Senators are looking for excuses over reasons to refuse President Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — a combat veteran who previously served as a Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii and now faces character assassination.
Gabbard, who is meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday afternoon, committed two crimes that now threaten to derail her confirmation: leaving the Democrat party and campaigning against the interventionist impulses of the deep state war machine.
After Democrats fought to delay her way forward, Semafor reported Wednesday that Gabbard’s nomination was “on shaky ground” within the GOP. According to the outlet, Republicans are “particularly hesitant” about previous statements from Gabbard “that some have read as too warm toward Vladimir Putin and former Syrian regime leader Bashar al-Assad.” The piece goes on to note that Gabbard met with Assad in 2017 and highlights her criticism of “some intelligence-gathering tools” — such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) used to execute the Russia hoax.
One anonymous GOP Senator told Semafor that “[t]here are very serious concerns by enough members to put her nomination in jeopardy.” Another anonymous GOP senator told the outlet that Gabbard still “has a lot of questions to answer.”
Apparently, both senators have some research to do. If meeting with Assad is disqualifying, then why did the Senate confirm 94 to 3 to confirm Secretary of State John Kerry in 2013? Kerry met with the Syrian president while serving as a senator from Massachusetts in 2006. Were either of the anonymous senators who are now apparently critical of Gabbard’s meeting in office 12 years ago? Did they vote to confirm Kerry as the nation’s chief diplomat? If they were previously in the House, did either complain when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi met with Assad over President George W. Bush’s objections a year later?
Or is Gabbard’s meeting now suddenly a problem because, under President Trump, engaging with overseas adversaries is an effective strategy to keep the peace, and neocons in Congress are allergic to world peace?
Lest lawmakers truly believe Gabbard is a champion for the since-dismantled Assad regime, any honest examination of her past comments suggests otherwise. In 2019, Gabbard was asked in an NBC interview whether she believed the ex-Syrian dictator was a “good person.”
“No, I don’t,” she said.
But the story in Politico on Gabbard’s comments at the time focused on her refusal to explicitly condemn Assad as a “U.S. adversary.”
“My point is that whether it is Syria or any of these other countries, we need to look at how their interests are counter to or aligned with ours,” she said.
How radical that a member of Congress might offer a sobering analysis of the realities in the Middle East. When Assad’s regime finally did fall in December, the rebel coalition to take over was essentially run by ISIS and al-Qaida, two groups whose interests generally run counter to the nation they repeatedly want to bomb. Acknowledging there are no good guys in a fight doesn’t make someone an ally to one or the other.
Gabbard predicted what would ultimately happen in Syria during an interview with CNN nearly a decade ago.
She noted how the Syrians she met with during her 2017 visit acknowledged that “[t]here [were] no moderate rebels” attempting to overthrow Assad.
“The Syrian people recognize and they know that if President Assad is overthrown, then Al-Qaida or a group like Al-Qaida … will take charge of all of Syria,” she said.
If anything, Americans should feel safer with a director of national intelligence who can accurately foresee what might happen in global affairs.
Semafor cited “two people close to the White House” reportedly “still behind” Gabbard. According to the outlet, one of these sources said the “concerns” about Gabbard are “not people trying to put a knife in Tulsi,” but that “there’s a problem, and nobody can figure it out.”
What these anonymous senators and other opposition are obviously trying to figure out is how to sink Gabbard’s nomination before her scheduled hearing on Jan. 30.
Gabbard, a nearly two-decade veteran, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, and a long-time critic of America’s forever wars is no rookie competing against deep state smear campaigns. Last year, the former Democrat congresswoman was the subject of surveillance under a counterterrorism program within the U.S. Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS). Gabbard came under surveillance just “one day after she criticized the Biden Administration” on Fox News, according to a letter from the whistleblower watchdog group Empower Oversight.
Now the victim of deep state abuses may be given the keys to oversee the deep state in what would be the worst nightmare for Gabbard’s neocon opponents.