President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, former Democratic lawmaker Tulsi Gabbard, has been accused of amplifying Russian propaganda and would come to the job having never worked in the intelligence world or served on a congressional intelligence committee.
Gabbard, who served in the Hawaii Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq with a medical unit, has long criticized U.S. foreign policy as imperial and heavy-handed. She also has sharply criticized Trump in the past over his approach to the Middle East during his first presidential term, portraying him as dangerous.
As director of national intelligence, a position created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies with a budget of about $70 billion and serve as the principal adviser to the president on intelligence matters. She would first need to be confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans will hold the majority starting in January.
In her public statements, Gabbard has often been at odds with the U.S. intelligence community’s assessments. If she is confirmed, her tenure would most likely be marked by clashes with government analysts who see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government as the primary purveyor of disinformation designed to sow divisions in the U.S.
Outraged lawmakers accused Gabbard two years ago of echoing Russian propaganda after Gabbard posted a video on social media asserting “the undeniable fact” of purported bio labs funded by the U.S. across Ukraine. She did not specify, as Russian disinformation had, that they were biological weapons labs.
Ukraine’s government, the U.S. government, news organizations and independent researchers have all said there is no evidence for the claim, which originated from Moscow.
Then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Gabbard had embraced “actual Russian propaganda” and called it “traitorous.” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Gabbard was “parroting fake Russian propaganda.”
Gabbard, who sent a cease-and-desist letter to Romney over his remarks, denied repeating Russian propaganda and sought to clarify her social media post by saying in a separate post that “‘Biolabs’, ‘bioweapons labs’, and ‘bioweapons’ are 3 very different things. But because these phrases are so similar, there is sometimes miscommunication and misunderstanding when discussing them. I recently experienced this myself.”
She also argued that her critics were trying to “censor” her questioning of Washington’s establishment.
“When powerful, influential people make baseless accusations of treason, a crime punishable by death, in order to intimidate, silence and censor those who speak the truth, it has a chilling effect on our democracy,” she said.
The U.S. has supported civilian Ukrainian biological research labs to safeguard public health, not weapons labs. Russia has repeatedly spread the falsehood that Washington has bankrolled biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.
Gabbard also criticized the Biden administration for requiring U.S. service members to get vaccinated against Covid.
During her 2020 presidential bid, Russian state propaganda often portrayed Gabbard favorably while it denigrated the other Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, according to research from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank.
Less than one month into her presidential campaign, there were at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government — all of which celebrated her candidacy.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Gabbard said the war could have been prevented had the U.S. and the West recognized Moscow’s concerns about Ukraine’s possibly joining the NATO alliance.
But a potential colleague in the second Trump administration, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who is Trump’s pick to be secretary of state, disagreed with Gabbard at the time.
“A pledge that #Ukraine would never join NATO was not Putin’s only demand,” Rubio said on X. “As recently as last week he once again demanded NATO leave every country that joined after 1997 including Bulgaria, Romania & 12 others.”
Conspiracy theories about a chemical attack
In 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical” that Syria was behind a chemical weapons attack that killed dozens of people in Syria.
But U.S. intelligence agencies, the United Nations and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons all concluded Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was behind the attack.
Shortly after the attack, Russia launched a disinformation campaign to try to deny Syria’s responsibility and promoted fabricated narratives, U.S. officials say.
Gabbard faced criticism in 2015 from members of her own party when she called on the Obama administration to stop supporting Syria’s opposition movement against Assad’s authoritarian rule.
“I don’t think Assad should be removed,” she said at the time, saying Islamist extremist groups would take over if he were toppled.
She made an unannounced trip to Syria in 2017 to meet Assad, even though the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Damascus and after human rights groups had accused him of committing atrocities to stay in power. The trip sparked an outcry from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
She defended the trip. “When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” Gabbard told CNN.
On Wednesday, Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., a former CIA officer, said she was “appalled” by Trump’s selection of Gabbard.
“Not only is she ill-prepared and unqualified, but she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies up to dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin,” Spanberger wrote on X. “As a Member of the House Intelligence Committee, I am deeply concerned about what this nomination portends for our national security. My Republican colleagues with a backbone should speak out.”
During her career in the House from 2013 to 2021 and as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Gabbard often staked out progressive, dovish positions, questioning America’s military interventions and foreign policy in the Middle East. In 2016, she endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Democratic presidential contest and withdrew from her position on the Democratic National Committee.
Leniency for Assange and Snowden
In a Democratic presidential primary debate in 2020, Gabbard called for “an end to this ongoing Bush-Clinton-Trump foreign policy doctrine of regime change wars, overthrowing dictators in other countries, needlessly sending my brothers and sisters in uniform into harm’s way to fight in wars that actually undermine our national security and have cost us thousands of American lives.”
In 2022, Gabbard announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, and last month she said she was joining the Republican Party.
She has called for leniency toward Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who are both accused of leaking troves of classified U.S. information that intelligence officials at the time described as causing potentially grave damage to America’s national security and U.S. allies.
Trump’s actions as president during his first term came in for harsh criticism from Gabbard, who slammed his plan for a wall on the southern border, his policies on Iran and his support for Saudi Arabia in its war with Houthi rebels.
In 2018, she referred to Trump as “Saudi Arabia’s b—-” in a social media post after Trump said the U.S. stood strongly behind Saudi Arabia and claimed that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi might never be known. Trump’s statement defied the conclusions of the CIA, which found that the crown prince authorized Khashoggi’s murder.
Despite her criticism of Trump, Gabbard voted “present” on both articles of impeachment against him in 2019 over allegations he pressed Ukraine to dig up damaging information about Biden, his political rival.
In 2020, Gabbard condemned Trump over his decision to order a U.S. drone strike against Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, calling it a dangerous escalation and unconstitutional as Congress had not approved the action.
“It’s the significance of the action that Trump took last night, violating the Constitution, taking military action, taking out a top military commander of another country without any type of congressional authorization or declaration of war,” Gabbard said at the time.
She also criticized Trump for his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, which imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of U.S. economic sanctions.
Gabbard, a native of Hawaii, began her political career at a young age. She won election to the state House of Representatives at the age of 21, becoming the youngest person elected to office in the state’s history.
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