I think Tulsi Gabbard is a bad pick to be the U.S. director of national intelligence, and she’s probably going to hate the job once she realizes how little power the job actually has.

But the supposedly big New York Times scoop about her allegedly meeting some high-level Hezbollah official feels awfully thin.

Shortly after her visit, U.S. spy agencies intercepted a phone call between two Hezbollah members concerning Ms. Gabbard, according to current and former officials briefed on the intelligence.

The intercept was of a Hezbollah member reporting that Ms. Gabbard had met with a person whom he identified euphemistically, using a word in Arabic that can be translated as “the boss” or “the big guy.” The Hezbollah member did not say the name of that person in the communication, prompting some speculation among U.S. intelligence officials as to who was being referred to.

Some U.S. intelligence officials assumed that “the big guy” referred to a senior Hezbollah official. Others assumed that it could be a reference to some Lebanese government official who had strong ties to Hezbollah and who met with Ms. Gabbard during her 2017 trip.

Get all of your “ten percent for the big guy” and “oh, she must have met with Joe Biden” jokes out of the way.

Sure, Hassan Nasrallah was a hefty guy; if the Israeli bunker-buster bomb didn’t get him last year, cholesterol would have.

But color me reflexively skeptical of any bombshell revelation of some terrible misdeed from years ago that arrives the day before a nominee’s hearing. You’re telling me that Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committee, met with either Nasrallah or some other Hezbollah heavyweight back in 2017 and it’s remained secret until now? And nobody in Gabbard’s camp, or Hezbollah, ever mentioned this meeting to anybody?

Remember, for almost all of Trump’s first term, Gabbard was a staunch critic of him, denouncing his “ignorance and disdain for the values that truly make America great” and calling him “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” and that he supported al-Qaeda. (This is one of the reasons that Gabbard’s nomination to the job is particularly bizarre.) Donald Trump was allegedly politicizing intelligence his whole first term. In this scenario, one of the president’s most vociferous critics met with Hezbollah, but no one in the Trump administration wanted to make an issue of it?

Nobody running against her in 2018 ever heard any rumors along these lines? Nobody in the Democratic presidential primary of 2019-2020 ever dug this up?

These spy agencies had this phone call recording for eight years, and it was never an issue until now?

The rest of the Times story is about how Gabbard and her husband ended up on a Transportation Security Administration watch list called Quiet Skies, because an event she attended at the Vatican in July 2024 was organized by a European businessman who appeared on an F.B.I. watch list. According to the Times, “The placement of Ms. Gabbard and her husband in the program required that additional security be added to their subsequent flights… A person close to Ms. Gabbard said that she had no relationship with the European businessman before or after the meeting, and that she did not know that he was on the F.B.I. watch list.”

So going to the Vatican event gets her on a watch list, but not allegedly meeting with somebody in Hezbollah back in 2017?

The Times also notes:

Gabbard acknowledged at the time of her trip that she met with a variety of Lebanese officials, including some who are close to Hezbollah such as Lebanon’s intelligence chief at the time.

The head of Lebanese State Security at that time was Major General George Karaa. The line between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government can get extremely blurry at times:

Unlike other Lebanese political parties, Hezbollah has de facto control over the military intelligence through Shia officers serving there. Lebanon’s military intelligence has become one of the state’s vehicles of repression…

Hezbollah has also infiltrated the state security apparatus in the name of cooperation and fairness. For example, the position of director-general of the General Security was formerly assigned to a Maronite Christian by convention; Hezbollah successfully lobbied for the post to go instead to a Shia, and since July 2011 the General Security has been under de facto Hezbollah oversight with the appointment of General Abbas Ibrahim as its director-general. This position is key to Hezbollah, as the group’s operatives have falsified identity documents to travel internationally unnoticed. The General Security also constitutes a major source of intelligence for Hezbollah, including counterintelligence to guard against infiltration by spies.

There’s really no need for skeptics of Gabbard to chase rumors of a long ago meeting with a Hezbollah “big guy.” The on-the-record, verified meeting with Bashar Assad is bad enough!