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TULSI GABBARD WOULD BE A SHOCK TO THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM  
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Jeremy Scahill
November 17, 2024
Drop Site
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_ Gabbard should be aggressively questioned about her use of “war
on terror” language and calls for a militarized war against an
ideology. But Democratic senators are likely to deploy a Cold War line
of interrogation on her stances on Russia and Syria. _

,

 

The elite bipartisan national security establishment in Washington,
D.C., is already in a panic about Donald Trump’s nomination of Tulsi
Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence officials
are suggesting
[[link removed]] they
will resign. Former CIA directors and other ex-senior intelligence
officials are warning she is a danger to the nation and the world.
“Cozying up to Putin as well as to Bashar al-Assad shows she doesn't
have the type of perspective needed for someone who is going to head
up these 18 intelligence agencies,” said Obama’s CIA director John
Brennan in an interview on MSNBC. “This appointment is sending
shockwaves not only in the United States but also around the globe. Is
this really someone Donald Trump is going to entrust with the care and
leadership of the intelligence community? An unserious pick for a
serious position.”

If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard
would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold
such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the
war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a
sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the
2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed
U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen,
which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple
occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,”
taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al
Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic
surveillance of Americans.

At the same time, Gabbard is not an antigen infiltrating the U.S.
intelligence system. Over the past four years she has fully embraced
Trump’s America First posture in explaining her dissent from the
elite foreign policy consensus. Gabbard also has a history of support
for a slew of standard, bipartisan U.S. national security and defense
policies. She has offered die-hard backing for Israel’s war against
Gaza, opposed a ceasefire, and accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,
the chief facilitators of Israel’s genocidal war, of being soft on
terrorism and anti-semitism. She has also argued that the U.S. and
other Western nations should wage both a military and ideological war
against what she calls “radical Islamist ideology.” She has
described herself as a “hawk” when it comes to using military
action against “terrorists” and has advocated using “surgical”
drone strikes against terror groups, a system refined and expanded
under the Obama and Trump administrations. She has praised
[[link removed]] Egyptian
dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi for his “great courage and
leadership” and, following a 2015 meeting with Sisi in Cairo, called
on Obama to “take action to recognize President el-Sisi and his
leadership.” In Congress, Gabbard voted to keep in place U.S.
surveillance laws aimed at foreign nationals and nations and
supported economic sanctions
[[link removed]] against
Russia, Iran, and North Korea. 

Gabbard began her career as a liberal Democrat who went on to become a
top surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for president. She ran
for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 primaries, staking out a
range of Sanders-style domestic policy positions and
non-interventionist foreign policies and repeatedly denounced the
Democratic Party power establishment. While she endorsed Biden in
2020, she also refused to vote in favor of impeaching Trump and was
the only lawmaker to vote present on the resolution, saying it was
“fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our
country.”

Soon after Biden won the 2020 election and Gabbard left Congress, she
declared herself a political independent and emerged as a rising star
in the conservative media ecosystem. She became a paid Fox News
contributor and swiftly went from being a rare, occasional Democratic
defender of Trump to one of the MAGA movement’s popular
personalities. In her public appearances, Gabbard often railed against
what she described as the “woke” ideology dominating the
Democratic Party, winning her enthusiastic embraces from Trump-aligned
audiences and media outlets. 

This culminated, in April 2024, with the publication of Gabbard’s
book, “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind,”
which chronicled her transformation. “The Democratic Party has
become a party that is opposed to freedom, that is opposed to the
central and foundational principles that exist within our founding
documents, and that serve as the identity of who we are as Americans
and what this country is supposed to be about. It has become a party
that is controlled by this elitist cabal of war mongers, who are
driving forward this quote unquote woke agenda. And we see it through
their racializing of everything,” she told podcaster Lex Fridman.
“We see this through their ‘defund the police’ mission. We see
this through their open border policies. We see this through how in
their education policy, they are failing our kids and how they are
pushing this narrative that ultimately is a rejection of objective
truth.”

