Trump nominated former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence, the person at the pinnacle of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies. Her nomination is startling, not only because she has no relevant experience, but far more important, because she has a history of defending Putin, no matter what he does. These may be her sincere beliefs yet they hardly suggest that she should control America’s intelligence agencies. It’s doubtful that she could get a security clearance to work at the CIA or any of the other intelligence agencies. Yet Trump wants to put her in charge.

Writing at The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last asks: Is Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset or a dupe? Open the link to finish reading the article.

1. Aloha, Comrade!

When you woke up yesterday the idea that Pete Hegseth—a philandering morning TV host who has never run anything bigger than a frozen banana stand—could serve as the secretary of defense was the most preposterous idea in the history of the federal government.

By dinner time Trump had issued two nominations that made Hegseth look like Bobby Gates.

The Matt Gaetz appointment is getting most of the attention because of the irony. The DoJ being controlled by a man who was recently investigated by the same department for having an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, whom he (allegedly) paid to travel with him? It’s too good.

Also, in the near term, the attorney general can a lot of damage to America. The AG has the power both to turn the state against its citizens and to shield wrongdoers from accountability.

But it’s the appointment of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence that worries me more. Because for a decade Gabbard has looked and behaved like a Russian asset. 

In four terms as a congresswoman her most notable actions were ongoing defenses of two war criminals: Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin.

Let me tell you her story.

It began in 2013, when Assad’s military used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. The Obama administration was mulling over responses and Gabbard argued that America should not intervene. She said she would vote against authorizing Obama to use force. 

Why Syria?

Syria and Russia had long enjoyed a cooperative relationship. In 2015, that partnership blossomed into direct Russian military intervention on Assad’s behalf. In March of 2016, 392 members of the House voted for a non-binding resolution of on holding Assad accountable for his crimes against humanity. The only Democrat to vote against it was Gabbard.

In December 2016, Gabbard sought an audience with the newly-elected Trump to promote a bill she called the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act.” The goal of this bill was to withdraw U.S. military support for the Syrian rebels fighting against the combined forces of Assad and Putin.1

And in 2017, Gabbard made an unannounced trip to Syria. She did not give her congressional colleagues advance notice that she was traveling to the region and she refused to disclose who had funded the trip. While there, she met with Assad. Twice.

In fact, Gabbard’s only notable break with Trump came in 2017, after Trump authorized a cruise missile strike on Syria in retaliation for Assad deploying nerve agents against civilians. Gabbard called this—Trump’s action, not Assad’s—“dangerous,” “rash,” and “reckless.”2

And she kept going. In 2019, she proclaimed that Assad “is not the enemy of the United States.”

For an on-the-make politician, that’s an awful lot of political capital spent defending a mid-level war criminal. Curious, no?

But of course, it wasn’t really about Syria. It was about Russia.

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When Gabbard made her failed presidential run in 2020, she was surreptitiously backed by Russian cyber assets. Russia’s interest in promoting Gabbard was obvious enough that Hillary Clinton publicly observed that it was clear the Kremlin was grooming her.

The extent of Gabbard’s affinity not just for Assad, but for Putin, spilled into the open when Russia invaded Ukraine. Gabbard defendedPutin’s invasion even before it began, blaming the Biden administration for forcing Russia’s hand.3

Appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, she said that it was the Biden administration who wanted war in Ukraine:

President Biden could end this crisis and prevent a war with Russia by doing something very simple. . .

Guaranteeing that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO because if Ukraine became a member of NATO, that would put U.S. and NATO troops right on the doorstep of Russia, which, as Putin has laid out, would undermine their national security interests. . . .

The reality is that it is highly, highly unlikely that Ukraine will ever become a member of NATO anyway. So the question is, why don’t president Biden and NATO leaders actually just say that and guarantee it?

Which begs the question of why are we in this position then? If the answer to this and preventing this war from happening is very clear as day. And really, it just points to one conclusion that I can see, which is, they actually want Russia to invade Ukraine.

