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November 30th , 2024 Len’s Political Note #688 Oppose Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence
2025 Trump Cabinet
Opposition to Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination is different from opposition to Matt Gaetz or Pete Hegseth or even Linda McMahon. It has nothing to do with sex scandals or money scandals. The opposition has to do with Tulsi Gabbard’s views and, perhaps, to some extent, to the reasons for those views.
Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth has suggested that Gabbard is compromised. Republican Senator Eric Schmitt says any claim that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian asset is a slur and false. There is no evidence that Gabbard is willingly manipulated by Russia, but her views on intelligence are surprising. Her views are particularly surprising for someone considered for the position of Director of National Intelligence, for coordinating the 18 intelligence agencies we have. Since those agencies are so resistant to coordination, it may be more realistic to say that her role would be to coordinate the information of those intelligence agencies for the President of the United States.
She has some odd views for someone in her role. She argues for the repeal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which enables a kind of mass surveillance. Passed in 2008, members of the intelligence community argue that the capacity to track communications by foreigners has been crucial in preventing 9/11 type attacks. Critics argue that Section 702 has been misused, used for tracking communications by citizens, a dangerous intrusion on our civil liberties. Would Tulsi Gabbard, if confirmed as DNI Director, create guidelines to prevent abuse? She has not said a word.
Tulsi Gabbard has also been criticized for her meeting with Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria. She became convinced, despite intelligence reports to the contrary, that it was not clear that Syria had used chemical weapons against his own people. I remember television news showing what looked a lot like Syrians in cities opposed to Assad dying from chemical weapon attacks. What would possess Gabbard to believe Assad is beyond me. Her support for Assad, an ally if not an asset of the Russians, gives credence to claims that she is unreasonably supportive of Russia.
She argues, for instance, for Ukrainian and American responsibility for the war between Ukraine and Russia. She would argue that a western oriented Ukraine, let alone a Ukraine that is a member of NATO, would create legitimate Russian fear of being surrounded by an aggressive West.
Gabbard is far too late to that argument. The West made its commitment twenty years ago to accepting the Western aspirations of former Soviet Union bloc countries when it admitted Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia to NATO and to the European Union. Western responsiveness to Ukraine was an extension of a policy that already existed. When he attacked Ukraine, Putin was defending the kleptocracy he has created out of the revolutions against Communism led by Gorbachev and Yeltsin. A democratic and prosperous Ukraine matching the democratic and prosperous Baltic countries that joined the West in 2004 would have been an example to the Russian people that would have been dangerous to Putin.
Confirming Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence would further Donald Trump’s aspirations for acquiescence to Russia and, perhaps, his personal aspiration to create his very own kleptocracy. I do not argue that Tulsi Gabbard is scandalously connected to Russia. Rather, I believe she is misguided and wrong for the job.
She probably went wrong, to begin with, when she decided to run for President as a Congresswoman. When Members of Congress run for President, they become figures of fun. Senators, Generals, Governors, and, now Captains of Industry (even if they are faux captains like Trump) are where we find our Presidents. A signal of her being off base, was the inclusion in her 2020 run for President of a collaboration with Matt Gaetz introducing a bill to drop criminal charges against Edward Snowden and a similar proposal with extreme and idiosyncratic right wing Congressman Thomas Massie toward freeing Julian Assange. A further indication of something being wrong with her judgment was her initial willingness to accept claims of US funded biolabs for biological weapons being developed in Ukraine. It may be a good thing that she walked support of that claim back, but it does not offset her willingness to believe and repeat such a claim.
Her journey to success before developing these peculiar views was, in many ways, impressive. She was born in American Samoa. Her father had a mixed European and Samoan ancestry. Her mother was from the American Midwest. They moved their family of five children to Hawaii when Tulsi Gabbard was two years old. In Hawaii, with the exception of two years, she was home schooled. Her mom had become Hindu. She and her husband became followers of the Science of Identify Foundation (SIF), a breakaway from the Hindu-based Hare Krishna movement. Tulsi Gabbard’s two in-school years were in a boarding school in the Phillippines run by the SIF. Her life at home was dominated by surfing, yoga, and elements of the family religion. Central to the SIF movement, were opposition to homosexuality, opposition to Islam, and an attachment to its Hindu origins. The religion’s opposition to homosexuality led to her joining her father in his movement against same sex marriage, a position for which she has since apologized.
