The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence in a 52-48 vote, making Donald Trump’s controversial nominee — whose approval appeared unlikely just weeks ago — the nation’s spy chief.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and an Army combat veteran, passed out of the Senate Intelligence Committee in a 9-8 party-line vote last week. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the former Senate majority leader, appeared to be the GOP’s only “no” for Gabbard during the final vote.
“The [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] wields significant authority over how the intelligence community allocates its resources, conducts its collection and analysis and manages the classification and declassification of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. In my assessment, Tulsi Gabbard failed to demonstrate that she is prepared to assume this tremendous national trust,” McConnell said in a statement.
At least two Republican senators on the high chamber’s intelligence panel were hesitant about Gabbard after she testified in her confirmation hearing late last month, but Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine have since said their concerns were adequately addressed in private meetings.
Chief among those concerns included her apparent hesitancy to not call National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden a traitor to the country. Around a decade ago, Snowden leaked troves of files detailing highly classified surveillance programs managed by the NSA in his time as a contractor for the signals-intelligence giant.
“I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” Gabbard said in her recent testimony, referring to the Snowden leaks, which sparked a global debate about government surveillance.
While in Congress, she co-sponsored legislation calling for espionage charges against Snowden to be dropped, working alongside then-Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.
She echoed those views when she made a run for the White House: “If it wasn’t for Snowden, the American people would never have learned the NSA was collecting phone records and spying on Americans. As president, I will protect whistle-blowers who expose threats to our freedom and liberty,” she wrote in 2019 during the Democratic presidential primary.
Gabbard’s views on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act also arose as a potential flashpoint. In 2020, she pushed to repeal the law through legislation, contending it enabled unwarranted access to Americans’ private communications. “Our civil liberties must be protected,” she said of her bill at the time, which ultimately did not pass. “Join us in ensuring our constitutional rights remain intact.”
While she has since reversed her position on 702, calling it crucial for national security, some remained unconvinced about the shift. The spying ordinance grants intelligence agencies the authority to compel communications providers to hand over data on foreign targets living abroad without a warrant. But the collection process permits analysts to capture both ends of a conversation, including cases where a U.S. person interacts with a foreign target.
Civil liberties advocates argue that dynamic enables the intelligence community to bypass the Fourth Amendment by allowing warrantless collection of Americans’ communications when they interact with foreign targets, which may include potential spies or terrorists. Privacy groups and some lawmakers, both Republican and Democrat, have pushed for a warrant requirement to address that ambiguity.
Gabbard told committee members in writing that she supports a warrant requirement for the intelligence community to query data on U.S. persons, a view largely opposed by most of the panel and past intelligence officials, who have argued that a warrant would slow down timely national security investigations.
Concerns about Gabbard’s qualifications for the role have been extensive, including a controversial visit with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
Documents reviewed by The Washington Post show her staff struggled to account for her time in Damascus and sought to downplay her engagement with Assad. Internal records initially logged their meeting as nearly three hours, but the final report to Congress cut it to 90 minutes. Staff also debated merging the meeting with other diplomatic encounters to make it seem part of broader protocol discussions. The trip itself deviated from the approved itinerary, which had no scheduled meetings with Syrian politicians.
Gabbard has also faced scrutiny for other foreign policy positions. In 2022, she suggested the U.S. and NATO could have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by addressing Moscow’s security concerns, a stance amplified by Russian state media. In 2017, her office consulted MIT physicist Theodore Postol, who disputed U.S. intelligence linking a Syrian chemical attack to Assad’s regime.
More recently, The New York Times reported she was briefly placed on the TSA’s “Quiet Skies” security list after attending a Vatican conference organized by a businessman on an FBI watch list.
“You will hear lies and smears that challenge my loyalty to and love for our country. Those who oppose my nomination imply that I am loyal to something or someone other than god, my own conscience, and the constitution of the United States, accusing me of being Trump’s puppet, Putin’s puppet, Assad’s puppet, a guru’s puppet, Modi’s puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters,” she said in her January testimony.
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