Senate Confirms Gabbard as Intel Chief

The Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence in a 52-to-48 vote on Wednesday.

Gabbard, who served four terms in the House of Representatives from 2013 to 2021 as a Democrat but subsequently became an independent and then a Republican, was approved on a near-party-line vote. All 45 Democrats and the two nominal independents who caucus with them were joined by Sen Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., in voting against her nomination.

As director of national intelligence, Gabbard will oversee 17 agencies in the intelligence community, including the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.

Gabbard had faced tough confirmation hearing questioning from some Democratic senators. They alleged that Gabbard, a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard who had passed several FBI background checks, was unduly sympathetic to foreign powers.

At her public hearing, Gabbard had promised “to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community.” She argued that trust in the intelligence community was at an all-time low and traced that failure in confidence to the invasion of Iraq, which in 2017 she called “a counterproductive regime war.” Gabbard’s service in the Army included time in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. 

Gabbard promised to bring accountability to the intelligence-gathering services of the United States, noting that members of Congress had conveyed to her a lack of responsiveness from the community to requests for information. Gabbard also criticized the FBI’s espionage of Trump campaign official Carter Page and mass government surveillance. 

“President [Donald] Trump’s reelection is a clear mandate from the American people to break this cycle of failure, end 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,” Gabbard told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

For Gabbard, serving as Trump’s intelligence chief is quite a turn of events. She had previously been the vice chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2013 and 2016 and ran to become the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2020. Gabbard was also the first Samoa-native and Hindu member of Congress.

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