Tulsi Gabbard Would Be a Shock to the U.S. Intelligence System

Trump's nominee for Director of National Intelligence has a twisted history of dissent from the elite D.C. foreign policy consensus and neocon-style “war on terror” rhetoric.

Tulsi Gabbard campaigns with Donald Trump on October 22, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

The elite bipartisan national security establishment in Washington, D.C., is already in a panic about Donald Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence officials are suggesting they will resign. Former CIA directors and other ex-senior intelligence officials are warning she is a danger to the nation and the world. “Cozying up to Putin as well as to Bashar al-Assad shows she doesn't have the type of perspective needed for someone who is going to head up these 18 intelligence agencies,” said Obama’s CIA director John Brennan in an interview on MSNBC. “This appointment is sending shockwaves not only in the United States but also around the globe. Is this really someone Donald Trump is going to entrust with the care and leadership of the intelligence community? An unserious pick for a serious position.”

If confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard would represent one of the most unorthodox political figures to hold such a senior national security post in U.S. history. A veteran of the war in Iraq, Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2012 and emerged as a sharp critic of the U.S. forever wars launched in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. She denounced U.S. regime change wars, including the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and consistently opposed U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s scorched earth war against Yemen, which extended from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On multiple occasions, she accused Trump of being “Saudi Arabia’s bitch,” taking orders from his Saudi “masters,” and of supporting Al Qaeda. She has called for pardoning whistleblowers Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and fought to change U.S. laws permitting domestic surveillance of Americans.

Tweet by Tulsi Gabbard from 2018.

At the same time, Gabbard is not an antigen infiltrating the U.S. intelligence system. Over the past four years she has fully embraced Trump’s America First posture in explaining her dissent from the elite foreign policy consensus. Gabbard also has a history of support for a slew of standard, bipartisan U.S. national security and defense policies. She has offered die-hard backing for Israel’s war against Gaza, opposed a ceasefire, and accused Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the chief facilitators of Israel’s genocidal war, of being soft on terrorism and anti-semitism. She has also argued that the U.S. and other Western nations should wage both a military and ideological war against what she calls “radical Islamist ideology.” She has described herself as a “hawk” when it comes to using military action against “terrorists” and has advocated using “surgical” drone strikes against terror groups, a system refined and expanded under the Obama and Trump administrations. She has praised Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sisi for his “great courage and leadership” and, following a 2015 meeting with Sisi in Cairo, called on Obama to “take action to recognize President el-Sisi and his leadership.” In Congress, Gabbard voted to keep in place U.S. surveillance laws aimed at foreign nationals and nations and supported economic sanctions against Russia, Iran, and North Korea. 

Gabbard began her career as a liberal Democrat who went on to become a top surrogate for Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for president. She ran for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 primaries, staking out a range of Sanders-style domestic policy positions and non-interventionist foreign policies and repeatedly denounced the Democratic Party power establishment. While she endorsed Biden in 2020, she also refused to vote in favor of impeaching Trump and was the only lawmaker to vote present on the resolution, saying it was “fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.”

Soon after Biden won the 2020 election and Gabbard left Congress, she declared herself a political independent and emerged as a rising star in the conservative media ecosystem. She became a paid Fox News contributor and swiftly went from being a rare, occasional Democratic defender of Trump to one of the MAGA movement’s popular personalities. In her public appearances, Gabbard often railed against what she described as the “woke” ideology dominating the Democratic Party, winning her enthusiastic embraces from Trump-aligned audiences and media outlets. 

This culminated, in April 2024, with the publication of Gabbard’s book, “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind,” which chronicled her transformation. “The Democratic Party has become a party that is opposed to freedom, that is opposed to the central and foundational principles that exist within our founding documents, and that serve as the identity of who we are as Americans and what this country is supposed to be about. It has become a party that is controlled by this elitist cabal of war mongers, who are driving forward this quote unquote woke agenda. And we see it through their racializing of everything,” she told podcaster Lex Fridman. “We see this through their ‘defund the police’ mission. We see this through their open border policies. We see this through how in their education policy, they are failing our kids and how they are pushing this narrative that ultimately is a rejection of objective truth.”

In August, Gabbard formally endorsed Trump, praising him for “having the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies, and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort.” Soon after, she joined Trump’s campaign as an honorary co-chair. Two weeks before the election, she appeared with Trump at a rally in North Carolina. "I'm proud to stand here with you today, President Trump, and announce that I'm joining the Republican Party. I am joining the party of the people,” she declared to huge applause. “The party of equality. The party that was founded to fight against and end slavery in this country. It is the party of common sense and the party that is led by a president who has the courage and strength to fight for peace.”

