President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be the director of national intelligence has stunned the intelligence community she’s set to lead.
Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii until 2021 and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, has no formal intelligence experience and she has claimed that she’s on a terror watchlist.
Gabbard announced at a Trump rally last month that she was joining the Republican Party and in September, she said in a video shared on X that she and her husband had been flagged as a “domestic terror threat” in July which she blamed on her rightward shift.
“Just before boarding a flight on July 23, my husband and I were pulled aside for additional TSA screening,” Gabbard said. “We were told by the TSA agent there that this was just a random selection. Now, that might have been believable if it had happened just once or twice. But five, six, seven, eight times in a row? There’s no way.”
“Federal air marshal whistleblowers came forward with very disturbing information,” she claimed. “They revealed that I had been added to a secret terror watchlist run by the TSA called Quiet Skies on July 23. This is the very same day my husband and I began to be subjected to those in-depth TSA searches.”
Gabbard went on to claim that she had been targeted because of her criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The TSA placed me on the Quiet Skies domestic terror watchlist in what I can only describe as the ultimate betrayal,” she said.
“The Harris-Biden regime has now labeled me a domestic terror threat. Why? They see me as a threat to their power,” she claimed.
The former congresswoman has regularly criticized American wars and has faced scrutiny for her apparently favorable views of authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Bashar Al-Assad of Syria.
A former intelligence official told Politico that the choice was a “left turn and off the bridge.” But some were relieved that Trump didn’t nominate his former Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, who also served as acting DNI during Trump’s first stint in the White House.
Gabbard looks set to face difficult Senate confirmation hearings, particularly because from members of her former party, with her foreign policy views out of the mainstream of both parties.
Just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she shared a video on X in which she said the Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans should put “geopolitics” to the side. She subsequently argued that the war could have been avoided if the West had issued a guarantee that Ukraine would never be allowed to join NATO.
Gabbard has dabbled in conspiracy theories about the US involvement in Ukraine, including saying that Ukraine wasn’t worth protecting because it “isn’t actually a democracy” and appearing to echo Russian claims that US-funded “biolabs” in the country might be developing chemical or biological weapons. She later clarified that she did not believe the labs were developing weapons but was concerned about “dangerous pathogens” being released from the labs during the war. In the meantime, Republican senator and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused her of spreading “treasonous lies,” something she angrily denied.
The claims about Ukraine had appeared similar to suggestions made in Russian propaganda efforts, which baselessly argued that the US was funding the labs in Ukraine to make illegal bio weapons for use against the Russians.
During her time in Congress in 2017, she went on a secret trip to see Al-Assad, later stating that he’s not an “enemy” of the US.
After serving 17 years in the Hawaii National Guard, Gabbard joined an Army reserve unit. She has said that the experiences of deploying to the Horn of Africa, Kuwait, and Iraq made her skeptical of US interventions.
A Western intelligence official shared their concern with the choice of Gabbard with Politico, saying that it may prompt US allies to decrease the amount of information they share with the US.
“I imagine even Israel will have serious qualms — America’s main intelligence partner on terrorist threats,” the official told the outlet. “Worse still, what some allies share may now be shaped by political goals rather than professional intelligence sharing.”
The office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after the 9/11 2001 terror attacks and is tasked with coordinating intelligence efforts across the US government and around the world.
In his statement announcing Gabbard as his pick for the role, Trump said that she “has fought for our Country and the Freedoms of all Americans” for “over two decades.”
“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength. Tulsi will make us all proud!” he added.
Gabbard, who was one of the only Democratic House members not to vote to impeach Trump in 2019 for abusing power and obstructing Congress, said on X that she was grateful to Trump “for the opportunity to serve as a member of your cabinet to defend the safety, security and freedom of the American people.”
