Robert F. Kennedy. Matt Gaetz. Pete Hegseth. The flurry of announcements this week from Donald Trump revealing his planned cabinet for a second term have drawn stunned responses across the federal government. In the intelligence community, the alarm has focused on Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to be the next Director of National Intelligence.
Gabbard, a former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii, has no background in intelligence and a history of making statements about countries like Russia and Syria that have raised questions about her judgment. If Trump gets his way, Gabbard will be tasked with overseeing the country’s 16 other intelligence agencies, and some of the country’s most secret national security programs.
“We are all reeling,” said a current intelligence official who’s worked through multiple administrations.
Intelligence analysts are most concerned that Gabbard, in the role of director of national intelligence, might be motivated to censor intelligence conclusions critical of Russia and shut down funding for potentially fruitful investigations. Some intelligence officials are privately considering whether to resign if Gabbard is their new boss.
The Director of National Intelligence is a position that was created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack in order to make sure America’s national security apparatus was working together and sharing information about the most critical threats. The job typically requires confirmation by the Senate Intelligence Committee—which in the past has reviewed the nominee’s financial disclosures and an FBI background check. Those reviews are conducted to ensure a DNI nominee doesn’t have any large outstanding debts or connections to foreign governments that might compromise them in coordinating the work of thousands of intelligence officials at the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies.
Gabbard’s background is strikingly different from the current director of national intelligence, Avril Haynes, who has a decades-long career working with intelligence agencies. Haynes was previously the deputy director of the CIA in the Obama Administration and was a senior member of Obama’s national security council.
Gabbard has little to no intelligence experience. In her eight years in Congress, she never served on the House intelligence Committee, having instead been assigned to armed services, foreign affairs and homeland security committees.
Gabbard emerged as a national figure in 2012, when she became the first Hindu, first American Samoan, and one of the first female combat veterans to be elected to the chamber. Before joining Congress, Gabbard had deployed to Iraq in 2004 as part of a medical unit in the Hawaii Army National Guard and is currently a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Over the last decade, Gabbard has stood out for her foreign policy views. She has long-been skeptical of American intelligence analysis and has taken public policy positions that echo Russian propaganda.
While in Congress in 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad after the U.S. had broken diplomatic relations with the country over his bloody crackdown against his own people. Russia is a long-time backer of Assad and has supplied troops and weapons to prop up Assad’s government during Syria’s 13-year-long civil war. Gabbard said the U.S. should not be supporting opposition fighters in the country, which were being assisted by American intelligence services.
Later that year, after the Syrian military attacked civilians with sarin and chlorine in the town of Ltamenah in northern Syria, Gabbard echoed Russian denials that Assad was behind a chemical weapons attack. A United Nations investigation later concluded that the Syrian Air Force dropped the chemicals.
Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard posted a video espousing a disproven conspiracy theory that alleged pathogens could leak from biolabs in Ukraine, a theory advanced by Russia as part of its propaganda attempt to press for a ceasefire. 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.”
That wasn’t the first time Gabbard was accused of trying to advance Russian interests. In 2019, Gabbard launched a longshot presidential bid that drew favorable coverage from Russian news and propaganda sites. Hillary Clinton suggested Russians were ‘grooming’ a Democrat to run as a third-party candidate and help Trump win re-election. It was widely assumed that Clinton was referring to Gabbard, who accused Clinton of trying to “destroy” her reputation.
Two years ago, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party, which she decried as “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Last month, she announced at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina that she was a Republican.
Gabbard has not always been supportive of Trump. She criticized Trump’s decision in 2015 to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement, which was backed by the Obama Administration, Iran and Russia, as well as China, France, Germany and the U.K. In 2020, Gabbard criticized Trump’s order to kill the Iranian general Qassim Soleimani who ran Iran’s proxy militia program in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen. Gabbard said at the time that Trump violated the Constitution by taking out another country’s top military commander without congressional authorization.
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