The Daily Populous Thursday December 5th, 2024 evening edition
Authored by rollingstone.com and submitted by rollingstone

Donald Trump has already lost a Cabinet pick and is reconsidering a second, but they say bad news comes in threes, and Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard may be the next uphill confirmation battle for the incoming president.

Gabbard — a former Democratic representative from Hawaii who turned Republican in 2024 — was a controversial pick from the start. Her past comments defending Russia’s 2020 invasion of Ukraine and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad have raised eyebrows within the intelligence community she’s meant to lead.

According to a Thursday report from ABC News, those concerns trickled all the way down to her former staff, who say the former congresswoman’s sympathy toward Russia stems from a media diet packed with pro-Kremlin propaganda.

Three former Gabbard aides told ABC News that the presumptive DNI regularly read and shared articles from RT, Russia’s state-operated propaganda outfit. She continued to do so even after being informed of the outlet’s connections to the Russian government.

“That Gabbard’s views mirror Russia’s narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear,” retired intelligence officer Doug London told ABC News, adding that the situation doesn’t “[bode] well for the president’s principal intelligence adviser responsible for enabling the [U.S. intelligence community] to inform decision-making by telling it like it is.”

The Guardian also reported on Thursday that high-level members of the intelligence community are raising their own concerns about Gabbard’s sympathetic ties to foreign adversaries.

“There is real concern about her contacts [in Syria] and that she does not share the same sympathies and values as the intelligence community,” one person familiar with discussions among senior intelligence officials told The Guardian. “She is historically unfit.” Editor’s picks

Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, told the publication that in 2018 concerns were raised about Gabbard’s presence during testimony by a Syrian dissident (referred to as “Caesar”) before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“There was genuine concern by Democrats in her own party, and Republicans and us and Caesar, about how were we going to do this?” Moustafa said. “With the member sitting on this committee that we believe would give any intelligence she has to Assad, Russia, and Iran, all of which would have wanted to kill Caesar.” (No evidence emerged of such conduct by Gabbard.)

In a Wednesdsay report from The Hill, aides to prominent GOP senators who will vote on Gabbard’s nomination indicated that she may have “the toughest path” to a confirmation despite her candidacy being overshadowed by the controversy surrounding nominees like Matt Gaetz (who withdrew his candidacy for attorney general,) Pete Hegseth (who is facing allegations of sexual assault and workplace misconduct), and Kash Patel (an extremist even Trump’s allies wanted nowhere near power.)

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one GOP aide told The Hill. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

Of the Patel-Hegseth-Gabbard trifecta of controversial nominees, another GOP aide said, “Gun to my head, Gabbard is probably the toughest.”

CJDistasio on December 5th, 2024 at 15:06 UTC »

Sounds like a perfect fit for a bunch of accelerationists that are trying to take down this country

picklerick8879 on December 5th, 2024 at 14:55 UTC »

The country is on life support, and with picks like Tulsi Gabbard for DNI, Trump’s about to pull the plug.

Gabbard’s pro-Kremlin propaganda binge and her bizarre defense of Assad and Russia should disqualify her instantly. But of course, Trump’s only concern is loyalty to him, not competence or integrity.

ToeDisastrous3501 on December 5th, 2024 at 14:55 UTC »

Just the perception of Russian sympathy is enough to disqualify her. If you’re one of our allies and you have some critical information you want to keep out of Russian hands, are you sharing it with the US if she’s in charge?

Better safe than sorry.