In August, Gabbard formally endorsed Trump, praising him for “having
the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies, and partners
alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort.” Soon
after, she joined Trump’s campaign as an honorary co-chair. Two
weeks before the election, she appeared with Trump at a rally in North
Carolina. "I'm proud to stand here with you today, President Trump,
and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party. I am joining the
party of the people,” she declared to huge applause. “The party of
equality. The party that was founded to fight against and end slavery
in this country. It is the party of common sense and the party that is
led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for
peace.”

While Gabbard’s nomination as DNI is being celebrated by many
non-interventionists on both the left and right, reviewing years of
her public statements, positions, and interviews reveals
inconsistencies in her dissent from U.S. war mongering and a frequent
embrace of some of the foundational language deployed by the
Bush-Cheney administration as it launched the so-called global war on
terrorism. “When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a
hawk,” she told a newspaper in Hawaii in 2016. “When it comes to
counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” Her support
for Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza fits
squarely within Trump’s Israel First national security nominees.
Gabbard also has close ties
[[link removed]] to
far right Hindu nationalists with an explicitly violent anti-Muslim
agenda and an alliance with Israel and extremist Zionists.

Despite Trump’s self-promotion as an unconventional
non-interventionist, his first term as president was a militaristic
one. He expanded U.S. drone strikes, sanctioned Russia and expelled 60
of its diplomats, interfered in Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations,
used the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, waged a massive
scorched earth war in northern Iraq against ISIS, bombed Syria, used
U.S. special operations forces inside Yemen, continued U.S. support
for Saudi Arabia, empowered Israel’s campaign to annihilate the
Palestinians and to annex more of their territory, assassinated the
most senior Iranian military official, and engaged in all manner of
traditional American warmaking. And he often did so with the backing
of leading Democrats, many of whom voted to give him sweeping and
expanded surveillance authorities.

Gabbard, who often blasted Trump during his first term for promoting
hawkish neocons to positions of power in the national security
apparatus and conducting an imperial foreign policy, has, to date,
offered no criticism of Trump’s nomination of a slew of warmongers
to serve in his new administration. One of those figures, Trump’s
nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, praised Gabbard as a
“revolutionary pick that has a chance to really make a positive
change.”

Gabbard’s Dissent

Gabbard says she met
[[link removed]] Donald
Trump soon after his election in 2016. “President-elect Trump asked
me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our
fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as
other foreign policy challenges we face,” Gabbard said at the time.
“I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the
President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been
beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian
government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of
lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of
safety for themselves and their families.” 

By that time, Gabbard had already staked out a position of support for
Russian military action in Syria. In a 2015 post
[[link removed]] on X/Twitter,
she wrote: “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in
Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of
these terrorists.”

In 2017, Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with President Bashar
al-Assad in Damascus and soon after challenged the allegations by U.S.
intelligence, UN officials, and Trump that Assad’s forces had used
chemical weapons. Gabbard was subjected to an avalanche of attacks by
fellow Democrats and Republicans and grilled on cable news programs,
accused of being a chemical weapons denialist and an ally of a
dictator the U.S. was confronting.

Gabbard said she was opposed to U.S. military action against Syria
because she assessed it was strengthening Al Qaeda and other militant
groups, arguing that U.S. policy was creating rather than diminishing
a threat to U.S. and regional security. She also
introduced legislation
[[link removed]] that
sought to cut off U.S. support for anti-Assad forces in Syria, saying
the U.S. was providing “direct and indirect support to terrorist
groups in order to overthrow the Syrian government.”

“The reality is that there is no possibility of peace unless we’re
willing to talk and engage directly. Ultimately it must be up to the
Syrian people to determine their own future,” Gabbard told me in
2018. “We should never have gone into Syria to both directly and
indirectly try to topple their regime. And we have seen the disastrous
consequences of that.” 

During the 2020 Democratic primary for president, Kamala Harris
responded to a blistering attack by Gabbard by pivoting to the Syria
controversy. “That criticism is coming from someone who has been an
apologist for Assad,” Harris said
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“She has been an apologist for he who has exterminated the people of
his country like they are, you know, cockroaches.”

