The most right-wing House Democrats founded the Blue Dogs in 1995. Many of them eventually jumped the fence and joined the GOP, including Louisianans Billy Tauzin, Jimmy Hayes and Rodney Alexander, Texans Ralph Hall and Greg Laughlin, Virgil Goode (VA), Alabamans Richard Shelby, Bobby Bright and Parker Griffith, Mississippians Michael Parker, Gene Taylor and Artur Davis, Nathan Deal (GA), Joe Baca (CA) and Jefferson Van Drew (NJ).
The latest Democrat to be talking about switching parties— eager for the pardon he will need to stay out of prison— is NYC criminal— and conservative— mayor Eric Adams. Not widely known outside of New York, Adams already was a member of the Republican Party until 2002 and is likely to migrate back to where he has always belonged.
Even though Tulsi Gabbard was always a Blue Dog at heart and voted with them while she was in the House, she never actually officially joined. Eventually though, she switched parties and is now officially a Republican— one who may be headed for Trump’s cabinet. The problem with her nomination, though, isn’t how conservative she is or to which party she belongs. Yesterday John Sakellariadis. And Robbie Gramer reported that Tulsi will be the next of Trump’s crackpot nominees to face intense questioning and stiff resistance from senators. “[O]ne former senior staffer at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence argued her nomination was already dead on arrival. ‘I do not think the votes are there for Tulsi Gabbard. I don’t see how you get to a majority on SSCI.’”
Her troubles are all about her affinity to foreign enemies, particularly Russia. On Thursday ABC News reported that her “rosy posture toward Moscow has prompted some Democratic critics to suggest that she could be ‘compromised,’ or perhaps even a ‘Russian asset.’… But former advisers to Gabbard suggest that her views on Russia and its polarizing leader, Vladimir Putin, have been shaped not by some covert intelligence recruitment as far as they know— but instead by her unorthodox media consumption habits. Three former aides said Gabbard, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT—formerly known as Russia Today— which the U.S. intelligence community characterized in 2017 as ‘the Kremlin's principal international propaganda outlet.’ … [O]ne former aide said Gabbard continued to circulate articles from RT ‘long after’ she was advised that the outlet was not a credible source of information. Doug London, a retired 34-year veteran intelligence officer, said Gabbard's alleged penchant to rely at least in part on outlets like RT to shape her view of the world reflects poorly on her suitability to fulfill the responsibilities of a director of national intelligence.”
"That Gabbard's views mirror Russia's narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear," London said, adding, "none of which bodes well for the president's principal intelligence adviser responsible for enabling the [U.S. intelligence community] to inform decision-making by telling it like it is."
…[O]ver the past decade, Gabbard's views on Russian aggression in Europe have evolved in a particularly dramatic fashion.
In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard— then a first-term Democratic U.S. representative from Hawaii— released a statement advocating for "meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces" and for the U.S. to invoke "stiffer, more painful economic sanctions for Russia."
"The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine are clear," she wrote at the time. "We have to act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful, sovereign neighbor."
By 2017, however, her tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff laying out her views on foreign policy, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, Gabbard blamed the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russian aggression and bemoaned the United States' "hostility toward Putin."
"There certainly isn't any guarantee to Putin that we won't try to overthrow Russia's government," she wrote in the memo from May 2017, titled "fodder for fundraising emails / social media."
"In fact, I'm pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that," she wrote.
She also condemned the very sanctions she had previously supported, writing that, "historically, the U.S. has always wanted Russia to be a poor country."
"It's a matter of respect," she wrote. "The Russian people are a proud people and they don't want the U.S. and our allies trying to control them and their government."
Gabbard's sentiment in the 2017 memo is "basically the Russian playbook," said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration.
"It's dangerous," said Daalder. "That strain of thinking is not unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it is certainly not where you would think a major figure in any administration would like to be, intellectually."
By 2022, at the outset of the latest Russia-Ukraine conflict, Gabbard suggested on X that Russia's invasion was justified by Ukraine's potential bid to join NATO, "which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia's border”— a narrative perpetuated by Russian propaganda channels, including RT, and denounced by the U.S. and NATO as "false."
Gabbard's messaging has at times aligned so closely with Kremlin talking points that at least one commentator on Kremlin state media has referred to her as "Russia's girlfriend."
…[I]t is Gabbard's framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has most galvanized her critics in the national security sphere.
In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video to Twitter sharing what she said were "undeniable facts" about U.S.-funded biolabs in the war-torn country, claiming that "even in the best of circumstances" they "could easily be compromised”— a debunked theory regularly promoted by RT and other Kremlin propaganda channels.
Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news agencies have frequently capitalized on Gabbard's public comments to support the biolab conspiracy theory and other disinformation, recirculating clips in which she repeats the Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing the false claims— effectively engineering an echo-chamber to magnify their propaganda machine.
Thursday, the Associated Press reported that nearly 100 former senior U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials— including former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, former national security adviser Anthony Lake— have urged Schumer and Thune to schedule closed-door hearings on Gabbard’s nomination to allow for a full review of the government’s secret files on her. “The former officials, who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, said they were ‘alarmed’ by the choice of Gabbard to oversee all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies. They said her past actions ‘call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus.’”
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