America's next spy chief: Senate confirms Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence

The Senate voted 52-48 Wednesday to confirm former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, with all Democrats — and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — opposing the nomination.

As chief of the national intelligence community, Gabbard will set policy and direct the intelligence-gathering activities of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

Gabbard, who was a Democrat until 2022 but critical of her party long before that, endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. She previously served in the Army Reserve but has no formal intelligence experience. More than that, Democrats have attacked Gabbard for her apparent sympathy for autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, embrace of various conspiracy theories used to justify their actions, and skepticism towards aiding Ukraine as it struggles to fend off a Russian invasion.

Ward Elcock, former director of Canada's national intelligence agency, CSIS, told CBC News that Gabbard's lack of experience and qualifications is deeply concerning.

"This is neither a particularly complex or particularly thoughtful person," he said. "Nothing I've read about her suggests she has the background or the experience or the knowledge to take up the positions that she's being appointed to by the Trump administration."

Perhaps her most famous turn in the spotlight before 2024 was her trip to Syria, where she met Assad even as he waged a destructive war against his own people. She also previously supported Edward Snowden, who leaked information on U.S. espionage and surveillance campaigns around the world and who lawmakers from both parties asked her to condemn at her confirmation hearing; she refused.

Against arguments by Senate Foreign Relations Committee members that Snowden had endangered U.S. personnel and interests, Gabbard insisted that the programs that Snowden exposed were “egregious, illegal and unconstitutional.”

Such positions, her critics said, made her an unfit and potentially dangerous choice to lead U.S. intelligence agencies, and one who could not be trusted by U.S. allies to share vital information with. Indeed, diplomats from several of those countries are already discussing countermeasures that can safeguard their own intelligence communities from potential exposure to their adversaries while not alienating their strongest ally.

While Gabbard has spoken about her opposition to U.S. interventionism and intrusive surveillance, her record on matters of war and peace is inconsistent. During President Barack Obama's second term, she criticized the former president for his alleged weakness in declining to say that the U.S. was at war not just with ISIS, but with "radical Islam" in general. And when Russia began a bombing campaign in Syria that killed thousands of civilians in and around Aleppo, Gabbard praised the effort.

Anywhere between 5,000 to 20,000 civilians were killed by U.S. and Russian operations against ISIS from 2014 to 2019, according to Airwars, an independent monitoring organization.

When she endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2016, Gabbard described herself as a “dove” when it came to “counterproductive wars of regime change” but a “hawk” in the global “war against terrorists," though anti-war critics argue that U.S. policymakers hardly make a difference between the two.

While she has previously equivocated between occasionally criticizing Israel and announcing her vigorous support for the Jewish state, delivering the keynote address in 2015 at a Christians United for Israel conference, she has now decisively swung towards the latter position. During the protests against Israel's invasion of Gaza, which human rights organizations have described as genocide, she called the protesters puppets of a "radical Islamist organization."

Still, one senior former intelligence official told Politico that allies like Israel would continue to have "serious qualms" about Gabbard.