If you’re like us, watching Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, traipse around Capitol Hill yesterday, begging senators to forget all the reasons it’s a bad idea to let her see America’s intelligence secrets, you might have felt sorry for her.
After all, it had been fewer than 24 hours since Bashar al-Assad, the deposed Syrian dictator, had been run out of his country and straight into the arms of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Considering her track record as an apologist for Assad, we wouldn’t be surprised to find out she was worried. When it turned out the Assads were going to Moscow, man, that must’ve been like that feeling where two of your oldest, best friends are in the same town, and they’re having a slumber party, and you’re not even in the same time zone.
Are they having fun without her in Moscow? Are they eating borscht pizza and telling secrets?
Did somebody smuggle in some pot and now everybody is trying drugs and playing “never have I ever” or some kind of drunk pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey?
Obviously we exaggerate a little bit, as we are not sure Tulsi Gabbard and Assad and Putin have ever even considered having a slumber party, but we and everybody else know the rest of her history when it comes to those two dictators, and why Democrats and Republicans alike are worried at the prospect of her having access to the products of the American intelligence community.
At the same time, we imagine she was just happy to know the Assads were safe, and was committed to the task at hand of swindling senators, because WHOA, can you believe there’s a president who’s enough of an anti-American turncoat that he’d nominate Tulsi Gabbard as DNI? That is some seriously crazy shit, man!
Gabbard is of course likely already facing lots of questions from senators about why she secretly went to hang out with Assad in 2017, why she wouldn’t call him an enemy of the US, why she was so eager to accept Assad’s version of events about the Syrian war, why she’s always been so skeptical that Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, why she’s always willing to barf out any Kremlin conspiracy theory the GRU comes up with, and so forth. (Some new reporting suggests Gabbard is just incredibly stupid and unable to discern the difference between good information and bad information.)
There have already been rumblings that, low-key, her nomination might be the most difficult of Trump’s clown car of deplorables to get confirmed.
She told reporters yesterday that she agrees with Trump that the United States should stay out of whatever is happening in Syria right now:
“My own views and experiences have been shaped by my multiple deployments and seeing firsthand the cost of war and the threat of Islamist terrorism,” Gabbard said. “It’s one of the many reasons why I appreciate President Trump’s leadership and his election where he is fully committed, as he has said over and over, to bringing about an end to wars, demonstrating peace through strength and putting the national security interests and the safety, security and freedom of the American people, first and foremost.”
Uh huh, sure, right, “America first,” you betcha.
WaPo notes that a number of Republican senators are already OK to just roll over for whatever Trump wants, which we guess includes possible national security threats like Gabbard, and that over 250 veterans had signed a letter supporting her nomination. They’re calling themselves American Veterans for Tulsi Gabbard and acting like they’re just normal veterans. Of course one of the most prominent signatories on that letter was Michael Flynn, who is most famous for secretly cahoots-ing with the Russian government and lying to the FBI about it.
So …
Other stories are starting to go around Capitol Hill too, and in the media.
NBC News has the fascinating and horrifying tale of a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting that happened in 2018, when Gabbard was a Democratic congresswoman. A Syrian defector — somebody who did not support the murderous dictator Assad — was going to testify behind closed doors, and aides to both Democratic and Republican congressmen were worried what might happen if Gabbard saw that Syrian defector’s face. They were worried Gabbard might burn the defector to the Assad regime. So they — Democrats and Republicans both — made sure to tell the defector, who they were calling “Caesar,” to cover his face when Gabbard was around.
“It was Democratic and Republican staffers on the committee coordinating with me to figure out how do we make sure that Tulsi doesn’t take a photograph of Caesar, or learn his real name, or record his voice,” said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force who helped organize Caesar’s appearance and translated for the session.
NBC News notes that, unlike the conservative veterans who think Gabbard is just great, “nearly 100 former diplomats, national security officials and intelligence officials wrote to Senate leaders expressing alarm at Gabbard’s nomination.” They want closed-door confirmation hearings, so they can really muck through Gabbard’s muck. “Several of Ms. Gabbard’s past actions call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus,” says the letter.
This quote from a former senior intelligence official says a lot:
“She basically completely adopted the Assad regime propaganda, where she suggested falsely that the U.S. was supporting terrorist extremists in Syria, and didn’t mention that the Assad regime had been slaughtering fellow Syrians there,” the former official said. “So what does that say about her judgment?”
People are wondering if Five Eyes — AKA the intelligence alliance of the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand — will continue sharing intel with us if Gabbard is DNI. (They probably shouldn’t, quite frankly.)
People are wondering why Gabbard literally thinks the Russian invasion of Ukraine was NATO’s fault.
Compromised, stupid, or both? Compromised, stupid, or both?
Just after Russia’s tanks crossed the Ukrainian border and starting slicing babies’ heads off in 2022, Tulsi Gabbard put this video on Twitter calling on Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and for some reason Joe Biden to “embrace the spirit of aloha.” (Yes, she said that.) She demanded Ukraine be a neutral country, not allowed to have military alliances that upset Russia.
You know, for fuckin’ “aloha” purposes.
That’s the totally serious person Donald Trump wants to give the keys to all America’s most secret intelligence, including stuff he hasn’t even stolen and taken to Mar-a-Lago yet.
Here, have a news report about all the people horrified by the prospect of Tulsi Gabbard.
Compromised, stupid, or both? Not sure we’ll ever know.
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