Tulsi Gabbard in the crosshairs

by WorldTribune Staff, January 24, 2025 Real World News

Former Democrat and combat veteran Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence?

Not everyone is convinced especially after she only recently broke ranks and teamed up with Donald Trump.

Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard / Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0

Democrats and neocons in the Senate who are “allergic to world peace” are intent on toppling her nomination, an analyst claimed.

Gabbard met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill on Thursday. The Senate Intelligence Committee will hold a hearing on her nomination on Jan. 30.

Gabbard “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,” Tristan Justice wrote for The Federalist on Thursday.

Semafor reported on 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.

Justice noted for The Federalist: “If meeting with Assad is disqualifying, then why did the Senate vote 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?”

In an interview with CNN nearly a decade ago, Gabbard predicted what would ultimately happen in Syria. 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.

Militants led by the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) overthrew Assad last month. The group is led by a former leader of the Al Qaida affiliate Nusra Front.

“If anything, Americans should feel safer with a director of national intelligence who can accurately foresee what might happen in global affairs,” Justice noted.

The Federalist analysis concluded: “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.”


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