While Gabbard’s nomination as DNI is being celebrated by many non-interventionists on both the left and right, reviewing years of her public statements, positions, and interviews reveals inconsistencies in her dissent from U.S. war mongering and a frequent embrace of some of the foundational language deployed by the Bush-Cheney administration as it launched the so-called global war on terrorism. “When it comes to the war against terrorists, I’m a hawk,” she told a newspaper in Hawaii in 2016. “When it comes to counterproductive wars of regime change, I’m a dove.” Her support for Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza fits squarely within Trump’s Israel First national security nominees. Gabbard also has close ties to far right Hindu nationalists with an explicitly violent anti-Muslim agenda and an alliance with Israel and extremist Zionists.

Despite Trump’s self-promotion as an unconventional non-interventionist, his first term as president was a militaristic one. He expanded U.S. drone strikes, sanctioned Russia and expelled 60 of its diplomats, interfered in Venezuela, Cuba, and other nations, used the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, waged a massive scorched earth war in northern Iraq against ISIS, bombed Syria, used U.S. special operations forces inside Yemen, continued U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, empowered Israel’s campaign to annihilate the Palestinians and to annex more of their territory, assassinated the most senior Iranian military official, and engaged in all manner of traditional American warmaking. And he often did so with the backing of leading Democrats, many of whom voted to give him sweeping and expanded surveillance authorities.

Gabbard, who often blasted Trump during his first term for promoting hawkish neocons to positions of power in the national security apparatus and conducting an imperial foreign policy, has, to date, offered no criticism of Trump’s nomination of a slew of warmongers to serve in his new administration. One of those figures, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, praised Gabbard as a “revolutionary pick that has a chance to really make a positive change.”

Gabbard’s Dissent

Gabbard says she met Donald Trump soon after his election in 2016. “President-elect Trump asked me to meet with him about our current policies regarding Syria, our fight against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, as well as other foreign policy challenges we face,” Gabbard said at the time. “I felt it important to take the opportunity to meet with the President-elect now before the drumbeats of war that neocons have been beating drag us into an escalation of the war to overthrow the Syrian government—a war which has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions of refugees to flee their homes in search of safety for themselves and their families.” 

By that time, Gabbard had already staked out a position of support for Russian military action in Syria. In a 2015 post on X/Twitter, she wrote: “Bad enough US has not been bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra in Syria. But it’s mind-boggling that we protest Russia’s bombing of these terrorists.”

In 2017, Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus and soon after challenged the allegations by U.S. intelligence, UN officials, and Trump that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons. Gabbard was subjected to an avalanche of attacks by fellow Democrats and Republicans and grilled on cable news programs, accused of being a chemical weapons denialist and an ally of a dictator the U.S. was confronting.

Gabbard said she was opposed to U.S. military action against Syria because she assessed it was strengthening Al Qaeda and other militant groups, arguing that U.S. policy was creating rather than diminishing a threat to U.S. and regional security. She also introduced legislation that sought to cut off U.S. support for anti-Assad forces in Syria, saying the U.S. was providing “direct and indirect support to terrorist groups in order to overthrow the Syrian government.”

“The reality is that there is no possibility of peace unless we’re willing to talk and engage directly. Ultimately it must be up to the Syrian people to determine their own future,” Gabbard told me in 2018. “We should never have gone into Syria to both directly and indirectly try to topple their regime. And we have seen the disastrous consequences of that.” 

During the 2020 Democratic primary for president, Kamala Harris responded to a blistering attack by Gabbard by pivoting to the Syria controversy. “That criticism is coming from someone who has been an apologist for Assad,” Harris said. “She has been an apologist for he who has exterminated the people of his country like they are, you know, cockroaches.”

Charges of “cozying up to Assad” and denying his use of chemical weapons is, second to charges she is a Russian asset, emerging as one of the most common attack themes deployed against her nomination as DNI.

Gabbard maintained that her views on Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons were distorted in the media and by her political opponents. “There is no disputing the fact that Bashar Al-Assad in Syria is a brutal dictator. There is no disputing the fact that he has used chemical weapons against his people,” she said on The View in 2019.

"There have been reports showing that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, both by the Syrian government as well as different terrorist groups on the ground in Syria," Gabbard similarly told CNN’s Dana Bash. "The skepticism and the questions that I raised were very specific around incidents that the Trump administration was trying to use as an excuse to launch a U.S. military attack in Syria." 

