At her confirmation hearing on Thursday, Tulsi Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, was subjected to challenging questions from a number of Republican senators regarding her prior support for intelligence leaker Edward Snowden and her evolving opinions on an electronic surveillance program backed by senators whose votes she needs.
Despite having previously portrayed Snowden as a zealous whistleblower, Gabbard took a more critical stance toward him in an attempt to comfort the GOP lawmakers while defending her prior progressive stances. However, she refused to respond when asked if she thought he was a traitor.
To Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., Gabbard responded, “I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” after he twice asked if she thought Snowden was a traitor.
In addition, Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii who previously supported Trump after defecting from the Democratic Party and running for president, avoided answering certain questions from Republican members regarding her opinions on the contentious monitoring program that Snowden helped reveal.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, which is hosting the hearing and has the first vote on Gabbard’s candidacy, is controlled by Republicans with a slim 9–8 majority. Some of the Republican members asked questions that suggested Gabbard might not win their support.
Gabbard will need the support of every Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee in order to maintain her chances of being confirmed, as Democrats are predicted to reject her. The Senate as a whole could still vote to confirm her if the committee doesn’t support her, but it would need a 60-vote majority, which is a very unlikely situation.
For years, Gabbard, a Democratic member of Congress and commentator, praised Snowden as a courageous whistleblower who had revealed a huge amount of sensitive material and demanded that he be pardoned. During the session, Gabbard was questioned by both Democratic and Republican senators. She stated that she would not ask for Snowden’s pardon if he were confirmed for the top intelligence position, but she did not specify whether she thinks he is a traitor.
“If confirmed as the director of national intelligence, my responsibility would be to ensure the security of our nation’s secrets, and [I] would not take actions to advocate for any actions related to Snowden,” Gabbard said in response to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who asked if she would seek a pardon or clemency for Snowden.
Collins inquired as to whether Gabbard would pursue a pardon for Snowden, and Gabbard replied that she would.
In 2013, Snowden was working as a National Security Agency contractor when he released a mountain of classified material that revealed specifics of US monitoring activities across the world. Snowden has been charged with espionage after fleeing the country and relocating to Russia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the committee’s leading Democrat, claimed that Gabbard’s empathetic remarks on Snowden were inconsistent with the duties of the national intelligence director, who is charged with protecting the nation’s secrets.
What message would a DNI who would applaud employees and contractors who choose to reveal our country’s most private information as they see appropriate send to the intelligence community? Warner enquired.
Snowden helped expose illegal spying by the intelligence community, according to Gabbard, even if she claimed he should have used legal channels within the agency to voice his concerns to Congress and not revealed all the classified information he did.
The fact is that, despite breaking the law, he also made public information about heinous, unlawful, and unconstitutional programs occurring in our country, which resulted in significant reforms being passed by Congress, Gabbard said.
Snowden, who is now a citizen of Russia, posted on social media in response to the hearing.
Guys, courts have been finding that NSA violated the law for a decade. “Go now,” he wrote.
Warner also criticized Gabbard for previous remarks that echoed talking lines from the former dictatorship of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and blamed NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Warner remarked, “I don’t know if your intention was to defend those dictators or if you were just ignorant of the intelligence and how your statements would be interpreted.” It seriously calls into question your judgment in either scenario.
In response to the criticism, Gabbard asserted that she was neither Assad’s nor Putin’s puppet.
“The fact that I refuse to be their puppet is what really agitates my political opponents,” Gabbard stated.
Republicans also questioned Gabbard sharply about her longstanding opposition to an electronic monitoring program that permits U.S. intelligence services to listen in on foreigners outside the nation without a warrant in order to gather intelligence.
U.S. officials can also go through the data, including information incidentally gathered from Americans communicating with the foreign targets, thanks to the program, which is permitted by section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In the past, Gabbard had argued that the program violated civil liberties. However, she changed her mind a few weeks ago, stating that she now backed the surveillance powers because her worries had been resolved by changes last year.
Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, questioned Gabbard about her opinions on whether a warrant is necessary to search for Americans who show up in surveillance data that has been gathered and what requirements would be necessary to get one. At the moment, obtaining a warrant is not necessary for U.S. officials.
Gabbard avoided answering the query.
She referred to Congress and stated that it would be up to you, not me, to decide whether a warrant was necessary.
Cornyn, however, retorted that she would be responsible for managing the program as DNI.
According to Cornyn, “people will want to hear from you as the director of national intelligence about what we should do as policy makers.”
Although Gabbard disagrees with the national security hawks who control the Senate Intelligence Committee, her prior stance on section 702 places her in line with many progressive Democrats in Congress as well as libertarian-minded Republicans. The president’s choice to lead the FBI, Kash Patel, has likewise been a vocal critic of the monitoring program.
In addition to having the last say over what intelligence is sent to the president, Gabbard would be in charge of 18 espionage organizations with a combined budget of over $100 billion if he were confirmed by the Senate as director of national intelligence.
Gabbard has been accused of repeating propaganda from Russia and the former Assad regime in Syria while running for president, serving in Congress, and commentating on Trump’s campaign. He has also questioned U.S. intelligence reports that the Syrian government had carried out numerous chemical weapons attacks on its own citizens.
During the hearing, Gabbard denied accusations that she had allied with enemies of the United States, saying it was ridiculous to doubt her allegiance to the United States considering her political and Army career.
She claims that because she challenges Washington’s national security establishment and opposes U.S. military interventions to overthrow regimes, like as the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, she is being attacked.
Because to her 2017 meeting with Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria at the time, and her subsequent remarks that appeared to support the regime’s narrative of the country’s civil war, Gabbard has come under heavy fire. However, Gabbard has stated that she was only looking at ways to put an end to the conflict and that any peace agreement would need to be discussed with the Syrian government.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., the intelligence committee chairman, expressed his dismay at what he saw as assaults on Gabbard’s patriotism. As an officer in the Army National Guard and Reserve, Gabbard has had an active security clearance for years, the senator pointed out.
Five FBI background checks have been performed on her. Last week, I looked over the most recent for over two hours, reading over three hundred pages. Cotton said, “It’s as clean as a whistle.”
Additionally, he commended her for being prepared to voice unorthodox opinions and stated that her strategy would be necessary to restructure the Office of the Director of Intelligence, which he claimed had grown into an overburdened bureaucracy.
Cotton was informed by Gabbard that she concurred that the ODNI should be reorganized to better fulfill its initial purpose of coordinating the activities of the nation’s intelligence services.