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There are three solid reasons to oppose her confirmation: her lack of competence in the skills the job requires; the wobbly credibility of her past statements; and her poor judgment about key issues facing the intelligence community.


Let’s start with competence. The DNI job was created to oversee and coordinate the 18 agencies that make up the “intelligence community.” Because this is largely a management job rather than a policy position, the legislation that created the post specifically requires that anyone nominated “have extensive national security experience.” The law even detailed dozens of duties and functions the DNI should perform.
The people who have done this job the best, not surprisingly, are the ones with the most expertise: Mike McConnell, a Navy vice admiral who ran the National Security Agency; James R. Clapper Jr., an Air Force lieutenant general who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; and Avril Haines, who served as deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser. They had the “extensive” experience the law requires.

What about her credibility? The record shows some odd and at times inconsistent remarks about intelligence-related matters.
The most striking area is surveillance, the task of many of the agencies she would oversee. In 2020, she voted against Section 702, a key part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, because, she said, it wouldn’t “protect the American people from illegal warrantless surveillance.” Yet after President Donald Trump nominated her for the DNI post, she lauded “vital national security tools like Section 702,” claiming it now protects civil liberties.


Gabbard’s accounts of her controversial 2017 trip to Syria have also been confusing. A Jan. 21 Post story explained that she disclosed the trip only after it became public, and that her aides later scrambled to compile an account of how she met, twice, with now-deposed leader Bashar al-Assad. People who have read that filing carefully are said to have found some odd gaps.


Gabbard has also been a champion of whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom many members of the intelligence community view as a traitor because of his 2013 revelations about NSA surveillance. She has called for his pardon and argued, “If it wasn’t for Snowden, the American people would never have learned the NSA was … spying on Americans.”

The final reason to worry about Gabbard is that she lacks the judgment a spy chief needs to assess the most delicate national security secrets. She has repeatedly been on the wrong side of issues. In 2016, she opposed the Global Magnitsky Act that imposed sanctions against human rights offenders in Russia and other countries. After her 2017 meetings with Assad, she defended him against allegations that he had used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians.


Her most worrisome failure is on Ukraine. When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022, she promptly blamed it on the Biden administration for ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” She then backed false Russian claims about what she said were “biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release and spread deadly pathogens.” That was pure propaganda.


It’s easy to spin sinister theories about an erratic gadfly such as Gabbard. Hillary Clinton said in 2019 that she was a “favorite of Russians.” After Gabbard was picked by Trump in November, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) described her as being “in Putin’s pocket” and asked, “Do you really want her to have all of the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies?”
But the truth about her nomination is much simpler: She is utterly unqualified to oversee America’s network of intelligence agencies. Even by Trump’s standards, this is a crazy choice.


Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/29/tulsi-gabbard-dni-nominee-trump-vote/