 "Tulsi Gabbard has previously defended her actions. saying her military service, deployments have made her skeptical about military interventions. AP")
Donald Trump has picked Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence.
But it won’t be easy getting her confirmed.
Gabbard has a long history of making statements that are both controversial and sympathetic to the United States’ enemies.
Indeed, some including ex-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton have even accused Gabbard of being a ‘foreign asset.’
Gabbard is also popular with Russia’s state media with one channel describing her as a ‘comrade.’
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after the September 11, 2001, attacks to coordinate the nation’s intelligence agencies and act as the president’s main intelligence adviser.
Let’s take a closer look:
A history of troubling remarks
First, let’s take a brief look at Gabbard.
The former Democrat has served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades.
She was deployed to Iraq and Kuwait and, according to the Hawaii National Guard, received a Combat Medical Badge in 2005 for “participation in combat operations under enemy hostile fire in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom III.”
Gabbard in 2017 travelled to Syria where she met President Bashar Assad.
At the time, Gabbard was a Democratic House member from Hawaii.
Her action angered many of her then-fellow Democrats who said said her visit helped legitimise a leader accused of war crimes and who has served as a proxy and host for Russia and Iran in West Asia.
That wasn’t the first time Gabbard’s actions on Syria raised eyebrows.
According to The Independent, in 2015, Gabbard, who travelled to the Syria-Turkey border, asked three victims of Assad’s bombings, “How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?”
“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was acting as translator recalled. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”
Gabbard’s previous statements have also caused alarm.
Gabbard says American assistance for Ukraine jeopardises global security by antagonising Russia. She has criticised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt
“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter at the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022.
Gabbard in 2022 endorsed one of Russia’s justifications for invading Ukraine: the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs working on some of the world’s nastiest pathogens.
The labs are part of an international effort to control outbreaks and stop bioweapons, but Moscow claimed Ukraine was using them to create deadly bioweapons.
Gabbard said she just voiced concerns about protecting the labs.
Gabbard also has suggested that Russia had legitimate security concerns in deciding to invade Ukraine, given its desire to join NATO.
According to Forbes, Gabbard also criticised Donald Trump’s airstrike which killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.
As per The New York Times, Gabbard also blamed the US for blowing up the Nord stream gas pipeline.
Her critics on both sides in Washington accuse her of parroting talking points straight out of America’s enemies – particularly the Kremlin.
“Gabbard, like Gaetz , is like a hand grenade ready to explode,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said “Republicans who throw themselves on those grenades for Donald Trump are risking their own personal reputations and places in history.”
Hillary in 2019 claimed that the Russians were ‘grooming’ a Democratic candidate – which many meant to mean Gabbard.
“I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Hillary was quoted as saying by CNN. “She’s the favourite of the Russians.”
“They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far,” Hillary added.
Gabbard ran for president in 2020 before dropping out and endorsing Democrat Joe Biden, who defeated Trump. Two years later, she left the Democratic Party to become an independent, criticising her former colleagues as an “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologues.
She subsequently campaigned for several high-profile Republicans , became a contributor to Fox News and started a podcast.
CNN reported that Gabbard was once placed on a Transportation Security Administration watchlist due to her foreign travel patterns and connections overseas.
Experts told CNN that a nominee for such a top post being placed on such a list was highly unusual – if not all out unprecedented.
Gabbard has previously defended her actions and said her military service, saying her deployments have left her skeptical about military interventions.
Democrats on attack, Republicans in defence mode
The Democrats have gone on the attack over Gabbard’s nomination.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and veteran of combat missions in Iraq, said she had concerns.
“I think she’s compromised,” Duckworth said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” citing Gabbard’s 2017 trip to Syria.
“The US intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes. And so my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” Duckworth said.
Adam Schiff, a California Democrat just elected to the Senate, said he would not describe Gabbard as a Russian asset, but said she had “very questionable judgment.”
“The problem is if our foreign allies don’t trust the head of our intelligence agencies, they’ll stop sharing information with us,” Schiff said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
“Do you really want her to have all of the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin’s pocket?” Senator Elizabeth Warren said on MSNBC. “That just has to be a hard no.”
Republicans have gone on the defence.
“For her to say ridiculous and outright dangerous words like that is wrong,” Senator Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, said on CNN, challenging Duckworth to retract her words.
“That’s the most dangerous thing she could say — is that a United States lieutenant colonel in the United States Army is compromised and is an asset of Russia.”
Gabbard’s nomination could be a close run thing because Republicans control the Senate by just three votes – 53 to 47.
However, with JD Vance set to be Vice-President, he could cast the tie breaking vote in her favour even if three Republicans vote no.
Senator James Lankford, another Oklahoma Republican, acknowledged having “lots of questions” for Gabbard as the Senate considers her nomination to lead the intelligence services. Lankford said on NBC that he wants to ask Gabbard about her meeting with Assad and some of her past comments about Russia.
“We want to know what the purpose was and what the direction for that was. As a member of Congress, we want to get a chance to talk about past comments that she’s made and get them into full context,” Lankford said.
As per Forbes, a number of other high-profile Republicans including Susan Collins, John Cornyn, and Mike Rounds have expressed concern .
Collins told the Jewish Insider there “are questions that I would want to ask her.”
“I’ve heard a lot of speculation about where she is in terms of Russia, for example,” Collins added.
Cornyn said he “would want to ask her about that” when asked about her ideas on Russia.
However, he added, “I have no doubt that she’s a patriot.”
But if so many Republican Senators are expressing concern, Gabbard’s nomination could be in trouble.
The Russians, meanwhile, seem overjoyed at Gabbard being picked.
“The CIA and the FBI are trembling,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian newspaper, was quoted as saying by The New York Times.
The paper added that Gabbard is thought of as “an agent of the Russian state” by Ukraine.
What do experts say?
That the Russians are getting everything they hoped for – and more.
“Gabbard fits an overall pattern of Trump breaking with much of the post-Cold War consensus,” Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs told The New York Times. “She is, for Russia, the one that perhaps most perfectly embodies the changes they were hoping for from the US.”
“Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin’s heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin’s ally rather than an adversary,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University added. “And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.”
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told The Independent, “Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming.”
Lister said Gabbard’s views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”
Trump’s election raises “very difficult issues” for America’s closest allies and members of the Five Eyes group, an intelligence-sharing coalition of the US, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, according to Thomas Juneau, a former strategic analyst with Canada’s Department of National Defence.
“Will the US be more selective in what it shares, to pressure allies? If yes, this will create mistrust between the US and its closest partners,” Juneau said.
“In the long term, this would negatively affect the Five Eyes, which is an extremely close partnership premised on an extraordinarily high level of trust.”
It remains to be seen if Gabbard’s appointment goes through – and how America’s allies and enemies react.
With inputs from agencies