Senators are expected to continue pressing Gabbard behind closed doors about her history of unorthodox national security views.
Facing an uncertain path to a Senate confirmation, Tulsi Gabbard is hoping the past two weeks she’s spent meeting with senators and national security officials will help gin up support for her nomination as director of national intelligence.
Her team is also in talks to organize a sit-down between her and former director of national intelligence John Negroponte sometime in early January, a source familiar with the matter told National Review. That’s a sign that Gabbard — a former Hawaii congresswoman, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve — is taking pains to gain insights from experienced U.S. intelligence officials about how to approach the job and the Senate confirmation process.
The director of national intelligence position falls under the jurisdiction of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which must clear Gabbard’s nomination through a simple majority vote before she can be considered before the full U.S. senate.
The whip count surrounding Gabbard’s nomination remains unclear. In recent days, her team has pushed back against press reports that have suggested that her meetings are not going over well, and they’ve pointed out that not a single GOP senator has publicly pledged to oppose her nomination.
At this stage in the confirmation process, several Republican senators dispute the characterization in some press reports that she is unprepared for her meetings — even as they keep their powder dry about how they plan to vote on her nomination.
“I had a good conversation with her, and have no complaints about the quality of that conversation,” Senator Jerry Moran (R., Kan.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told National Review. “As in every instance, I reserve judgment until the hearing occurs. And in her case, it’s particularly useful because a portion of it I assume will be in a classified setting.”
During her private meetings on Capitol Hill, there are several areas on which Gabbard and senators agree, according to a source who has participated in her meetings. For example, she and many senators agree that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) needs to be a leaner, more efficient operation. They also share a deep-seated frustration that senators often hear intelligence from press reports before they read it in their own briefings.
Behind closed doors, senators are grilling her about her unorthodox foreign policy views. They are pressing her to explain why she opposed Trump’s decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal and to restore harsh sanctions against the country, as well as her 2020 view that the then-president had “no justification whatsoever” in killing Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani — a move she said at the time constituted an “illegal and unconstitutional act of war.”
Another sticking point for national security hawks on the hill is her 2017 visit with recently toppled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad as a then-congresswoman from Hawaii.
When asked about her Syria trip in closed-door meetings with senators, she emphasizes she cleared the trip’s itinerary with House Ethics before and after she went and that she followed up with former House Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer upon her return. According to a person who has participated in her meetings, she also makes a point of underscoring that she met with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon at the time, and that the main objective of her Syria trip was to talk to dissidents, teachers, nurses, and religious groups on the ground there.
The Assad meeting isn’t a dealbreaker for every senator.
“I told her that I didn’t have a problem with her meeting with people from overseas, and I still don’t,” Senator Mike Rounds (R., S. D.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NR. He said his priority was to learn more about her personal background and “her knowledge of intelligence areas.”
“We actually had a very good meeting,” Rounds said, adding that Gabbard is “a quick study,” with a “good team” and a “good path forward to getting the nomination.”
In the new year, senators are expected to continue pressing her about her unorthodox national security views on a range of topics, including her dovish views on the Ukraine war, her support for dropping charges against national security leakers such as Edward Snowden, and her approach to trade relations with China during her 2020 presidential run.
“The way that this administration is approaching China is very dangerous in that, you know, Trump’s saying, ‘Well, China is our enemy,’ he’s escalating this trade and tariff war that’s having a really negative impact on our farmers and manufacturers,” she told Fox Business in January 2020, prompting the Chinese Communist Party-controlled China Global Television Network to tout Gabbard as “a strong advocate of the U.S. mending its ties with China.”
During her hearing, she may also come under fire for her skepticism of Japanese rearmament.
“As we remember Japan’s aggression in the Pacific, we need to ask ourselves this question: is the remilitarization of Japan, which is presently underway, truly a good idea? We need to be careful that shortsighted, self-serving leaders do not end up bringing us again face-to-face with a remilitarized Japan. #pearlharbor,” Gabbard wrote on social media on December 7, 2023.
In recent weeks, many Republican senators have emphasized that ODNI is not a decision-maker on matters of foreign policy. If confirmed to Trump’s cabinet, these lawmakers say, Gabbard’s main responsibility will be advising the president-elect, declassifying secret intelligence, and overseeing the federal government’s vast and complex intelligence apparatus.
“Foreign policy is going to be run out of the White House,” Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) told National Review. “That, to me, is clear. A lot of these cabinet secretaries are going to be on a pretty short leash. It’s not like they’re going to be cowboying it and making a lot of decisions on their own.”
Gabbard is also leaning into this hands-off foreign policy approach in her meetings with senators. Her strategy is to talk about how her views are shaped by her own Army deployments, watching friends die overseas, and lowering the human cost of war. She has insisted privately to senators that if she is confirmed, she’d check her politics at the door – as she has in the military for more than two decades – and would leave policy making to the White House.
Gabbard will also continue to emphasize that as an officer in the U.S. military, she already has a security clearance and regularly goes through the military’s background check process.
It’s possible she could secure support from Senate Democrats. Gabbard’s team has sent meeting requests to every Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. To date, the only Senate Democrats who have met with her privately in recent days are Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John Fetterman (D., Pa.).
Others Senate Intelligence Committee members – including senators Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.), Kyrsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.), and Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) – told NR last week that they hope to sit down with Gabbard privately in the new year.