It’s As If Trump Is Repaying Putin For Something
Tulsi Gabbard is such an unbelievably bad pick for a top intelligence job that some people are wondering if the Matt Gaetz announcement was designed to take the focus off of her. In writing about McConnell’s future role— he’s got two years left in his term— Andrew Desiderio and Max Cohen reported that “Gabbard’s foreign policy views are anathema [to him]… Gabbard opposes U.S. assistance for Ukraine, often to the point of amplifying Russian propaganda… There’s a belief that if McConnell opposes Gabbard’s nomination, it could provide cover to other Senate Republicans who align with his foreign policy views. With a 53-47 margin, Trump can only afford to lose three Republican votes, assuming there’s full attendance.”
Other than perhaps Kremlin shills like Ron Johnson (WI), Marsha Blackburn (TN) and Tommy Tuberville (AL), there are no senators who think this nomination was a good idea. So far, though, Republican willingness to stand up to Trump hasn’t manifested outside of Lisa Murkowski (AK) and Susan Collins. Is Mitt Romney really going to go along with this and not denounce something that he surely feels alarmed about?
Yesterday, Warren Strobel reported that Gabbard is seen by U.S. spy agencies as someone who “has often seemed to embrace Washington’s adversaries and questioned key American intelligence judgments, raising alarm among veteran intelligence officials and the wider national security establishment.” Any people see her as completely in the pockets of both Putin and Modi… [H]er past comments preview the potential internal clashes she could have with intelligence professionals.”
“Of course there’s going to be resistance to change from the ‘swamp’ in Washington,” she said in a Fox News interview on Wednesday. Her goal, she said, will be “to defend the safety, security and freedom of the American people.”
In interviews and social-media posts, Gabbard has blamed the NATO alliance for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and echoed a Kremlin claim that Ukraine hosted U.S.-funded labs researching dangerous pathogens. She later clarified her remarks, saying she was worried about the danger amid the war of pathogens escaping from Ukrainian biological laboratories.
U.S. funding of Ukrainian biological labs has focused on efforts to improve security and prevent the escape of pathogens.
…“I thought it was the worst cabinet-level appointment in history until we then heard about the Matt Gaetz appointment,” former Trump national security adviser-turned critic John Bolton said… “So now we’re going to see whether the American Senate can stand up and reject two people who are totally unqualified, unfit professionally, and really lacking in the moral characteristics, the character that you need to hold these jobs,” Bolton said on CNN Thursday.
Reaction on Capitol Hill has been mixed, with some in Trump’s Republican party saying they approved his choice of Gabbard, who, after a brief presidential run in 2020, left the Democratic Party and joined the GOP.
“She’s obviously smart, she went from being a Democrat to a Republican, so she’s obviously brilliant,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) joked. “My world view might not be the same worldview as hers, but apparently it’s pretty close to what Donald Trump wants, and that’s what’s important.”
If confirmed, she would oversee U.S. intelligence agencies as they are grappling with major conflicts in the Mideast and Ukraine, confronting a multipronged challenge from China, and trying to adapt to new threats posed by artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and climate change.
Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, who served as national intelligence director in his first term, to lead the CIA. Trump credited Ratcliffe, a Republican former House member from Texas, with “exposing fake Russian collusion to be a Clinton campaign operation.”
U.S. intelligence officers pride themselves and their agencies on being nonpartisan, and on delivering unvarnished intelligence reports even if the news they contain is unwelcome to senior policymakers at the White House and other government agencies.
The president-elect has vowed during the campaign to purge U.S. intelligence agencies of those he deemed corrupt or disloyal.
Douglas London, a veteran CIA operations officer, said the reaction among his colleagues is “serious concern over the implications of [Gabbard’s] nomination regarding the president-elect’s intentions toward the Intelligence Community.”
The director of national intelligence is supposed to be the president’s top intelligence adviser, fairly representing the views of 18 separate intelligence agencies and units.
London questioned whether Trump chose Gabbard to give him a thoughtful, nuanced picture of secret U.S. analysis on major security threats or as “someone to cheer him on.”
“Is she going to shape the intel? Is she going to shape and filter it?” he added.
If confirmed, Gabbard would have expansive authority to declassify and release secret intelligence, London noted. At the end of Trump’s first term, he and his allies pushed to declassify intelligence on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, drawing fierce opposition from then-CIA Director Gina Haspel and others, who argued that release would compromise intelligence sources.
It was one of numerous first-term battles Trump had with the powerful spy agencies, whom he blamed for the “hoax” of Russian election meddling on his campaign’s behalf. In 2019, Trump took to Twitter and told his intelligence chiefs to “go back to school” after they testified before Congress that North Korea was unlikely to abandon its nuclear weapons and Iran, despite its nuclear program, wasn’t yet seeking the bomb.
Both conclusions conflicted with his views.
Long-time Gabbard enemy Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) told an MSNBC audience yesterday that “Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has met with war criminals, violated the Department of State’s guidance and secretly, clandestinely went to Syria and met with [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad, who gassed and attacked his own people with chemical weapons. She’s considered to be, essentially, by most assessments, a Russian asset… There’s no question, I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.”
Brian Bennett, writing for Time, reported that he spoke with a career intelligence officer who told him that “We are all reeling.” He also reported that “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.”