In 2003, after some time in community college, Tulsi Gabbard was elected to the Hawaii state legislature. That same year, she joined the Hawaii Army National Guard. In 2004, she was deployed for a one-year tour in Iraq as a medical specialist. Away from the legislature and criticized by a potential opponent, she declined to run for reelection. Instead, she enrolled in Officer Candidate School and graduated at the top of her class, measured by both her academic and physical performance. She also completed her BA from Hawaii Pacific University in 2009.
She found herself as an officer in the army, advancing beyond her initial role in the military police to captain and then to major. In 2020, as a major, she was assigned to the Psychological Operations Command. After that, she was promoted to Lt. Colonel and assigned as the Civil Affairs officer in support of a Special Operations mission in Africa.
Home after her second deployment, in 2009 she was elected to the Honolulu city council. Having helped food vendors by reducing the regulations they had to live with and making life tougher for the homeless by allowing for confiscation of personal property stored in public spaces, she ran for Congress and was elected.
She was the first Samoan-American who was a voting member of Congress and Congress’s first Hindu member. Tulsi Gabbard’s first two terms in Congress evoked her past. She supported bills on behalf of veterans and a bill that addresses child abuse on military bases. She was critical of President Barack Obama for being insufficiently wary of Muslim extremists. Nevertheless, she spoke at the 2012 Democratic nominating convention. Nancy Pelosi described her as an emerging star.
Tulsi Gabbard’s vision for her third and fourth term was broader – supporting legislation to transition away from fossil fuels, to ensure there was a paper record for review in every state’s elections and sought more authority for Congress on issues that have allowed presidents to move forward to war. What is more, she became interested in running for President.
Her interest in running for President was, at best, an act of hubris, a defiance of the conventional. Members of Congress have run before. When they ran, they were treated as oddities. Related to the 2016 campaign, she wound up in a quarrel with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz about debates. Ultimately, she endorsed Bernie Sanders for President, opposed superdelegates at Presidential conventions, and supported Keith Ellison for DNC chair.
Even without aspirations for the presidency, Tulsi Gabbard conducted a kind of affinity foreign policy. Like Jewish Congressmembers who go to Israel or Irish Congressmembers who go to Ireland, Tulsi Gabbard, who had left the SIF movement to see herself as a mainstream Vaishnavic Hindu, participating in festivals such as Dwiali with other Hindu-Americans, met with India’s Prime Minister Modi.
If Tulsi Gabbard had had a little more patience, if she had a greater capacity to test her most extreme views against reality, she might of stayed as a Democrat and become an important figure. If she were to be confirmed as Director of National Intelligence, she certainly would have achieved a role of great importance. However, having incorporated her extreme views that coincide so clearly with the views of the Russian leadership into her understanding of the world, she should not be confirmed for this post. With your help, she will not be confirmed at Director of National Intelligence.
Thank the following Republican Senators for expressing their concerns about Matt Gaetz and urge them to oppose Tulsi Gabbard: Alaska’s Lisa Mukowski (202)-224-6665, Maine’s Susan Collins (202) 224-2523, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell (202) 224-2541, and Utah’s Congressman John Curtis (202) 225-7751 who has been elected Senator from Utah. Two members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, James Lankford (202) 224-5754 of Oklahoma and Mike Rounds 202-224-5842 of South Dakota have expressed their concerns about Tulsi Gabbard. Thank them and urge them to oppose her confirmation as DNI. Virginia Democrat Mark Warner 202-224-2023 is likely to be the Vice Chairman of the committee. Contact him to urge that he oppose Tulsi Gabbard as well.
Call their offices. Tell the aide who answers what you think and why.
