If the Senate votes to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, she will be the person briefing him each day on the nation’s most closely held secrets. At her confirmation hearing on Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senators from both parties expressed serious concerns about whether they trust Gabbard in that crucial role.
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While Gabbard, a former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii and U.S. Army Reserve officer with no background in intelligence, faced questions about controversial moments in her past—her 2017 meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, her expressing skepticism of U.S. intelligence assessments about Syria’s use of chemical weapons, and her criticism of how the intelligence community collects data on U.S. citizens—many Senators homed in on her praise of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as a way to question her overall judgment.
In 2013, Snowden fled the country after removing 1.5 million classified documents about military and intelligence programs, initially traveling to Hong Kong to share some of the files with journalists and eventually seeking asylum in Russia. Snowden leaked thousands of documents that revealed a broad collection of American telephone records by the U.S. government and other secret programs, prompting a national debate about civil liberties. Gabbard has called Snowden “brave.” Senators suggested Gabbard’s support for someone who so famously leaked classified documents would undermine her credibility as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.
Asked repeatedly on Thursday if she stood by that compliment, Gabbard wouldn’t back away from it. “Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. “He also exposed information that revealed the United States’ government’s illegal activities.” Snowden’s leaks prompted Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act in 2015 that was designed to curtail the collection of American phone records.
A bipartisan House intelligence committee investigation concluded in 2016 that Snowden’s theft caused “tremendous damage” to national security and quoted a Russian official saying Snowden did share intelligence with Moscow.
Multiple senators pressed Gabbard to call Snowden a traitor. She steadfastly refused.
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma asked Gabbard if Snowden was “a traitor” when he leaked intelligence and fled to Russia. “Senator, I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” Gabbard said.
Another Republican, Indiana Senator Todd Young, pointed out that Gabbard has previously said Snowden should be pardoned and asked Gabbard if Snowden betrayed his duty to the American people. Gabbard wouldn’t go that far. Instead, she repeated that Snowden broke the law and said he “released his information in a way he should not have.”
Young told Gabbard that Snowden was likely watching the hearing. Snowden himself weighed in on Thursday before Gabbard met with Senators, writing on X that Gabbard “will be required to disown all prior support for whistleblowers as a condition of confirmation.” Snowden wryly said he encouraged her to do so and to tell Senators that he “harmed national security and the sweet, soft feelings of staff.”
“This may be a rare instance where I agree with Mr. Snowden,” Young said.
Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat representing Colorado, became exasperated when Gabbard continued to talk around a condemnation of Snowden’s actions and refused to recant past comments justifying Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “Can’t we do better than somebody who can’t answer whether Snowden was a traitor five times today, who made excuses for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?”
“I’m questioning her judgment, that’s the issue that’s at stake here,” Bennet said.
Asked if she was aware that her comments about Russia’s invasion in 2022 were amplified by Russian state TV, Gabbard said, “I don’t pay attention to Russian propaganda. My goal is to speak the truth whether you like it or not.”
At the beginning of the hearing, Gabbard gave a scathing review of the track record of the American intelligence community. “For too long, faulty, inadequate, or weaponized intelligence have led to costly failures and the undermining of our national security and God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution,” she said. The false intelligence conclusion that Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers, millions of deaths, the rise of Islamist terror groups in the region and the strengthening of Iran, she said. And the intelligence community overstepped in its investigation of Donald Trump during his first term to “falsely portray him as a puppet of Putin,” she said. If confirmed to be the country’s top intelligence official, Gabbard said she intends to “break this cycle of failure and the weaponization of and politicalization of the intelligence community.”
As the hearing ended midday Thursday, it was unclear if the pushback Gabbard received on Snowden and other issues would stall her nomination. Nearly every Republican Senator has signed off on Trump’s nominees in the past few days. Enough Republicans were willing to brush aside allegations of heavy drinking and aggressive behavior by Pete Hegseth to confirm him as Defense Secretary. And most Republican Senators seemed poised to look past Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s extensive public campaigns against vaccines to sign off on him running Health and Human Services.
