‘I Refuse to Be Their Puppet’ – Trump’s Pick for Intel Chief Faces Tough Questions About Russian Sympathies

The US Senate on Thursday grilled President Donald Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, specifically questioning her past relationships with dictators in Syria, Libya and Russia.

Gabbard, presently a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve, served in the House of Representatives as a Democratic legislator from 2013 to 2021, and served as the Vice Chair for the Democratic National Committee from 2013 to 2016. She switched her allegiance to the Republican Party in 2022.

While in Congress, Gabbard often criticized the foreign policy of Democratic President Barack Obama. She blasted that administration for not being tougher on suspected Islamic militants around the world, and at the same time met with since-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017.

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In a 2019 interview with MSNBC, Gabbard claimed that “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.” She later told CNN that “There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them.”

Assad has since been overthrown in Syria, and he and his family have found exile with Assad’s Kremlin allies in Moscow.

On Thursday, Gabbard told the Senate confirmation panel in her opening statements, “What truly unsettles my political opponents is that I refuse to be their puppet… I have no love for Assad or [late Lybian leader Muammar Gaddafi] or any dictator. I just hate al-Qaeda. I hate that we have leaders who cozy up to Islamist extremists, minimizing them to so called rebels.”

The former Democrat-turned-Trump-stalwart has been broadly criticized for her repeating Kremlin talking points about the war in Ukraine. She is also regarded with suspicion from both sides of the aisle for her past support for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who endangered US national security with his leaks of top-secret information and is now a naturalized Russian citizen.

“You consistently praised the actions of Edward Snowden, someone I believe jeopardized the security of our nation and then … fled to Russia,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) during the hearings. He asked Gabbard if she still believes that Snowden is “brave.”

She replied that Snowden “broke the law,” but she does not “agree with or support all the information or intelligence which he released, nor the way he did it.”

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told CNN that “she refused to say that [Snowden] was a traitor to our nation. It’s concerning to me, and it should be concerning to my colleagues,” he said.

Kelly, a retired astronaut and Navy captain, agreed with his CNN interviewer that it was concerning that Gabbard has refused to even admit that Russia was to blame for invading Ukraine.

Just one dissenting Republican senator said she may try to stop Gabbard’s nomination from going on to a final vote. Trump can only afford to lose three Republican senators’ votes to get her appointed ultimately to the highest intelligence position in the land, overseeing, for example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who also voted against Pete Hegseth during his Secretary of Defense confirmation hearings, is so far the only Republican who said she has yet to make up her mind about Gabbard.

The Senate has already approved Trump’s nomination of John Ratcliffe for CIA Director, who once held the post of DNI Director under the Republican president’s previous administration.