Charges of “cozying up to Assad” and denying his use of chemical
weapons is, second to charges she is a Russian asset, emerging as one
of the most common attack themes deployed against her nomination as
DNI.

Gabbard maintained that her views on Assad’s alleged use of chemical
weapons were distorted in the media and by her political opponents.
“There is no disputing the fact that Bashar Al-Assad in Syria is a
brutal dictator. There is no disputing the fact that he has used
chemical weapons against his people,” she said on The View in 2019.

"There have been reports showing that chemical weapons have been used
in Syria, both by the Syrian government as well as different terrorist
groups on the ground in Syria," Gabbard similarly told CNN’s Dana
Bash. "The skepticism and the questions that I raised were very
specific around incidents that the Trump administration was trying to
use as an excuse to launch a U.S. military attack in Syria." 

During a recent appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
suggested Trump’s nomination of Gabbard was “devastating,”
charging, “as much as she says that she’s an anti-war person,
she’s not. She supports very pro-war individuals abroad.”

Gabbard’s foreign policy dissent was not limited to Syria. During
her tenure in Congress, she routinely accused both Republican and
Democratic officials of war mongering and lambasted Trump throughout
his presidency, including for placing neoconservative hawks in
positions of power during his first presidential term. “Donald Trump
and his cabinet, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and others—are creating a
situation that just a spark would light off a war with Iran, which is
incredibly dangerous,” she said in 2019 as she ran for president.
“That’s why we need to de-escalate tensions. Trump needs to get
back into the Iran nuclear deal and swallow his pride, put the
American people first.”

When Trump authorized the assassination of Iranian military leader
Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC, in a drone strike in Baghdad
in early 2020, Gabbard told Fox & Friends, "This was very clearly an
act of war by this president without any kind of authorization or
declaration of war from Congress, clearly violating the Constitution."

Gabbard supported the Iran nuclear deal and frequently criticized
Trump for canceling it in favor of a more hostile stance. “The
American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be
far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw
in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the
refugee crisis. And it wouldn’t be just contained within Iran,”
she said in June 2019. “This would turn into a regional war … We
need to get back into the Iran nuclear agreement, and we need to
negotiate how we can improve it.”

Gabbard advocated for direct talks with North Korea and other U.S.
adversaries and to only use military force as a last resort. “We
have to be willing to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a
possibility that peace could be achieved,” Gabbard told me in
January 2018, “regardless of our opinion of these people, whether
they be adversaries or dictators or others. The reality is that there
is no possibility of peace unless we’re willing to talk and engage
directly.” Six months later, Trump famously met with Kim Jong Un and
crossed over the demilitarized zone into North Korea, winning praise
from Gabbard.

Gabbard’s position on meeting with adversaries echoed a controversy
from 2007 when, during a Democratic primary debate, then-Sen. Barack
Obama was asked if he would meet "without precondition" with the
leaders of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. "I would,"
Obama responded. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow
not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the
guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration—is
ridiculous." Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain attacked Obama for
his stance, with Clinton calling Obama “irresponsible and frankly
naive” and McCain saying Obama displayed “reckless judgment” and
inexperience. 

Democrats Portray Gabbard as Russia’s Manchurian Candidate

For more than eight years, the Democratic Party attacks against Trump
and his allies have centered around portraying them as Russian stooges
or assets, implying they are sleeper agents or useful idiots for a
Soviet plot to destroy America.

Gabbard’s positions on Russia are already taking center stage in the
attempts to block her confirmation as DNI. In 2022, Gabbard accused
the U.S. of provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing NATO
expansion. “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if
Biden admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security
concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO," she wrote on
social media. Days after Russia’s invasion began, Gabbard posted a
video [[link removed]] in
which she called for “an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral
country—no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore
alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both U.S. and NATO
countries as well as Russia because there’d be no Russian or NATO
troops on each other’s non-Baltic borders. This would allow the
Ukrainian people to live in peace.”