During a recent appearance on MSNBC, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested Trump’s nomination of Gabbard was “devastating,” charging, “as much as she says that she’s an anti-war person, she’s not. She supports very pro-war individuals abroad.”

Gabbard’s foreign policy dissent was not limited to Syria. During her tenure in Congress, she routinely accused both Republican and Democratic officials of war mongering and lambasted Trump throughout his presidency, including for placing neoconservative hawks in positions of power during his first presidential term. “Donald Trump and his cabinet, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and others—are creating a situation that just a spark would light off a war with Iran, which is incredibly dangerous,” she said in 2019 as she ran for president. “That’s why we need to de-escalate tensions. Trump needs to get back into the Iran nuclear deal and swallow his pride, put the American people first.”

When Trump authorized the assassination of Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC, in a drone strike in Baghdad in early 2020, Gabbard told Fox & Friends, "This was very clearly an act of war by this president without any kind of authorization or declaration of war from Congress, clearly violating the Constitution."

Gabbard supported the Iran nuclear deal and frequently criticized Trump for canceling it in favor of a more hostile stance. “The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives. It would exacerbate the refugee crisis. And it wouldn’t be just contained within Iran,” she said in June 2019. “This would turn into a regional war … We need to get back into the Iran nuclear agreement, and we need to negotiate how we can improve it.”

Gabbard advocated for direct talks with North Korea and other U.S. adversaries and to only use military force as a last resort. “We have to be willing to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that peace could be achieved,” Gabbard told me in January 2018, “regardless of our opinion of these people, whether they be adversaries or dictators or others. The reality is that there is no possibility of peace unless we’re willing to talk and engage directly.” Six months later, Trump famously met with Kim Jong Un and crossed over the demilitarized zone into North Korea, winning praise from Gabbard.

Gabbard’s position on meeting with adversaries echoed a controversy from 2007 when, during a Democratic primary debate, then-Sen. Barack Obama was asked if he would meet "without precondition" with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba and Syria. "I would," Obama responded. "And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them—which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of [the Bush] administration—is ridiculous." Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain attacked Obama for his stance, with Clinton calling Obama “irresponsible and frankly naive” and McCain saying Obama displayed “reckless judgment” and inexperience. 

Democrats Portray Gabbard as Russia’s Manchurian Candidate

For more than eight years, the Democratic Party attacks against Trump and his allies have centered around portraying them as Russian stooges or assets, implying they are sleeper agents or useful idiots for a Soviet plot to destroy America.

Gabbard’s positions on Russia are already taking center stage in the attempts to block her confirmation as DNI. In 2022, Gabbard accused the U.S. of provoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, citing NATO expansion. “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO," she wrote on social media. Days after Russia’s invasion began, Gabbard posted a video in which she called for “an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country—no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both U.S. and NATO countries as well as Russia because there’d be no Russian or NATO troops on each other’s non-Baltic borders. This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace.”

“The idea that someone who has aligned herself with and defended Vladimir Putin could potentially have information related to the sources and methods of how it is that we knew that Russia was going to have invaded Ukraine”—as Gabbard would as DNI—”helps illuminate why [her nomination] is so extraordinarily dangerous,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia Democrat and former CIA officer, told MSNBC. On Friday, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz—a close friend and ally of the Clintons—once again called Gabbard a “likely” Russian asset on MSNBC. 

While Gabbard has staked out a range of positions diametrically opposed to U.S. policy toward Russia, her political enemies have repeatedly accused her, without evidence, of conduct that falls within the scope of treachery against America rather than protected speech expressing dissent on policies of monumental consequence. Soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Republican Senator Mitt Romney, a prominent opponent of Trump, accused Gabbard of “parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.”

In January 2020 Gabbard sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for defamation after Clinton called her a Russian “asset” whom Moscow was “grooming” to launch a third party presidential bid to thwart Democrats. "She's the favorite of the Russians, they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her,” Clinton said in a 2019 podcast interview. “Yeah, she's a Russian asset. I mean, totally.” The day after Clinton’s remarks, Gabbard tweeted to Clinton: “You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain.” Gabbard dropped her suit after five months and her lawyers said that while they believed Clinton had defamed their client, Gabbard wanted to prioritize “defeating Donald Trump in 2020, rather than righting the wrongs here.” Clinton’s team issued a statement calling the lawsuit a “publicity stunt,” writing in Russian: “good riddance.”

These attacks will no doubt be welcomed and ridiculed by Trump and his supporters as a desperate repeat of the Russiagate “hoax” being deployed to protect the deep state. But Gabbard’s positions on Russia and the repeated characterization of her as a Russian operative may compel some Republican senators to oppose Gabbard’s nomination. 

