Tulsi Gabbard and Trump's scheme to gut the intel agencies
It's hard to envision a less suited intelligence chief. That’s a feature, not a bug.
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Donald Trump has selected Tulsi Gabbard, former congresswoman and notorious Putin stooge, as his nominee for director of the office of national intelligence.
It’s difficult to imagine a candidate less suited to carry out the DNI’s mission, and that’s very likely just the reason that Trump chose her. Gabbard has virtually none of the experience or expertise required to competently assume DNI’s weighty responsibility of marshaling the information and analyses gathered by the nation’s intelligence agencies and coordinating their work.
Gabbard’s longstanding association with a shadowy rightwing cult, her history of suspicious uses of campaign funds, her habitual conspiracism and advocacy for the interests of bloodthirsty dictators (including Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as well as Putin) all raise a multiplicity of red flags.
But, as Donald Trump made clear during his first term in office, national security is hardly at the top of his list of priorities. In fact, hobbling the nation’s intelligence agencies is one of his principal goals.
Trump has long held a grudge against the work of competent intelligence and counterintelligence professionals, including in the FBI, CIA, and the office of the DNI. That is unsurprising, given that their work has inevitably raised questions about Trump’s own curious associations and affinities with many of the nation’s sworn enemies, as reflected in the events that gave rise to the Mueller investigation and Trump’s first impeachment.
Accordingly, Trump spent much of his first four years in the White House sidelining and firing intelligence professionals and attempting, increasingly aggressively, to replace them with stooges, a project he clearly wants to complete this time around. On that background, his elevation of someone like Gabbard to the DNI position makes perfect sense.
Trump’s long war against the nation’s intelligence services
The office of the DNI was established at the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission to integrate the work of the nation’s long-siloed and often competing intelligence and counterintelligence agencies. It’s meant to ensure that policymakers receive “timely and accurate” analyses, but that is exactly what Trump does not want to happen.
Since he first took office in 2017, Trump has viewed the nation’s intelligence agencies and law enforcement institutions as the most serious threats to him and his cronies. There’s good reason for this — those institutions have a history of uncovering information incriminating Trump himself.
Trump spent much of his first term in office seeking out a DNI who was willing to betray their statutorily assigned job of providing accurate intelligence. He shuffled though no less than five of them in the process.
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Trump’s first DNI, former conservative senator Dan Coates, was forced out in 2019 after he acknowledged that Russia, as well as North Korea and Iran, had schemed to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Coates reportedly came to believe that Putin had an illicit hold over Trump.
Later in 2019, an irate Trump fired his hand-picked successor to Coates, Robert McGuire, before he could be confirmed by the Senate because McGuire dared to permit a member of his staff to do her job by briefing senators on Russian efforts to interfere in the then-upcoming 2020 election.
Trump appeared to be pleased with his next two DNIs. The first of them was MAGA partisan Ric Grenell. He held the job on an acting basis for a short time, but made Trump happy by selectively declassifying materials at his behest.
The second, John Ratcliffe, was a former Republican House member who — like Gabbard — had little national security experience, but a record as a fierce opponent of the Russia investigation.
Ratcliffe was Trump’s initial choice to replace Coates as DNI, but Trump withdrew his nomination in August 2019 because of opposition, including from Republican legislators concerned that he might politicize intelligence. But Trump renominated Ratcliffe in February 2020, and he was narrowly confirmed in May of that year, just in time for him to politicize intelligence at the height of that year’s presidential campaign.
Most notoriously, before the 2020 election and over the objections of the CIA and NSA, Ratcliffe chose to declassify an unverified Russian report that purported to exculpate Russia for its own DNC email hacking scheme during the 2016 campaign.
Trump was so pleased with Ratcliffe’s abuse of the DNI position that he has nominated him to serve as CIA director during his second term. But Trump’s selection of Ratcliffe has gotten little attention in the wake of his nomination of Gabbard for Ratcliffe’s old job, and for good reason. Her biography prepares her to be a truly disastrous director of national intelligence.
Tulsi Gabbard, the perfect Trump stooge
Few political figures have amassed as curious a record of rightwing culture warring, faux progressivism, and conspiracism as extensive as Trump’s new DNI pick.
Gabbard, who was born in Samoa and grew up in Hawaii, is the daughter of Mike Gabbard, a longtime Hawaiian political figure who’s currently a member of the state legislature. Mike Gabbard began his political career as a Republican, but joined the Democratic Party in 2007 because, he said, Republicans have little power in the state. In addition to being Catholic, Mike Gabbard is also a longtime member of a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement called the Science of Identity Foundation (SIF), which is centered in Hawaii.
