No to Tulsi Gabbard

National Review Online

Friday, January 24, 2025

 

The good thing regarding Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence is that the job is not nearly as important as it sounds.

 

That said, she’s an atrocious nominee who deserves to be defeated. Republican senators reluctant to cross an ascendant President Trump should consider that they’ll be doing him a favor by saying no to this nomination. The president can readily find someone more suitable, as he’s done before. Does anyone miss ex–attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz?

 

Throughout her career, Gabbard has been ideologically hostile to the job she’s been selected for. She long opposed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows us to monitor the communications of non-Americans located outside the United States. This is a little like a secretary of defense nominee being opposed to building tanks. Under pressure from Republican senators, she’s now converted on the issue, but that it took being desperate for confirmation votes for her to make her change is not comforting.

 

Also, as a member of Congress, Gabbard co-sponsored legislation “expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.” The resolution went nowhere because not everyone was as sympathetic to a figure who illegally absconded with classified information about the National Security Agency’s metadata tracking program, handed it over to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks (a group that deliberately imperiled U.S. service personnel abroad), and subsequently defected to Russia. Snowden is, quite simply, a traitor and fugitive from U.S. justice. A DNI pick taking his side is like an AG nominee thinking the mob gets a bad rap.

 

Gabbard has an extensive record of poor judgment. Infamously, she followed in Nancy Pelosi’s footsteps when she set herself, literally, on the road to Damascus in 2017. Like Pelosi, there was no grander objective in sitting down for nearly three hours with the blood-soaked Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad other than to embarrass the sitting Republican president. She hoped to box Trump in and keep him from reacting with force to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Even her own staff was reportedly shocked and confused by the amount of time she spent with Assad.

 

She still hasn’t conceded that Assad was responsible for the gas attacks. This is like a nominee for OMB director not being able to count.

 

She’s made a habit of parroting Russian talking points about Syria, which is of a piece with her other bizarre strategic misjudgments.

 

“As we remember Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, we need to ask ourselves this question: is the remilitarization of Japan, which is presently underway, truly a good idea?” she wrote, not in, say, 1953, but 2023. Japan has the world’s third-largest defense budget, a quarter million active-duty military personnel, and hundreds of advanced air and sea weapons platforms — and blessedly so.

 

Gabbard’s supporters defend her nomination on the grounds that she is just the shake-up the U.S. intelligence community needs after various failures, oversights, and attempts to influence domestic political disputes. She’d certainly be different, but not in the right way.

 

The director of national intelligence in theory sits atop the hierarchy of U.S. intelligence agencies, although no one treats the position that way in reality. Still, the director wields significant authority over the $100 billion intelligence budget and oversees what makes it into the President’s Daily Brief. There is nothing to suggest that Gabbard has the experience or judgment requisite for this job.

 

Trump wants to give the former Democrat a plum assignment because she was part of the loose, unorthodox coalition that put him over the top in November and she has impeccable anti-establishment credentials. But he can easily do her a solid in some other way. There’s a strong chance that Gabbard will be ineffectual or worse as DNI, and there’s no reason that Trump can’t find someone for this role in the mode of John Ratcliffe, his CIA director who just got easily confirmed.

 

Republican senators want to defer to Trump as much as possible as he enters office at the apex of his influence. But the aloha spirit can go too far.