that confirmed your view. You accepted the view of people who were sympathetic to Russia.” The intelligence agencies “don’t get it right 100 percent of the time, but when you were skeptical of the IC, you would not apply the same skepticism to people who were sympathetic with Assad.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in 2005 as a result of findings that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks four years earlier could have been halted if the U.S. intelligence agencies hadn’t worked in isolation from one another. The idea was that the DNI would have access to all intelligence and would coordinate the activities and reports of the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. He or she would also serve as the president’s chief intelligence adviser, the official who writes and serves up the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
This was one of the very few confirmation hearings this month where members of both parties expressed serious reservations about one of Trump’s nominees. If a flicker of sense still shines above a handful of seats on the Republican side of the Senate, Thursday’s hearing should mark the end of Tulsi Gabbard.
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