Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been confirmed by the Senate to the position of director of national intelligence.
Gabbard was confirmed in a 52–48 vote on Feb. 12 and will move immediately to assume her responsibilities in the nation’s top intelligence role.
The confirmation follows a contentious few weeks of debate over Gabbard’s qualifications and judgment, in which lawmakers from both sides of the aisle questioned her ability to lead the intelligence community before voting along party lines.
Leading intelligence Democrats voted against Gabbard’s nomination, saying that the former congresswoman’s history of speaking favorably of hostile foreign powers raised questions about her ability to discern key intelligence matters.
Those criticisms largely center on Gabbard’s history of suggesting NATO is to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and her questioning of whether chemical weapons were used in the Syrian Civil War.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said that, though he appreciated Gabbard’s service, he believed she had demonstrated poor judgment in political and national security matters and that her nomination would ultimately weaken the nation’s intelligence community.
“Over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to support the interests of the United States ... versus those of our adversaries, time and time again she picks our adversaries,” Bennet said on the Senate floor.
Conversely, Senate Republicans championed Gabbard’s willingness to take on what they see as an entrenched bureaucratic class within the intelligence community that too frequently does not work with Americans’ best interests in mind.
“I know Tulsi will be committed to protecting all Americans at this pivotal moment in American history,” Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said.
“The intelligence community needs to refocus on its core mission: collecting intelligence and providing unbiased analysis of that information,” he added.
Gabbard’s nomination was highly scrutinized by both Democrats and Republicans who expressed concern over Gabbard’s desire to eliminate controversial surveillance laws and her praise of Edward Snowden, an intelligence contractor who leaked more than a million files from U.S. intelligence and defense servers before fleeing to Russia.
Members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence largely characterized Snowden as a “traitor” and said that surveillance laws were a boon to national security despite the risk they pose to American civil liberties.
Gabbard assured the committee that she would not pardon Snowden unless directed to do so by the president, but was uncomfortable describing him as a “traitor” given that Gabbard herself had been deemed a traitor by some former officials, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Instead, Gabbard said she supported Snowden’s success in exposing previously unknown programs through which the government solicited the assistance of tech companies to spy on American citizens on a massive scale.
“My statements in the past have been reflective of the egregious and illegal programs that were exposed in that leak,” Gabbard said.
Similarly, when pressed on her belief that section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) should be repealed, Gabbard said that she had reconsidered her position and now considered the law to be “essential for our national security.”
As such, though Gabbard said she now believed FISA 702 is an essential tool for national security, she clarified that the intelligence community has been given too long a leash and that its actions have largely worked counter to its mission.
“For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution,” Gabbard said during her testimony to the committee last month.
“Ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people is a mandate of leadership that rises above partisan politics,” she added.
