Donald Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence isn’t dead in the water, but she’s floundering and no one can quite put their finger on why, according to new reports.
Despite holding multiple rounds of meetings with Republican senators, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman turned MAGA loyalist, has so far failed to fully put to rest concerns that she’s overly sympathetic to authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
They’re also not convinced she’s capable of doing the job. Gabbard is an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who deployed to Iraq, but she has little intelligence experience and has reportedly shown up to meetings with senators without being prepared.
Enough senators still have serious concerns that they’re putting her nomination in jeopardy, one GOP senator told Semafor. Another who spoke to Jewish Insider put it far more poetically.
“Let’s put it this way: I do a lot of boating,” the unnamed senator said. “There’s a lot of barnacles that need to be scraped off that hull because it’s starting to create a drag. It’s not sinking, it’s not taking on water, but it’s definitely slowing down.”
In 2017, Gabbard secretly traveled to Syria—which was and remains a designated state-sponsor of terrorism—and met twice in three days with Assad. One of their meetings lasted almost three hours, according to a new report in the Washington Post.
At the time, Assad had been waging a bloody civil war for almost six years, killing hundreds of thousands of his own people. Even Gabbard’s aides—who weren’t told about the meetings in advance—were shocked by how much time she’d spent with him, the Post reported.
A spokesperson for Gabbard told the Post its report was a “Deep State smear campaign filled with gross misrepresentation and conjecture.”
Regardless, about two months after her trip, Gabbard told CNN she was “skeptical” of the U.S. intelligence finding that Assad had used chemical weapons on his own people.
In the years since, she has also parroted Russian propaganda blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and has claimed the country is home to U.S.-funded labs that create deadly bioweapons. (They’re actually Ukrainian national labs dedicated to preventing outbreaks.)
And then there’s the fact that she has shown up to meetings with senators unable to discuss key surveillance laws or even say what the director of national intelligence actually does. Over repeat meetings she finally started to “do her homework,” according to lawmakers.
“She was pretty bad in the beginning, but she’s doing much better now,” one senator told Jewish Insider.
Despite all this, no senators have publicly opposed her, as spokeswoman Alexa Hanning pointed out to Semafor.
“She’s met with almost every GOP Senator in the U.S. Senate and Democrats who’ve accepted her invitation to meet,” Henning said. “She is continuing the advice and consent process in the Senate and looks forward to her hearing.”
But she clearly doesn’t have the momentum of Trump’s other wildcard nominees, including FBI director Kash Patel and defense secretary Pete Hegseth, Semafor wrote.
The Senate is still waiting to receive her FBI background check before the Intelligence Committee can schedule a confirmation hearing. In the meantime, Trump himself still fully supports Gabbard, according to Semafor.
But over the past few days he’s been less vocal about that support, and has told people it’s time for her to step up.
“This is not people trying to put a knife in Tulsi,” one source close to the White House told Semafor. “But there’s a problem, and nobody can figure it out.”
