Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to oversee US spy agencies, faces grilling
Ms Gabbard and her nomination have been criticised over her past comments about Russia.
Tulsi Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, has defended her past controversial views and told a confirmation hearing that big changes are needed to address years of failures of America’s intelligence service.
Ms Gabbard lashed out at former intelligence leaders and said that too often, intelligence provided to policy makers has been false or politicised, leading to wars, foreign policy failures and the weaponisation of espionage.
“The bottom line is this must end. President Trump’s reelection is a clear mandate from the American people to break this cycle of failure and the weaponisation and politicisation of the intelligence community,” Ms Gabbard said at the start of her hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Ms Gabbard promised to be objective and “leave her personal views at the door”. She noted her military service and said she would bring the same sense of duty and responsibility to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Ms Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, is a lieutenant colonel in the National Guard who deployed twice to the Middle East and ran for president in 2020.
She has no formal intelligence experience, however, and has never run a government agency or department.
It is Ms Gabbard’s comments, however, that have posed the biggest challenge to her confirmation.
Ms Gabbard has repeatedly echoed Russian propaganda used to justify the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine and criticised Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as a corrupt autocrat.
She has been accused of spreading Russian disinformation by Republican politicians and has even won praise in Russian state-controlled media.
A 2017 visit with ex-Syrian president Bashar Assad is another point of contention. Mr Assad was recently deposed as his country’s leader following a brutal civil war in which he was accused of using chemical weapons.
Following her visit, Ms Gabbard faced criticism that she was legitimising a dictator and then more questions when she said she was sceptical that Mr Assad had used chemical weapons.
As a politician, Ms Gabbard sponsored legislation that would have repealed a key surveillance program known as Section 702, which allows authorities to collect the communications of suspected terrorists overseas.
Ms Gabbard said the programme could be violating the rights of Americans whose communications are swept up inadvertently, but national security officials say the programme has saved lives.
She now says she supports the programme, noting new safeguards designed to protect Americans’ privacy.
While politicians from both parties have raised concerns about Ms Gabbard’s nomination, Republicans have increasingly come to support her.
Given thin Republican margins in the Senate, she will need almost all GOP senators to vote yes in order to win confirmation.
