Dem
47
GOP
53
While Pete Hegseth's nomination is getting most of the attention at the moment, as everyone waits for Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) to announce her vote, there is more controversy ahead. In particular, nearly 100 former national security officials have written a letter urging the Senate to carefully scrutinize the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as DNI. "Scrutinize" is a euphemism for "reject." The officials note her lack of experience in anything even peripherally related to national security and also her previous controversial (pro-Russia) statements and a meeting she had with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. They also question her willingness to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to a president notorious for refusing to read the Presidential Daily Briefing. In Trump v1.0, he had the DNI or CIA director personally come and explain things to him.
As one example of her aligning herself with al-Assad, Gabbard publicly cast doubts on intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting that the Syrian leader attacked his own people with poison gas. She said the attacks were staged by agents from the U.K. She has also insisted the U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine were developing biological weapons, thus justifying Russia's invasion of Ukraine to destroy the (nonexistent) labs.
In addition, the letter points out that the DNI must manage 18 different spy agencies throughout the government, many of them at war with some of the others. This requires extensive management experience running organizations with a large number of competing divisions. She has no such experience. Her background is being a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, followed by four terms in the House representing Hawaii.
Left unsaid is the fear that she would leak critical U.S. intelligence to Vladimir Putin and other enemies of the United States, as she often defends dictators around the world. In some ways, she may be more endangered than Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Kash Patel because many Republicans actually care about national security and don't want to put a loose cannon in charge of it.
It is worth noting that in the past, far milder problems were fatal for cabinet-level nominees. George W. Bush's first pick for secretary of labor was derailed for housing an undocumented immigrant. Barack Obama's first nominee for HHS was forced out for not paying taxes on a car service. Joe Biden's pick for director of OMB had to drop out due to some of her sharply worded posts on social media. These are small potatoes compared to Gabbard's love of America's enemies and sharing posts from RT (formerly Russia Today), a Kremlin-backed station. (V)