Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii speaks as former U.S. President Donald Trump listens at a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Oct. 22.
To say that Tulsi Gabbard is unfit to be director of national intelligence is an understatement of the century.
President-elect Donald Trump's pick for the most important intelligence job in the U.S. government - a massive job that oversees all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency - has no background in intelligence whatsoever and has never managed much of anything.
Even more worryingly as someone meant to advise the president and protect our nation's secrets from our adversaries, Gabbard has cozied up to at least two vicious dictators who are America's enemies: Syria's Bashar al-Assad, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own civilians, and Russia's Vladimir Putin, whose deadly invasion of Ukraine has resulted in one million deaths. Instead of holding the guilty accountable, she has defended Assad and blamed the United States and NATO for the Ukraine War.
An Army National Guard veteran, Gabbard was a Democratic member of Congress from Hawaii when she went outside government channels to organize a secret four-day trip to Syria in 2017 and met with Assad, who the United Nations says has repeatedly used deadly gas on his own citizens. But Gabbard pronounced herself "skeptical" that Assad used chemical weapons, despite then-President Trump's declaration, based on U.S. intelligence reports, that "there can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons." When she ran for president in 2019, Gabbard refused to call Assad a war criminal and - most alarmingly of all - declined to reply when asked if she would trust her own intelligence community if she were elected.
Gabbard has appeared so many times on Russian state television that state-run media have jokingly referred to her as a Russian agent. Among Putin's talking points she's repeated is Russia's outrageous claim that it invaded Ukraine to protect itself from secret U.S.-funded biological warfare labs, a claim easily debunked by the facts: the U.S. funds a public effort in Ukraine to reduce the threat of infectious disease outbreaks.
This year, Gabbard was put on a travel watch list by the U.S. Transportation Security Administration when her overseas travel patterns and foreign connections triggered a government algorithm, something that may be unprecedented for an appointee to a sensitive top government position. Appointees are required to undergo extensive background checks and explain travel and foreign contacts. But Trump has said he may skip background checks altogether.
Gabbard is so unfit for the job that it's tempting to think her nomination might be a head fake - that Trump knows she won't be confirmed but believes the Senate would feel compelled to confirm almost anyone he might name to replace her.
But her appointment is just the latest example of Trump's complete disregard for the rules and standards for handling intelligence and for the highly trained professionals who keep our nation safe.
Last year, a grand jury indicted Trump on 40 felony counts - including under the Espionage Act - for his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Justice Department prosecutors asserted that Trump violated the law when he left the White House in 2021 and took 10,000 official government documents with him - including 340 that were classified and contained sensitive details about U.S. nuclear weapons and spy satellites. The secret documents were found by the FBI in a jumble of boxes kept in unsecured locations, including a bathroom, at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, where more than 150 major social events, including weddings, were held while the boxes were there.
It wasn't the first time that Trump treated classified national security information in a cavalier and reckless fashion, doling out tidbits like party favors. In 2017, then-President Trump shared highly classified information with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, exposing secrets of a close U.S. ally.
I was chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and if I had done any of these things, I'd have been in jail long ago.
Trump has repeatedly denounced intelligence professionals who work for the U.S. government as members of the "deep state" that he says tried to undermine him in office and target his campaigns. Now, he is seeking to install as their boss an unqualified toady who will bend intelligence to his will. It is ominous that Trump's three least qualified appointees are those whom he initially selected to oversee intelligence and the departments of defense and justice - agencies that Trump failed to cudgel into submission and stack with sycophants the last time around.
Other government agencies advise presidents, but the leaders of intelligence, defense and justice departments have a special power to tell a president "no" when a plan or policy is illegal or unfeasible or threatens our national security. Trump's choices make clear that he wants to reverse that tradition - or make sure that these departments are led by toadies who will do his bidding.
The National Intelligence Council, where I twice had the honor to hold leadership positions, is staffed by men and women who serve their country, not any political party. Indeed, with few exceptions, I never knew the politics of those who worked with me. They sought to "tell truth to power." They knew that the policymakers they served had biases and pet projects, and they knew that the ground truth intelligence they were responsible for would, on occasion, challenge those preconceptions.
Sometimes, they had to rain on the parade of those policy preferences, laying out why a project probably wouldn't work. During President Bill Clinton's administration, I remember an intelligence assessment that concluded that arming the Bosniaks - the Bosnian Muslims who were being "ethnically cleansed" by their Serbian and Croatian neighbors - was a terrible idea. The problem was there was one person who thought arming the Bosniaks wasn't a bad idea: Clinton. But in the end, he listened to his intelligence advisers.
Intelligence officers understand they are on the same team as the policy officials they advise, but their role is different. Consider the intelligence briefers who come to work at 4 a.m. to prepare reports and then fan out across Washington to brief senior officials. They get very uncomfortable when a conversation turns political.
To sideline or ignore those who have good reasons and good intel when they say "no" is unwise for any administration and dangerous for the nation.
A distinguished civil servant and friend, the late Helmut "Hal" Sonnenfeldt, used to say that people go into government to accomplish great things but quickly realize that just preventing a silly thing or two from happening is a big success. Intelligence can be instrumental in that process, and even, on occasion, may help policy officials understand foreign politics well enough to frame better policies in pursuit of their interests. The nation is in danger if the president surrounds himself with yes-men and yes-women and won't listen to the facts.
By appointing Gabbard to be director of national intelligence, Trump has not just opened the country to that danger, he has embraced it. Senate Republicans need to stand up in their constitutional obligation to give advice and consent, and unequivocally vote her down.
Gregory F. Treverton, former chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017 and vice chair from 1993 to 1995, served on the first Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and oversaw the writing of America's National Intelligence Estimates. He is a professor of the practice at the University of Southern California and chair of the Global TechnoPolitics Forum.