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Tulsi Gabbard was grilled over her past support for leaker Edward Snowden, her dealings with Syria’s ousted president and sympathies for Russia as she tried to convince sceptical senators to confirm her as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence.
Gabbard pledged to be no one’s “puppet” and pushed back against the suggestion that she sympathised with dictators including Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
“The fact is, what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet,” she said during her testimony.
Senators in both parties tried to pin her down on a series of sensitive issues, including whether she thought Snowden was a traitor — a question she continually refused to answer.
“My heart is with my commitment to our constitution and our nation’s security,” she said.
If confirmed, she pledged to ensure such a leak would not happen again. But she alarmed many members of the Senate intelligence committee when she noted that while Snowden broke the law, he “released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs . . . that led to serious reforms”.
Several senators expressed concerns about what signal her confirmation might send, given her support for someone who violated the trust of the intelligence community.
“A lot of the folks in the intelligence community that you’d have the responsibility to oversight . . . they want to hear that you also believe . . . not just he broke the law, but that he’s a traitor — because they don’t want that to ever happen again,” said Republican Senator James Lankford.
Gabbard refused to budge.
The former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii and US Army Reserve officer, who is now a Republican, will struggle to get confirmed by the full Senate if she does not win approval first from the full committee, which could be a challenge.
She received the backing of several members of the committee, including chair Republican Senator Tom Cotton. Others, including Lankford, who asked tough questions, have already indicated they would support her.
On Thursday, Gabbard was also asked about her 2017 meeting with Assad, and whether she pressed him on his use of chemical weapons and other atrocities.
“I asked him tough questions about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people,” she said, adding that she did not get any concessions from him — and “didn’t expect to”.
Gabbard has been haunted throughout the process by many of her past statements and actions. She has been accused of spreading Russian disinformation and echoing Moscow’s propaganda used to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
When asked by Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas whether Russia would “get a pass” in her assessments or policy recommendations, she responded: “I’m offended by the question.”
She added: “If confirmed, no country, group or individual will get a pass in my fulfilling that responsibility of providing that full intelligence picture so that you all can make the best informed policy decisions for the safety, security and freedom of the American people.”
Another senator, Susan Collins, asked whether she had ever knowingly met with Hizbollah officials, an accusation Gabbard dismissed as “absurd”.
At the beginning of the hearing she said the US spy community must undergo significant change to rectify years of failures, with politicised intelligence in the past leading to wars, foreign policy failures and abuses of power. She promised she would offer Trump “completely objective, unbiased and apolitical” counsel.
Senators also pressed her on her efforts as a congresswoman to repeal a surveillance programme known as Section 702, which allows the US government to collect the communications of terror suspects abroad.
She said in Thursday’s hearing she supported the programme after new safeguards added earlier this year.
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