Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination poses a risk to national security

President-elect Donald Trump has named former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11 to address what American politicians viewed as a lack of coordination among the various national intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits at the top of all American intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

Gabbard is astonishingly unqualified for almost every Cabinet position (as are some of Trump’s other nominees), but especially for the ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence officer – literally none. (She is a lieutenant colonel in the reserves and previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard with assignments in medical, police and civil affairs. She has won some local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant leadership or leadership experience Management of many things.

But let’s put aside for now that she’s clearly unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans typically accept presidents rewarding loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to place Gabbard in any office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her something. It’s not a nice tradition, but it’s not unprecedented either.

But naming Tulsi Gabbard as DNI isn’t just about handing a bouquet of flowers to a political troublemaker. Her appointment would be a threat to the security of the United States.

Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020 and tried to position herself as something of a peace candidate. But she is no peacemaker: She has been an apologist for both Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Their policies, otherwise incoherent, tend to sympathize with these two strongmen, portraying America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been perplexed by the way she positions herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe” politics: her views can seem both extreme left and extreme right, which is probably why people like Tucker Carlson – a conservative who leans towards…whatever pro- Russian right-wingers are now called – have developed – have taken a liking to the former Democrat (who used to be a Republican and is now a member of the GOP again).

In early 2017, while still a member of Congress, Gabbard met with Assad and said that peace in Syria was only possible if the international community had a conversation with him. “Let the Syrian people decide their own future, not the United States, not any other country,” Gabbard said after speaking with a man who prevented the Syrian people from choosing their future through the use of chemical weapons to determine your own future. Two years later, she added that Assad was “not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States” and that her critics were merely “warmongers.”

Gabbard’s shilling for Assad is a mystery, but she’s even more committed to carrying Putin’s waters. Tom Rogan, a conservative writer and hardly a liberal hand-wringer, summed up their record succinctly in the book Washington Examiner Today:

It has blamed NATO and the US for the Russian invasion of Ukraine (again, to the delight of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the US has set up secret bioweapons labs in that country, and has argues that the United States, not Russia, bears sole responsibility for Putin’s nuclear risk-taking.

When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity paled as she looked at Gabbard, who floated away in a haze of Kremlin talk and cheers for Russia. If Hannity tries to escort you back to the airlock before you run out of oxygen, you’re pretty far out.

A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed near the crown jewels of American intelligence. I have no idea why Trump nominated Gabbard; She was a supporter, but she was not the focus of his campaign, and he owes her very little. For someone as sleazy with transactions as Trump, this appointment doesn’t make much sense. It’s possible that Trump hates the intelligence community — which he blames for many of his problems in his first term — so much that Gabbard is his revenge. Or maybe he just likes the way she acts on TV.

But Trump could also be engaging in a ploy to get someone else involved. He might suspect that Gabbard cannot be confirmed by the Senate. Once she’s sent off, he could field an even more appalling candidate and claim he has no choice but to use a recess date as a backup. (It’s hard to imagine who could be worse as a DNI than Gabbard, but keep in mind that Trump has repeatedly promised to bring retired Gen. Mike Flynn back into government. Flynn is a decorated veteran caught in a scandal over Lying from Trump’s White House, the FBI was fired; he is now a conspirator who fully shares Trump’s desire for revenge against his enemies.

Gabbard has every right to her personal views, however inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize to her heart’s content for Assad and Putin. But as a security risk, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree full of warning lights. If she’s named America’s top intelligence officer, it’s everyone’s business.

Last spring, I described how U.S. government employees with clearances are trained each year to identify “insider threats,” people who could put sensitive information at risk for a variety of reasons. I said Trump’s open and persistent affection for Putin and other dictators would be a concern for any security organization. Gabbard’s behavior and admiration for dictators are no less cause for concern – especially since she would be at the head of the entire American intelligence community.

Presidents should be shown respect when filling their cabinet. But this nomination is likely to be one of Trump’s few appointments where future Majority Leader John Thune and his Republican colleagues will take a hard line and say no – at least if they still care about the Senate’s exercise of its constitutional duty to advise and consent.

Related: