It was narrower than a city street in Honduras. The Senate Intelligence Committee has essentially cleared the way for Tulsi Gabbard to be the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), voting 9-8 to support President Donald Trump’s nominee. Democrats and some Republicans on the committee grilled Gabbard ruthlessly for days, questioning her judgment, patriotism and qualifications for the job, suggesting she was soft on Russia and China because she is not anxious to start a nuclear war. She will have to face a vote from the full Senate but that seems likely to break along party lines.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who never appeared comfortable with the direction of her party is foundational to the New Republican Party of Donald Trump that appeals to common sense average Americans more than the woke bankers and academics who are watching history pass them by. She, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr (who was also in a Senate trial this week), is one of the reasons that Trump won the presidential election with the votes of disaffected Democrats.
Gabbard notably backtracked on her opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), telling Punchbowl News, “If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people.” This was extremely disappointing because the FISA warrants are always government intrusion waiting to happen, but if she had to make this one concession to intelligence hawks to gain the nomination, then it was worth it. America finally has an intelligence chief who will be more interested in outing real security risks and not spying on Americans.
If she wins the larger Senate vote, as it is now expected, the first question I would have for Gabbard is whether it is possible to drastically prune the so-called intelligence community that has become increasingly bloated and invasive. Counting the ODNI, the US has 18 intelligence agencies. Incredibly, no senator asked Gabbard if she thought that number was too high. No democracy needs that much intelligence gathering. It is no wonder that these agencies have often directed their energies at the political enemies of the sitting president.
And you have to laugh at the criticism of those senators who didn’t think Gabbard had the experience to run national intelligence. She couldn’t possibly do a worse job of coordinating the clowns responsible for safeguarding national security with their blatant incompetence. If the withdrawal from Afghanistan was a military fiasco, it was also emblematic of the sort of failures that have characterized America’s intelligence community. The experts couldn’t have been more wrong in their assessment of the Taliban and the fall of Kabul. When the transport aircraft were leaving the runway, engorged with fleeing Americans and allies, the intelligence team was ready to declare a state of emergency.
The intelligence on the war in Ukraine has been abominable as well, or so it appears because the Biden administration continued to pour billions of dollars into a war that Ukraine cannot win and cannot even fight anymore because it has run out of military aged men and women, with more than a million dead on the battlefield. Trump too, appears to be warming to insanely corrupt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, though it is difficult to know if the president isn't playing mind games with the dictator in Kyiv, just as he loves to do with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Gabbard’s task will be to streamline the intelligence community while encouraging greater communication and cooperation between the various agencies. If so many retired intelligence operatives were prepared to dismiss Hunter Biden’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” then you know these folks are either ideologically motivated or just plain stupid.
Gabbard made it clear in her opening remarks last week that she is entirely serious about bringing order to the chaos of the ODNI.
“I'm honored and grateful to President Trump for his trust and confidence in nominating me to serve our country as the Director of National Intelligence at a time when trust in the intelligence community, unfortunately, is at an all-time low. Chuck Schumer admitted a few years ago, ‘You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.’ Gabbard said, 'For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in the constitution,”
That’s a raw but completely accurate depiction of how Americans view the self-serving politicos of security who seem completely unabashed by their failings and failures; unconcerned about targeting your phone calls and text messages and completely oblivious to their growing reputation as people who don’t just get it wrong once in a while but almost never get it right.
To illustrate these costly failures, Gabbad reached back to the Iraq war, a costly waste of military personnel and national treasure that was “based upon a total fabrication or complete failure of intelligence. This disastrous decision led to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers, millions of people in the Middle East, mass migration, destabilization and undermining of the security and stability of our European allies, the rise of ISIS, strengthening of Al-Qaeda and other Islamist jihadist groups, and strengthening Iran,” she told the committee.
“The American people elected Donald Trump as their president not once, but twice and yet the FBI and intelligence agencies were politicized by his opponents to undermine his presidency and falsely portray him as a puppet of Putin. Title I of FISA was used illegally to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page using a Clinton campaign-funded false dossier as their so-called evidence," she continued.
Gabbard even noted how a past DNI, the notorious fibber James Clapper, lied to the Intel committee just how extensive was the federal government’s spying on American citizens. She summed up her mission magnificently, “The bottom line is this, this must end. President Trump's reelection is a clear mandate from the American people to break this cycle of failure and the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community and begin to restore trust in those who've been charged with the critical task of securing our nation. If confirmed as DNI I will do my very best to fulfill this mandate and bring leadership to the intelligence community with a laser-like focus on our essential mission, ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people.”
Gabbard knew it was going to be another attack show from the Democrats who would use every ad hominem line in their lexicon, including callng her a "Russian asset" an absurd contention. “Now before I close, I want to warn the American people who are watching at home. You may hear lies and smears in this hearing that'll challenge my loyalty to and my love for our country. Those who oppose my nomination imply that I'm loyal to something or someone other than God, my own conscience, and the Constitution of the United States. Accusing me of being Trump's puppet, Putin's puppet, Assad's puppet, a guru's puppet, Modi's puppet, not recognizing the absurdity of simultaneously being the puppet of five different puppet masters.”
What makes Gabbard so right to head national intel is that she has not spent a lifetime in a cloistered community that knows more about protecting itself than national security. Like Pete Hegseth at defense, Gabbard is not a member of the establishment that frankly doesn’t care if they are not doing their jobs but only that they keep their jobs and the intelligence network keeps expanding. Tulsi has the grit and determination to rein this all in and Make Intelligence Great Again – or at least correctly focused and accurate.