“The idea that someone who has aligned herself with and defended
Vladimir Putin could potentially have information related to the
sources and methods of how it is that we knew that Russia was going to
have invaded Ukraine”—as Gabbard would as DNI—”helps
illuminate why [her nomination] is so extraordinarily dangerous,”
Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat and former CIA officer,
told MSNBC. On Friday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a close friend
and ally of the Clintons—once again called
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a “likely” Russian asset on MSNBC. 

While Gabbard has staked out a range of positions diametrically
opposed to U.S. policy toward Russia, her political enemies have
repeatedly accused her, without evidence, of conduct that falls within
the scope of treachery against America rather than protected speech
expressing dissent on policies of monumental consequence. Soon after
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a
prominent opponent of Trump, accused
[[link removed]] Gabbard of
“parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well
cost lives.”

In January 2020 Gabbard sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for
defamation after Clinton called her a Russian “asset” whom Moscow
was “grooming” to launch a third party presidential bid to thwart
Democrats. "She's the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of
sites and bots and other ways of supporting her,” Clinton said in a
2019 podcast interview. “Yeah, she's a Russian asset. I mean,
totally.” The day after Clinton’s remarks, Gabbard tweeted to
Clinton: “You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption,
and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party
for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.” Gabbard
dropped her suit after five months and her lawyers said that while
they believed Clinton had defamed their client, Gabbard wanted to
prioritize “defeating Donald Trump in 2020, rather than righting the
wrongs here.” Clinton’s team issued a statement calling the
lawsuit a “publicity stunt,” writing in Russian: “good
riddance.”

These attacks will no doubt be welcomed and ridiculed by Trump and his
supporters as a desperate repeat of the Russiagate “hoax” being
deployed to protect the deep state. But Gabbard’s positions on
Russia and the repeated characterization of her as a Russian operative
may compel some Republican senators to oppose Gabbard’s
nomination. 

U.S. Intelligence Gathering

As a lawmaker, Gabbard regularly denounced abuses by U.S. intelligence
agencies and sponsored legislation aimed at ending domestic
surveillance of American citizens. In 2018, Gabbard and Republican
Rep. Justin Amash tried unsuccessfully to amend the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act to prevent domestic spying on U.S.
citizens. It failed. “It’s the fear tactics and misinformation
campaign that we have seen far too often, especially after 9/11
that’s been used to pass things like the PATRIOT Act,” she told me
in 2018. It is “a disservice to the American people and undermines
the constitutional civil liberties that we were seeking to protect
within our amendment, while also making sure that the Section 702
tools provided focused on foreign targets were maintained.”

Gabbard blamed former President Obama for failing to confront these
violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of the Bush-Cheney era.
“He was someone as a U.S. senator who gave some pretty powerful
speeches on the Senate floor about his concerns with the Patriot Act,
his concerns with surveillance from the NSA, his concerns with a
violation of our Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties,” she
told podcaster Lex Fridman. “But when, as president, he was
confronted with leaked information about the surveillance occurring
under those authorities in his presidency, he took the side of the
national security state and did not take action to right the wrongs
that he correctly pointed out as senator and during his campaign for
the presidency.” 

In 2020, Gabbard publicly urged Trump to pardon NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, saying they had,
“at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality
of those in the deep state.” In her last year in Congress,
she introduced
[[link removed]] legislation
calling on the U.S. to drop all charges against the two and to reform
the Espionage Act. “Brave whistleblowers exposing lies and illegal
actions in our government must be protected,” she said.

Gabbard’s Support for Israel

Like all of Trump’s nominees, Gabbard has been a staunch supporter
of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza and
opposed a ceasefire. Throughout the past year, she has
repeatedly characterized
[[link removed]] anti-war protesters as
“puppets” of Hamas and said the October 7 attacks in Israel should
have been an “extreme wake up call for leaders in the United States
and leaders around the world about how Islamist terrorists continue to
pose the greatest short and long term threat to our peace—our
ability to live in peace and to live free.”

