Trump Allies Make Push for Lawmakers to Give Gabbard Top Spy Job
(Bloomberg) -- After Pete Hegseth won confirmation by a single vote to become defense secretary, Donald Trump’s entourage is mobilizing to bolster Tulsi Gabbard, another of the president’s imperiled nominees for a top national security post.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Manhattan’s Morning Commute Time Drops With New Congestion Toll
US Students’ Reading Scores Drop to Worst in More Than 20 Years
Texas HOA Charged With Discrimination for Banning Section 8 Renters
They’re pressing hard for lawmakers to back Gabbard — the president’s pick for director of national intelligence — ahead of her confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. That’s despite concerns about her shifting positions on intelligence collection, a 2017 meeting with Syria’s recently ousted leader, Bashar al-Assad, and statements seen as sympathetic to Russia’s position on Ukraine.
In a letter to the top senators on the committee, dozens of current and former officials in Trump’s orbit, including his current envoy for special missions Richard Grenell and the president’s former national security advisor Robert O’Brien, urged senators to back the former lawmaker who has transformed from liberal Democrat to Trump Republican.
And last week, the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was even more explicit.
“Any Republican Senator who votes against @TulsiGabbard deserves a primary,” he threatened in a post on X last week. “No more Deep State bullsh*t!!!!”
It’s a playbook that worked in the push to get Hegseth through the Senate. Many Republicans initially wavered over the former Fox News host’s qualifications and allegations of alcohol abuse, financial mismanagement and sexual misconduct, all of which he denied.
Trump never backed down, and his allies waged a pressure campaign against key senators including Iowa Republican Joni Ernst, who eventually voted in his favor.
Senate support for Gabbard has been tepid so far despite weeks of meetings with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Some Republicans say they want to hear her answers before making a decision. A lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, she would oversee the 18 US spy agencies, from the CIA and the National Security Agency to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Gabbard, 43, has been something of a political chameleon. The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii backed progressive Senator Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 and pursued her own Democratic presidential campaign in 2020 before dropping out and supporting Joe Biden in his successful race against Trump. Then she swung over to support Trump enthusiastically last year.
Assad, Snowden
Along the way, Gabbard’s past positions have provoked alarm among some lawmakers. They cite statements they say echoed Russian propaganda on Ukraine as well as her 2017 meeting with Syria’s Assad. Although she’s called Assad a “brutal dictator,” Gabbard questioned whether he was behind chemical weapons attacks and at the time castigated Trump for launching retaliatory missile strikes against his regime.
In 2020, Gabbard introduced legislation to drop all charges against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who disclosed top-secret US spy programs and found refuge in Russia.
As a Democrat, Gabbard voted against renewing a controversial spying law that has allowed intelligence agencies to capture private information about Americans when they communicate with foreigners who are under surveillance. Hawks on both sides of the political aisle view Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a warrantless wiretapping program introduced in 2008, as critical to national security. With the program sunsetting next year, they will look to the spy agencies’ directors to champion its renewal.
Gabbard has since said that Section 702 is needed to protect the US while also ensuring civil liberties.
“I tend to vote for almost everybody in both parties, but I want to see how the hearing goes,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Why did you go to Syria? What did you do regarding Assad? Why do you think Edward Snowden should be held as a hero? I certainly don’t. We’ll see how the hearing goes.”
Gabbard’s backers say she’ll offer fresh perspective after intelligence agencies failed to foresee major events like the Hamas attack on Israel. She has said her drive to push back against “regime-change wars” stems from the flawed intelligence that led to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, where she served in a medical unit.
In an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the committee that will handle Gabbard’s nomination, slammed Democrats for questioning Gabbard’s patriotism. He said her latest background check was “clean as a whistle.”
“We’re moving them along, we’re getting them confirmed,” Cotton said of Trump’s nominees.
But others in the intelligence community raise doubts about her judgment as the candidate for a job in which she’d be briefing Trump on what she considers the most important intelligence matters of the day.
“She seems to be someone prone to wanting to entertain and even support views that are contrary to consensus views in the United States regarding national security matters,” said Larry Pfeiffer, director of the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security at George Mason University. “That to me raises questions of judgment, temperament, personality, maybe more so than questions of loyalty.”
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
Indy Pass, the Anti-Vail Seasonal Ski Ticket, Is Gaining Fans
What America's Tech Billionaires Really Bought When They Backed Donald Trump
The CDC Won’t Give the Public a Full Picture of Fertility Treatment Risks
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.