TULSI GABBARD

Time  - Intelligence analysts are most concerned that Gabbard, in the role of director of national intelligence, might be motivated to censor intelligence conclusions critical of Russia and shut down funding for potentially fruitful investigations. Some intelligence officials are privately considering whether to resign if Gabbard is their new boss...

Gabbard’s background is strikingly different from the current director of national intelligence, Avril Haynes, who has a decades-long career working with intelligence agencies. Haynes was previously the deputy director of the CIA in the Obama Administration and was a senior member of Obama’s national security council. 

Gabbard has little to no intelligence experience. In her eight years in Congress, she never served on the House intelligence Committee...

She has long-been skeptical of American intelligence analysis and has taken public policy positions that echo Russian propaganda. 

While in Congress in 2017, Gabbard met with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad after the U.S. had broken diplomatic relations with the country over his bloody crackdown against his own people. Russia is a long-time backer of Assad and has supplied troops and weapons to prop up Assad’s government during Syria’s 13-year-long civil war. Gabbard said the U.S. should not be supporting opposition fighters in the country, which were being assisted by American intelligence services.

Later that year, after the Syrian military attacked civilians with sarin and chlorine in the town of Ltamenah in northern Syria, Gabbard echoed Russian denials that Assad was behind a chemical weapons attack. A United Nations investigation later concluded that the Syrian Air Force dropped the chemicals.

Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard posted a video espousing a disproven conspiracy theory that alleged pathogens could leak from biolabs in Ukraine, a theory advanced by Russia as part of its propaganda attempt to press for a ceasefire. Then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Gabbard had embraced “actual Russian propaganda” and called it “traitorous.” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Gabbard was “parroting fake Russian propaganda.”

That wasn’t the first time Gabbard was accused of trying to advance Russian interests. In 2019, Gabbard launched a longshot presidential bid that drew favorable coverage from Russian news and propaganda sites. Hillary Clinton suggested Russians were ‘grooming’ a Democrat to run as a third-party candidate and help Trump win re-election. It was widely assumed that Clinton was referring to Gabbard, who accused Clinton of trying to “destroy” her reputation.

Two years ago, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party, which she decried as “under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” Last month, she announced at a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina that she was a Republican