She falsely portrayed Hamas as an ally of ISIS and Al Qaeda and said
its goal is “not really about the territory between Israel and Gaza
or Palestine” but aims to establish a “global Islamist caliphate
and destroy anyone who doesn’t adhere to their radical
interpretation of Islam including Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and
others.” She said Hamas wants to “rid the world of quote-unquote
non-believers or infidels and establish Islamic caliphates.”
She characterized
[[link removed]] anti-Gaza war
demonstrators as “mobs” engaged in “violent protest around the
world supporting Hamas and standing against freedom, standing against
peace.” She criticized Biden—who publicly characterized
[[link removed]] campus
protests as violent and anti-semitic—for not condemning the
demonstrators, saying Biden is afraid of being labeled “an
Islamophobe.”

Despite her clear backing of the Gaza war and opposition to a
ceasefire, Gabbard maintains that she supports a two-state agreement.
“You have some people in the Israeli government who don’t want the
Palestinian people in Gaza at all and want them to go and repatriate
in other countries,” she said in April. “I think that’s a big
problem and that further exacerbates this hatred and resentment that
continues to grow there.”

Prior to the launch of the 2023 Gaza war, Gabbard had a mixed record
on Israel-Palestine issues, though it was overwhelmingly filled with
standard bi-partisan pro-Israel positions. During the Great March of
Return protests in Gaza in 2018, Gabbard criticized Israel’s use of
lethal force, tweeting: “Israel needs to stop using live ammunition
in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza. It has resulted in over
50 dead and thousands seriously wounded.”

In 2015, she criticized
[[link removed]] Democrats
for boycotting Netanyahu’s address to Congress and attended his
speech. Netanyahu’s primary mission was to undermine the Iran
nuclear deal. That year, Gabbard received an enthusiastic welcome at
far right preacher John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel
conference. “There are many issues that we deal with on a daily
basis in Congress that are very divisive. But I can tell you without a
doubt that the importance of our nation’s long standing friendship
and partnership with Israel is not one of them,” Gabbard said
[[link removed]]. “It’s absolutely
true to say that there are few issues that bring us together more, few
issues that cause people to set aside their differences more, than the
issue of the United States’ longstanding friendship with Israel.”

In 2016, she received an award from extremist rabbi Shmuley Boteach
and posed for a picture
[[link removed]] with Boteach
and Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson, who gave $100 million
to Trump’s election campaign and advocates for Israeli annexation of
all Palestinian territory. That same year, she criticized Obama for
not using the term “radical Islamist terrorism,” which was a
constant GOP talking point about Obama, a president that launched
multiple wars against Muslim countries and presided over eight years
of consistent drone strikes in several nations under the auspices of
striking al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, and other militant organizations,
and expanded the U.S. ground war in Afghanistan. Gabbard told CNN,
“it’s important that you identify your enemy, you know who they
are, you call them by their name, and you understand the ideology
that’s driving them.”

As both a lawmaker and independent political figure, Gabbard has, at
times, expressed opposition to the expansion of Israeli settlements.
In 2017, she voted against a bill that condemned the Obama
administration’s decision to abstain from vetoing a UN Security
Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution,
which was adopted in December 2016, stated that “the establishment
by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since
1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes
a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to
the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and
comprehensive peace.” (This was the UN resolution where Trump’s
National Security Advisor-designee Mike Flynn tried to get other
nations to intervene to stop Obama by voting against the resolution.)
“I know how important our enduring alliance with Israel is,”
Gabbard asserted in explaining her vote. “My vote upholds my
commitment to maintaining and strengthening this alliance, as well as
my long-held position that the most viable path to peace between
Israel and Palestine can be found through both sides negotiating a
two-state solution. While I remain concerned about aspects of the UN
resolution, I share the Obama administration’s reservation about the
harmful impact Israeli settlement activity has on the prospects for
peace.”

