President-elect Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence designee, Tulsi Gabbard, completed her first round of meetings on Monday here in Washington, where she addressed questions from GOP senators — including Mike Rounds (R., S.D.), James Lankford (R., Okla.), and Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) — about her foreign policy views and plans to oversee the country’s vast intelligence apparatus.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has jurisdiction over her nomination. As National Review reported on Friday, the U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and former Hawaii congresswoman is squarely focused this week on quelling GOP senators’ concerns about her approach to intelligence declassification, her views on the war in Ukraine, and her 2017 visit with recently toppled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad as a congresswoman. Gabbard is preempting reservations about her Assad visit in particular by leaning into Trump’s strategy of maintaining open lines of communication with foreign adversaries, while also making clear to lawmakers that she does not sympathize with dictators (she expressed skepticism at the time that he used chemical weapons against his own people but later called him a “brutal dictator.”)

Speaking with reporters after her meeting with Senate Intelligence Committee member James Lankford, Gabbard said her views are shaped by her overseas deployments and that she stands with the president-elect’s comments over the weekend urging against U.S. involvement in the conflict in Syria.

Following his closed-door meeting with Gabbard, Lankford says he pressed Trump’s DNI designee about her Syria visit and comments from years ago urging the federal government to pardon national-security leaker Edward Snowden.

“We’re one of the earliest meetings for her, and so it’s a matter of trying to be able to hear what direction she wants to be able to take ODNI, what the role and responsibility is, and then to be able to also know how to articulate how she’s going to pass that on to the president,” Lankford said.

The Oklahoma senator emphasized that the president is  “the decision maker” on most intelligence-related matters, not the director of national intelligence. “The ODNI has responsibility to be able to gather all information in a nonpartisan way and hand that over for those decisions to be made,” he said.

Expect other senators to press Gabbard throughout the week about how she plans to approach this part of the job. As one GOP senator put it to NR last week: “The concern will be that she becomes a gatekeeper for what information gets through to the president. . . . It’s a pretty big operation, when you consider all the intelligence agencies combined.”