On the day Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine, kickstarting two years of ongoing misery in the region, politicians in Washington were practically unanimous in their condemnation of Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
One notable exception was Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, and military veteran who had run a failed campaign for president in 2020, but has now been picked as Donald Trump’s intelligence chief.
“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if [the Biden administration and] Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of Nato,” she tweeted.
That statement was only the latest of a series of outlandish stances on foreign policy, including her scepticism about chemical weapons attacks in Syria that followed two controversial meetings with Bashar al-Assad.
After leaving the Democratic Party in October 2022, Ms Gabbard has undergone a remarkable conversion to become one of Mr Trump’s most loyal allies.
Her nomination as the next director of national intelligence on Wednesday could bring about the biggest shake-up of the American spying community in decades.
Military industrial complex
Since joining the Republican Party earlier this year, Ms Gabbard has accused the government of being complicit in a “military industrial complex” and has railed against the “foreign policy establishment in Washington”.
Soon after Jan 20, if her nomination is confirmed by the Senate, she is set to join that establishment as its leader.
The DNI oversees the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, from the leviathan FBI and NSA to the more obscure National Reconnaissance Office.
The position was created in the aftermath of 9/11, and has never been held by a politician with such contempt for the intelligence activities they oversee.
In 2015, Ms Gabbard raised eyebrows at the CIA, when she tried to introduce legislation to block the agency’s activities in Syria. The plan was blocked by congressional committees.
Four years later, she called on the US government to drop charges against Julian Assange, the Australian journalist and Wikileaks founder who published thousands of classified intelligence documents on the internet. She then called for the pardoning of Edward Snowdon, an NSA employee who supplied much of the material
She has also pushed a Kremlin-backed conspiracy theory that Ukraine was developing US-backed biological weapons laboratories.
These positions will not make her popular in the US intelligence community, and her appointment is likely to face significant opposition in the Senate before Mr Trump takes office next year.
