Raise your hand if you supported Tulsi for DNI.
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Paywall. What's the article about?
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Excerpts:
President Trump has taken on many ancillary roles in Washington: chairman of the Kennedy Center. The de facto chief architect of the city’s landmark properties. And now, the nation’s chief intelligence analyst.
This revelation came from Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence. She had the unenviable task at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday of squaring Mr. Trump’s comments about an urgent nuclear threat from Iran with a letter from one of her trusted aides that the country posed no “imminent threat.”
Her answer? Only the president can decide what is an “imminent” threat. In other words, she was turning one of the key roles of the intelligence community’s 80,000 employees — to make nonpolitical judgments about threats to American security — over to Mr. Trump.
Ms. Gabbard’s comments were necessitated by the decision of Joe Kent, her close adviser, to quit his counterterrorism position over his opposition to the war in Iran and his belief that Israel had pressured the United States into the conflict.
So she came up with her line that it is Mr. Trump, not the intelligence community, that determines what constitutes a threat.
It was Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, who pressed Ms. Gabbard the hardest on whether there was “imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.”
“Yes or no?” he demanded.
Ms. Gabbard was ready with an answer. “It is not a responsibility of the intelligence community to determine what is or is not an imminent threat,” she said.
The senator, speaking over Ms. Gabbard, rejected the answer: “It is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States.”
In her statement, Ms. Gabbard said Iran’s nuclear enrichment program was “obliterated” in strikes last year, echoing Mr. Trump. There have been “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” her written statement said.
In her oral testimony, Ms. Gabbard said something quite different. Intelligence agencies assessed that before the current war, she said, “Iran was trying to recover from the severe damage to its nuclear infrastructure.”
Called out on the discrepancy by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, Ms. Gabbard said she had truncated her comments because they were running long. Mr. Warner snapped back that she “chose to omit the parts that contradict the president.”
Several Democrats unsuccessfully sought to pin down Ms. Gabbard on what information she had provided the president ahead of the war, including about Iran’s willingness to attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
“I’m not going to comment on what the president did or didn’t ask me on any topic,” Ms. Gabbard insisted.
Like Trump, Tulsi screws up everything, in every way possible, then tells lies about it.
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I’ll help.
Way to go, Checkers!
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Consent Management