Why did Gabbard think Biden wanted Russia to invade Ukraine? So that it could impose sanctions on Putin. And to be clear here: Gabbard thought that imposing sanctions on Vladimir Putin would be terrible. She explained:

It gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to go and levy draconian sanctions, which are a modern-day siege against Russia and the Russian people.

Sanctions, by the way, are a long-standing bugaboo of Gabbard’s. In 2020, she introduced a bill designed to prove that U.S. sanctions kill children in foreign countries so as to make it harder for the U.S. to deploy sanctions against adversaries.

So in case you’re keeping score: Gabbard is opposed both to U.S. military intervention and to U.S.-imposed sanctions.

But she is not opposed to the Syrian dictator gassing civilians or Russia pursuing its “security interests” by invading neighboring countries.

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As the war progressed, Gabbard would go on to parrot Russian claims about the United States funding “biolabs” across Ukraine as part of her ongoing attempt to justify Putin’s aggression.

After Putin arrested a Russian journalist who protested the invasion of Ukraine, Gabbard rushed onto TV to defend Putin. She claimed that the media environment in Russia was “not so different” from America.

Last April, Gabbard accused President Biden of trying to “destroy” Russia:

All the statements and comments that the Biden-Harris administration has made from the beginning of this [Russo-Ukrainian] war essentially point to their objective being basically to destroy Russia.

In case you cannot tell: Gabbard viewed the “destruction” of the Putin regime in Russia as a bad thing.4

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2. Asset or Dupe?

Is Gabbard a Russian asset? I don’t know if that’s how she sees herself. But the Russians certainly view her that way.

Here’s the thing about intelligence assets: Sometimes an asset is a person you must own and direct. But sometimes an asset will do what you want her to, either with gentle, indirect inputs or completely under her own steam.

Walter Duranty did not officially report to the Kremlin, but Stalin viewed him as a valuable asset and made sure to stroke him and position him in ways that were useful to the USSR. The result was that Duranty’s dispatches to the New York Timeswere indistinguishable from something a KGB-controlled spy would have written.

Whether or not Duranty saw himself as a Russian agent, Stalin and the Soviet secret services classified him as an asset and were diligent in Duranty’s care and feeding.

So when it comes to Gabbard, ask yourself: What would she have done differently over the last decade if she had been formally controlled by Putin?

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Gabbard says, over and over, that the only thing she cares about is “peace.” But in this quest for peace she has, over and over, attacked and attempted to discredit the U.S. intelligence community while embracing propaganda emanating from the Kremlin.

She has attempted to stop U.S. military intervention against Russian allies while also opposing sanctions against them.

She has met secretly with Russian clients.

She has blamed the United States for an invasion conducted by Russian forces, attempted to draw false equivalence between America and Russia, and accused the American president of being unfairly belligerent toward Putin—whose regime has killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and abducted 20,000 Ukrainian children.

Even if Gabbard is only an unwitting dupe, from the Russian perspective her elevation to DNI would represent the greatest achievement in the history of espionage. Russia will have fully penetrated the American intelligence apparatus at the very top level.

Having Gabbard serve as DNI would probably set back America’s intelligence services by a generation.

First, asset recruitment would become impossible. Any potential recruit in the field would be a fool to cooperate with U.S. intelligence knowing that the American DNI was at least functionally on Putin’s side.

Second, no secrets would be safe. There is no way Gabbard could pass a security clearance check in 2024. The only way for her to gain access to this level of information is to be appointed to the top of the organization. She could never be considered for a job inside, say, the CIA.5

Third, she’s not even on America’s side. Just objectively speaking Gabbard views the American government as a problem to be resolved and the interests of the Russian government as valid and worth accommodating.

Making Gabbard director of national intelligence simply makes no sense. It’s the equivalent of the American government gouging its own eyes out and purposefully making itself blind to the covert actions of its adversaries.

Or rather, it makes no sense for America.

For Russia, DNI Gabbard makes all the sense in the world.