U.S. Intelligence Gathering

As a lawmaker, Gabbard regularly denounced abuses by U.S. intelligence agencies and sponsored legislation aimed at ending domestic surveillance of American citizens. In 2018, Gabbard and Republican Rep. Justin Amash tried unsuccessfully to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to prevent domestic spying on U.S. citizens. It failed. “It’s the fear tactics and misinformation campaign that we have seen far too often, especially after 9/11 that’s been used to pass things like the PATRIOT Act,” she told me in 2018. It is “a disservice to the American people and undermines the constitutional civil liberties that we were seeking to protect within our amendment, while also making sure that the Section 702 tools provided focused on foreign targets were maintained.”

Gabbard blamed former President Obama for failing to confront these violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of the Bush-Cheney era. “He was someone as a U.S. senator who gave some pretty powerful speeches on the Senate floor about his concerns with the Patriot Act, his concerns with surveillance from the NSA, his concerns with a violation of our Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties,” she told podcaster Lex Fridman. “But when, as president, he was confronted with leaked information about the surveillance occurring under those authorities in his presidency, he took the side of the national security state and did not take action to right the wrongs that he correctly pointed out as senator and during his campaign for the presidency.” 

In 2020, Gabbard publicly urged Trump to pardon NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, saying they had, “at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.” In her last year in Congress, she introduced legislation calling on the U.S. to drop all charges against the two and to reform the Espionage Act. “Brave whistleblowers exposing lies and illegal actions in our government must be protected,” she said.

Gabbard’s Support for Israel

Like all of Trump’s nominees, Gabbard has been a staunch supporter of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza and opposed a ceasefire. Throughout the past year, she has repeatedly characterized anti-war protesters as “puppets” of Hamas and said the October 7 attacks in Israel should have been an “extreme wake up call for leaders in the United States and leaders around the world about how Islamist terrorists continue to pose the greatest short and long term threat to our peace—our ability to live in peace and to live free.”

She falsely portrayed Hamas as an ally of ISIS and Al Qaeda and said its goal is “not really about the territory between Israel and Gaza or Palestine” but aims to establish a “global Islamist caliphate and destroy anyone who doesn’t adhere to their radical interpretation of Islam including Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and others.” She said Hamas wants to “rid the world of quote-unquote non-believers or infidels and establish Islamic caliphates.” She characterized anti-Gaza war demonstrators as “mobs” engaged in “violent protest around the world supporting Hamas and standing against freedom, standing against peace.” She criticized Biden—who publicly characterized campus protests as violent and anti-semitic—for not condemning the demonstrators, saying Biden is afraid of being labeled “an Islamophobe.”

Despite her clear backing of the Gaza war and opposition to a ceasefire, Gabbard maintains that she supports a two-state agreement. “You have some people in the Israeli government who don’t want the Palestinian people in Gaza at all and want them to go and repatriate in other countries,” she said in April. “I think that’s a big problem and that further exacerbates this hatred and resentment that continues to grow there.”

Prior to the launch of the 2023 Gaza war, Gabbard had a mixed record on Israel-Palestine issues, though it was overwhelmingly filled with standard bi-partisan pro-Israel positions. During the Great March of Return protests in Gaza in 2018, Gabbard criticized Israel’s use of lethal force, tweeting: “Israel needs to stop using live ammunition in its response to unarmed protesters in Gaza. It has resulted in over 50 dead and thousands seriously wounded.”

In 2015, she criticized Democrats for boycotting Netanyahu’s address to Congress and attended his speech. Netanyahu’s primary mission was to undermine the Iran nuclear deal. That year, Gabbard received an enthusiastic welcome at far right preacher John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel conference. “There are many issues that we deal with on a daily basis in Congress that are very divisive. But I can tell you without a doubt that the importance of our nation’s long standing friendship and partnership with Israel is not one of them,” Gabbard said. “It’s absolutely true to say that there are few issues that bring us together more, few issues that cause people to set aside their differences more, than the issue of the United States’ longstanding friendship with Israel.”

In 2016, she received an award from extremist rabbi Shmuley Boteach and posed for a picture with Boteach and Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson, who gave $100 million to Trump’s election campaign and advocates for Israeli annexation of all Palestinian territory. That same year, she criticized Obama for not using the term “radical Islamist terrorism,” which was a constant GOP talking point about Obama, a president that launched multiple wars against Muslim countries and presided over eight years of consistent drone strikes in several nations under the auspices of striking al Qaeda, ISIS, Al Shabaab, and other militant organizations, and expanded the U.S. ground war in Afghanistan. Gabbard told CNN, “it’s important that you identify your enemy, you know who they are, you call them by their name, and you understand the ideology that’s driving them.”

