The Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence Wednesday, 52-48, as enough Republicans coalesced behind a nominee once seen as facing one of the roughest paths to confirmation.
Gabbard, who represented Hawaii in the House as a Democrat from 2013 to 2021, will lead an intelligence office that spans 18 agencies and organizations.
“Our country will be safer and more secure with Director Gabbard,” Senate Intelligence Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a social media post after the vote.
Gabbard moved through the Wednesday vote with Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the only Republican opponent. The Senate agreed to limit floor debate on her nomination in a party-line vote Monday. But her road to confirmation wasn’t always clear.
McConnell said in a statement that Gabbard has “a history of alarming lapses in judgment,” and that confirming her is “an unnecessary risk.”
“So is empowering a DNI who only acknowledged the value of critical intelligence collection authorities when her nomination appeared to be in jeopardy,” he added.
Questions had swirled about her past support for whistleblower Edward Snowden, her previous opposition to Section 702 of a law known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and a 2017 trip to Syria on which she met with then-leader Bashar Assad.
Democrats raised concerns about Gabbard in the hours leading up to her confirmation vote.
“Every single Democrat, I am really proud to say, will oppose this awful nomination,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said. “We simply cannot, in good conscience, trust the most classified secrets to someone who echoes Russian propaganda and falls for conspiracy theories.”
Gabbard said at a hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee that she doesn’t regret her trip to Syria to meet with Assad, a leader who had used chemical weapons against his own people. She said she asked Assad “tough questions about his own regime’s actions” but didn’t extract any concessions from the conversation, later adding that she “shed no tears for the fall of the Assad regime.”
Assad was overthrown last year and is in exile in Russia.
Gabbard also faced bipartisan scrutiny for her statements about Snowden. Lawmakers pressed her to call the whistleblower a traitor, but she declined. Snowden was an intelligence contractor who in 2013 exposed details of the National Security Agency’s information-gathering programs.
Gabbard, as a House member, had introduced a resolution encouraging the federal government to drop all charges against Snowden. She told the Senate Intelligence Committee that she wouldn’t, as DNI, support a pardon for Snowden.
“The fact is, he also, even as he broke the law, released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs that are happening within our government that led to serious reforms that Congress undertook,” she said during the hearing.
Gabbard has also changed her tune on Section 702, which allows U.S. surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S. But the surveillance has at times ensnared American citizens. She sponsored a House bill in 2020 that would have repealed the provision. Since her nomination, she has supported Section 702, citing changes made to the law in 2024.
When asked at her confirmation hearing about the specific changes that caused her to shift her stance, however, she didn’t cite any. As DNI, she would be involved in any effort to renew Section 702 when it comes due for reauthorization in 2026.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a Senate Intelligence Committee member and a leading privacy advocate, said on the floor Tuesday that he opposed Gabbard’s confirmation, in part because of her past writings deriding intelligence and law enforcement agencies. However, he said he saw some promise in a handful of privacy-related commitments she made at her hearing.
“If Ms. Gabbard is confirmed, my first order of business will be to hold her to the commitments she made during her confirmation process,” Wyden said. “With regard to surveillance policy, she expressed her support for a warrant requirement for U.S. person searches of communications collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. With Section 702 reauthorization up next year the DNI’s support of reforms like these will be critical to protecting the privacy rights of Americans.”
The committee last week advanced Gabbard’s nomination favorably in a party-line vote. Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Todd Young, R-Ind., once seen as potential skeptics, threw their support behind the nominee.
Young, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer, said ahead of the committee vote that he “got the reassurances we needed” regarding Gabbard’s nomination.
Gabbard’s confirmation also comes as Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal government are impacting intelligence and related agencies.
Trump said on Feb. 7 he would fire some of the FBI agents who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection in the Capitol, but not all of them. The same day a federal judge temporarily halted the administration from making public a list of the FBI officials involved in cases tied to the attack.
The CIA also reportedly sent an unclassified email with a list of recent hires in an effort to comply with an executive order to reduce the government’s workforce. And employees at multiple intelligence agencies have reportedly been sent deferred resignation offers from the Trump administration.
Gabbard in her hearing sought to paint a picture of a politicized intelligence community and said she saw Trump’s election as “a clear mandate to break this cycle of failure” and focus on the role’s “essential mission.”
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