SIF is frequently called a cult, and for good reason — its reclusive leader, Chris Butler, is known for his condemnation of homosexuality (which some SIF leaders claim is a gateway to pedophilia) and antagonism toward Islam. The group has long focused on political activities, and once even started its own political party, called the “Independents for Godly Government,” which disclaimed affiliation with SIF, although it was reportedly founded and funded by SIF members.
Even before becoming an elected official, Mike Gabbard gained prominence for his ardent homophobia, having founded various anti-gay and anti-same sex marriage organizations, including one bearing the name “Stop Promoting Homosexuality International.” He declared that as the owner of a health food store, he would discriminate against gay job applicants.
From the outset, Tulsi followed in her father’s religious and political footsteps. She also became a SIF devotee and got her start in politics working for an anti-gay marriage PAC in 1998. She was elected to the Hawaii House of Representatives in 2002, where she came to prominence leading, along with her father, the successful opposition to a bill that would have legalized gay marriage in the state.
Gabbard chose to resign from the legislature before her National Guard unit deployed to Iraq (she ultimately became a captain in the Army Reserve), but she later returned to Hawaii politics. She was elected to the Honolulu City Council in 2009 and to the US House in 2012 as a Democrat.
Despite her background in a rightwing cult, the telegenic Gabbard presented herself as a mainstream Democrat with a focus on advocacy for members of the military. Gabbard purported to renounce her family’s history as Hawaii’s leading homophobes (as did her father). She began to be touted as a rising star in the party, as reflected in her appointment as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in 2013.
Gabbard did stand out, however, for going on Fox News to condemn then-President Obama for being soft on “Islamic extremism,” which was then a favorite talking point for Republicans and supporters of the Iraq War.
Gabbard’s political career took a new turn in February 2016 when she resigned from the DNC after endorsing Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. She spent months loudly endorsing claims that there were illicit schemes afoot in the DNC to undermine Sanders. These conspiracy theories were avidly being promoted by the Kremlin at the same time as part of Putin’s scheme to foment chaos and dissension in the Democratic Party.
Gabbard also become a prominent foe of the nation’s so-called “forever wars,” a bandwagon that then-emerging GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump had jumped on as he opposed candidates like Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination. Yet soon after bursting onto the national political stage as a champion of a progressive presidential candidate, Gabbard made yet another shift.
Soon after Trump prevailed in the 2016 election, Gabbard met with the president-elect at Trump Tower, where she joined the stream of Republicans seeking posts in the new Trump administration. Trump didn’t give Gabbard a job at that time, but it was clear that her time as a rising Democratic Party star was a thing of the past.
Even before Gabbard started openly warming up to MAGA, she had begun to display a curious partiality to Putin and his cronies, including the bloodthirsty Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who has massacred massive numbers of his own citizens with the avid assistance of Russia and Iran.
In 2015, while a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Gabbard visited the Turkey/Syria border, where she met with several young girls who had suffered horrific burns in a recent Russian airstrike. Upon meeting the wounded girls, Gabbard began spouting Putinist propaganda. She suggested they had been victims of an airstrike by ISIS, which did not even possess an air force, rather than by the Russian air force, which was then relentlessly bombarding Syrian cities (as it would later bombard Ukraine).
During the next several years, as the evidence mounted that Assad was unleashing a campaign of terror on his own nation and massive numbers of refugees were streaming into Europe, Gabbard’s affinity for patently false Russian and Assadist propaganda about the conflict only grew. In 2017, she even traveled to Syria to hold friendly meetings with Assad, who was by then a notorious international pariah.
Gabbard evolved into a virtual spokesperson for the Kremlin’s favored talking points, and began to specialize in excusing Russian atrocities and massacres. As former Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster recently observed, Gabbard “parrot[s] Vladimir Putin’s talking points,” including the Russian dictator’s claim — long rejected by US intelligence agencies — that Putin’s attack on Ukraine was somehow the fault of NATO.
By 2020, Gabbard’s remaining “base” in the Democratic Party was comprised largely of fellow “tankies,” whose focus is on the perceived evils of US foreign policy and the purported benignity of the Russian, Syrian, and even Iranian regimes. Gabbard, whose chances of winning reelection to Congress in Hawaii were dim, chose not to run for another term in the House, and instead launched a longshot bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Gabbard’s candidacy was a fringe enterprise from start to finish — she peaked at two percent in the polls. It also raised questions about her continued connections to the SIF cult that had provided the start to her political career.