As both a lawmaker and independent political figure, Gabbard has, at times, expressed opposition to the expansion of Israeli settlements. In 2017, she voted against a bill that condemned the Obama administration’s decision to abstain from vetoing a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution, which was adopted in December 2016, stated that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.” (This was the UN resolution where Trump’s National Security Advisor-designee Mike Flynn tried to get other nations to intervene to stop Obama by voting against the resolution.) “I know how important our enduring alliance with Israel is,” Gabbard asserted in explaining her vote. “My vote upholds my commitment to maintaining and strengthening this alliance, as well as my long-held position that the most viable path to peace between Israel and Palestine can be found through both sides negotiating a two-state solution. While I remain concerned about aspects of the UN resolution, I share the Obama administration’s reservation about the harmful impact Israeli settlement activity has on the prospects for peace.”

Gabbard has sharply criticized the BDS movement and supported legislation that denounced BDS and effectively tarred it as an anti-semitic movement. On the other hand, Gabbard also voted in favor of a bill sponsored by Ilhan Omar in 2019 that sought to protect the rights of Americans to boycott foreign countries in an effort to change policy. 

Trump has pledged to embrace Israel’s most extreme agendas and nominated Christian Zionist fanatic Mike Huckabee as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee has declared Palestinians do not exist and that there is no such territory as the West Bank. Gabbard’s support for Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza, combined with her conflation of Palestinian armed resistance with Al Qaeda and ISIS, will likely guide her posture on support for Israel more than any dissenting position she took as a lawmaker. 

Senate Confirmation

There are a range of issues that Gabbard should be aggressively questioned about in her Senate confirmation, including her constant employment of “war on terror” language and calls for a militarized war against an ideology, a dangerous doctrine adopted after 9/11 that was used to justify U.S. military actions across the world. But Democratic senators are much more likely to deploy a Cold War, 2.0, line of interrogation on her stances on Russia and Syria.

To pretend that Gabbard somehow poses a more grave danger to U.S. security than those in power after 9/11 or throughout the long bloody history of U.S. interventions and the resulting blowback is a lot of hype and hysteria. U.S. intelligence operated a global kidnap-and-torture program, which included the use of secret prisons, launched after 9/11. Brennan, one of Gabbard’s top opponents, authorized an operation to spy on U.S. Senate torture investigators and then lied to Congress about it. His own nomination to be CIA director at the beginning of Obama’s presidency was killed because of Brennan’s support for torture and extraordinary renditions under the Bush administration, so Obama created a non-Senate confirmed post for him. Obama’s DNI James Clapper lied under oath to Congress about NSA domestic spying. 

The abuses by the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies at home and abroad should be thoroughly audited and confronted. This is something the Brennans, Clappers, and Gina Haspels of the world would never do, in large part because of their undying loyalty to the system right or wrong. It is not difficult to imagine the pre-2021 Gabbard prioritizing such an effort. In light of her conversion to a MAGA-aligned Trump loyalist, it becomes an open question.

There are legitimate concerns about whether Trump would seek to abuse the system—and U.S. intelligence capabilities—for his personal agenda, and to enact revenge on his enemies—and whether Gabbard would reject those efforts. These, too, would be relevant lines of inquiry during a Senate confirmation hearing.

Gabbard never served on the House intelligence committee or worked as a spy. She did not work as a case officer or an official in any intelligence agency. She is, to put it bluntly, an outsider, not unlike Trump. Her detractors cite those facts as evidence she is not qualified and would therefore put the nation at risk. Her supporters view her outsider status as a feature, not a bug—particularly Trump, who has spent eight years denouncing what he maintains was a deep state plot to take him down.

Independent journalist Michael Tracey, who sympathetically covered Gabbard’s career and embedded with her on the campaign trail during her 2020 run for the Democratic nomination, recently accused Gabbard of cynically abandoning many of her marquee positions as she shifted to an alliance with the MAGA movement. “[A]n opportunity arose to insinuate herself into the Republican Party—which of course requires abandoning any critique of Trump,” Tracey wrote. “She has proven that she no longer holds to the positions she once espoused in any discernible fashion. No real through-line between now and the 2020 campaign can be reliably traced … she decided to overturn her prior stated convictions in pursuit of power. I consider that crass, unprincipled opportunism.”

Whatever one thinks of Gabbard, it is undeniable that there has never been anyone like her in charge of coordinating the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. The question is which version of Gabbard would be in power.