Trump might search to vary that, nevertheless, based mostly on solutions contained in Challenge 2025, the Heritage Basis’s blueprint for a second Trump presidency. Within the chapter on the intelligence neighborhood, the doc means that the ODNI needs to be the one company drafting the day by day intelligence briefing for Trump and may have full oversight of the complete intelligence neighborhood’s finances.
Since Gabbard was introduced because the ODNI nominee, many Democratic lawmakers have criticized the choice, declaring Gabbard’s lack of expertise within the intelligence neighborhood and her questionable views on Russia and Syria.
Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger, a member of the Home Intelligence Committee from Virginia, wrote on X she was “appalled on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard,” including: “Not solely is she ill-prepared and unqualified, however she traffics in conspiracy theories and cozies as much as dictators like Bashar-al Assad and Vladimir Putin.”
Gabbard has a protracted historical past of embracing controversial viewpoints on international coverage in addition to being linked to conspiracy theories.
Gabbard has been linked for years with an extremist offshoot of Hare Krishna, referred to as the Science of Identification Basis. The group, which some former members have described as a cult, is led by Chris Butler, who’s worshipped by a few of his followers as a deity and whom Gabbard has described as her “guru.”
She gained a degree of nationwide notoriety in 2017 when she met in individual with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad throughout what her workplace referred to as a “fact-finding” mission to the Center East. She later raised doubts concerning the US intelligence companies’ evaluation that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons towards civilians, and referred to as US airstrikes towards Syrian targets in response to the chemical assaults “reckless and short-sighted.”
Upon leaving the Democratic Social gathering in 2022, she criticized it utilizing phrasing harking back to the coded language utilized by followers of QAnon, labeling her former celebration an “elitist cabal of warmongers” pushed by “cowardly wokeness.”
In 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard made feedback that some interpreted as justifying Putin’s determination, claiming that if the US “had merely acknowledged Russia’s legit safety considerations” in relation to Ukraine searching for to hitch NATO, the struggle may have been prevented.
She additionally made feedback that had been used to gasoline the Russian-backed conspiracy idea that US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could be used to launch organic weapons. When Trump introduced that Gabbard was his decide for DNI, Russian state TV presenters celebrated the information.
In 2022 Gabbard additionally campaigned for Kari Lake in her failed gubernatorial race in Arizona. Lake was at that time one of the vital vocal proponents of election denial conspiracy theories about Trump’s election loss in 2020 and would spend years claiming, with out proof, that her personal loss in 2022 was attributable to election fraud.
Gabbard didn’t reply to repeated requests for remark about her hyperlinks to Willis, however in an interview final April, she did point out the truth that she was visiting the border and making a documentary—although she didn’t point out Willis’ involvement.
“I simply obtained again final evening from just a few days on the border in California. It is part of the border in our nation that simply hasn’t gotten a lot consideration,” Gabbard informed the Kelsi Sheren Perspective podcast. “I am placing collectively a brief documentary. I went there and introduced my husband, who’s a cinematographer, and some cameras particularly, as a result of most individuals in America do not know what’s occurring.”