While Gabbard contended she had left the rightwing Hare Krishna offshoot to become a mainstream Hindu, her small campaign paid more than $259,000 to Kris Robinson, a purported media consultant in rural Washington state who had no record of working on political campaigns but was tied to SIF. Meanwhile, Gabbard’s husband — also a longstanding SIF adherent — received payments from her federal campaign committees, including for his work creating prolific numbers of sometimes bizarre web videos of his spouse.
Shortly after dropping her quixotic presidential campaign, Gabbard endorsed Biden. But before long, her fondness for Putin and the rightwing culture warring that marked the beginning of her political career brought her once again into the Trumpist orbit — and this time, far more enthusiastically.
Gabbard become a regular on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, where she joined in his isolationism, increasingly open praise of the Putin dictatorship, and his derision of Ukraine. Gabbard also enthusiastically endorsed Carlson’s transphobia, echoing some of the same rhetoric she had once used to denounce same-sex marriage.
In 2022, Gabbard, to the then surprise of nobody, released a video announcing her resignation from the Democratic Party, stating:
I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue and stoke anti-white racism, actively work to undermine our God-given freedom hostile to people of faith and spirituality, demonize the police and protect criminals at the expense of law-abiding Americans, believe in open borders, weaponize the national security state to go after political opponents, and above all, drag us ever closer to nuclear war.
Gabbard’s transformation into an open and notorious rightwing conspiracist and transphobic bigot was complete. It therefore came as no surprise when, during the ensuing months, she jointed the GOP, and also became a Fox News host.
In the wake of her coming out as a MAGA Republican, Gabbard — who was a candidate for nothing — continued her eccentric approach to political financial activities, creating (and raising money for) a number of political action committees, ostensibly for the purpose of supporting Republican candidates. Gabbard’s PACs, however, contributed little money to candidates, and instead, in an echo of her 2020 presidential campaign, appear to have enriched the coffers of consultants and of Gabbard’s own political team.
While Gabbard may not have helped many candidates for elected office, she did manage to increase her profile with Trump, as reflected in his nomination of the thoroughly unqualified stooge for DNI.
Trump trades national security for personal ends
With the nomination of Gabbard for DNI, as well as the naming of proven lackey Ratcliffe to serve as CIA director, Trump is situating himself to carry out the complete hobbling of the nation’s intelligence and counterintelligence institutions that eluded him during his first term.
The office of the DNI was established to address the intelligence failures that — supplemented by the arrogance of many of George W. Bush’s advisors — led the nation to miss the ample evidence of planning ahead of September 11. The risks of politicized intelligence, and thus the need for a role like the DNI, was demonstrated soon after the terrorist attacks, when Bush embarked upon the disastrous Iraq War based on deeply flawed analysis concerning Saddam Hussein’s (as it turned out, non-existent) weapons of mass destruction programs.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies have also suffered several disasters arising from its penetration by clandestine spies, including Russian agents who have repeatedly undermined counterintelligence operation in the US and UK such as Aldrich Ames and Kim Philby and his fellow Cambridge spies. Most recently, the disregard by leaders of Israeli intelligence agencies of the ample of evidence of Hamas planning for the 10/7 massacre offered a stark reminder of the heavy cost a country can pay for flawed intelligence institutions.
These kinds of failures have been catastrophic enough. Yet no US president has set out to deliberately gut the nation’s intelligence agencies, let alone intentionally stock them with minions who carp for the world’s worst dictators, as Trump is now doing.
It’s easy to understand why Trump — who has long proved willing to sacrifice the national interest for his personal interest — sees value in putting a stake in the heart of the nation’s intelligence agencies. From his perspective, the risk they will uncover wrongdoing by him, or the authoritarian leaders he identifies with, is too great.
But if Trump succeeds in this nihilistic project, the risk of a catastrophic outcome for the country will be very high. Those are the stakes as the Senate considers Trump’s absurdly irresponsible nomination of Gabbard. It is the responsibility of Democrats, including those sitting in opposition in the Senate, to make those risks clear.
That’s it for this week
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Putin has had more success with his goal of destroying America out of Trump in the last few years than he ever had in his years as a KGB agent or leader of Russia.
More proof, to me at least, that Trump really doesn't like this country. He only wants to turn it into his own little fiefdom, where he can do whatever he wants and grift more and more money. Gabbard, Ratcliffe and all the rest of his nominees are only involved in order to further his schemes. Aren't we lucky?