Gabbard has sharply criticized the BDS movement and supported
legislation
[[link removed]] that
denounced BDS and effectively tarred it as an anti-semitic movement.
On the other hand, Gabbard also voted in favor of a bill sponsored by
Ilhan Omar in 2019 that sought to protect the rights of Americans to
boycott foreign countries in an effort to change policy. 

Trump has pledged to embrace Israel’s most extreme agendas and
nominated Christian Zionist fanatic Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador
to Israel. Huckabee has declared Palestinians do not exist and that
there is no such territory as the West Bank. Gabbard’s support for
Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, combined with her conflation
of Palestinian armed resistance with Al Qaeda and ISIS, will likely
guide her posture on support for Israel more than any dissenting
position she took as a lawmaker. 

Senate Confirmation

There are a range of issues that Gabbard should be aggressively
questioned about in her Senate confirmation, including her constant
employment of “war on terror” language and calls for a militarized
war against an ideology, a dangerous doctrine adopted after 9/11 that
was used to justify U.S. military actions across the world. But
Democratic senators are much more likely to deploy a Cold War, 2.0,
line of interrogation on her stances on Russia and Syria.

To pretend that Gabbard somehow poses a more grave danger to U.S.
security than those in power after 9/11 or throughout the long bloody
history of U.S. interventions and the resulting blowback is a lot of
hype and hysteria. U.S. intelligence operated a global
kidnap-and-torture program, which included the use of secret prisons,
launched after 9/11. Brennan, one of Gabbard’s top opponents,
authorized an operation to spy on U.S. Senate torture investigators
and then lied to Congress about it. His own nomination to be CIA
director at the beginning of Obama’s presidency was killed because
of Brennan’s support for torture and extraordinary renditions under
the Bush administration, so Obama created a non-Senate confirmed post
for him. Obama’s DNI James Clapper lied under oath to Congress about
NSA domestic spying. 

The abuses by the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies at home
and abroad should be thoroughly audited and confronted. This is
something the Brennans, Clappers, and Gina Haspels of the world would
never do, in large part because of their undying loyalty to the system
right or wrong. It is not difficult to imagine the pre-2021 Gabbard
prioritizing such an effort. In light of her conversion to a
MAGA-aligned Trump loyalist, it becomes an open question.

There are legitimate concerns about whether Trump would seek to abuse
the system—and U.S. intelligence capabilities—for his personal
agenda, and to enact revenge on his enemies—and whether Gabbard
would reject those efforts. These, too, would be relevant lines of
inquiry during a Senate confirmation hearing.

Gabbard never served on the House intelligence committee or worked as
a spy. She did not work as a case officer or an official in any
intelligence agency. She is, to put it bluntly, an outsider, not
unlike Trump. Her detractors cite those facts as evidence she is not
qualified and would therefore put the nation at risk. Her supporters
view her outsider status as a feature, not a bug—particularly Trump,
who has spent eight years denouncing what he maintains was a deep
state plot to take him down.

Independent journalist Michael Tracey, who sympathetically covered
Gabbard’s career and embedded with her on the campaign trail during
her 2020 run for the Democratic nomination, recently accused Gabbard
of cynically abandoning many of her marquee positions as she shifted
to an alliance with the MAGA movement. “[A]n opportunity arose to
insinuate herself into the Republican Party—which of course requires
abandoning any critique of Trump,” Tracey wrote
[[link removed]]. “She has proven
that she no longer holds to the positions she once espoused in any
discernible fashion. No real through-line between now and the 2020
campaign can be reliably traced … she decided to overturn her prior
stated convictions in pursuit of power. I consider that crass,
unprincipled opportunism.”

Whatever one thinks of Gabbard, it is undeniable that there has never
been anyone like her in charge of coordinating the entire U.S.
intelligence apparatus. The question is which version of Gabbard would
be in power. 

_Jeremy Scahill: Journalist at Drop Site News, co-founder of The
Intercept, author of the books Blackwater and Dirty Wars. Reported
from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere._

_Drop Site News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new
posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid
subscriber._

* Tulsi Gabbard
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* U.S. Intelligence agencies
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* national security
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* Donald Trump
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* Israel
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