The problems with Tulsi Gabbard

Matt Jphnson, MSNBC -  When President Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and millions more displaced by six years of grinding civil war. Assad waged this war with indiscriminate brutality, mass terror and repression, the extent of which is rapidly coming to light after his ouster in December.

A few months after Gabbard’s visit, the Assad regime massacred scores of civilians with chemical weapons in Khan Sheikhoun. U.S. intelligence agencies declared that the Assad regime was responsible, while Trump said: “There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons.”

 

Except there was dispute — from Trump’s future nominee for DNI, Tulsi Gabbard. On the day of the Khan Sheikhon attack, Gabbard somehow already knew she was “skeptical” that the Assad regime was responsible. This reflexive position didn’t change in subsequent years, even though it contradicted U.S. and French intelligence — as well as joint reporting from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the United Nations. More