The Tulsi Gabbard I Know Is Perfect for DNI

In 2012, Tulsi Gabbard was seen as the future of the Democratic party. She gave a headline speech at the convention nominating Barack Obama for his second term. Pelosi praised her. Vogue deemed her the next “Democratic Party star.”

Then she told the truth. She exposed the party’s anti-democratic efforts in the 2016 primaries that denied a fair process in favor of coronating Hillary Clinton. She called out the entrenched foreign policy elite for its decades of endless war. And she spoke out against the weaponization of government against domestic political enemies.

I’ve seen Tulsi’s leadership up close: In the summer of 2019, I found myself working for Tulsi Gabbard’s presidential campaign. As a Republican, it was never part of my plan to get involved with a Democrat’s bid for president. But, like many, I was drawn to Tulsi’s realist, restraint-oriented approach to U.S. foreign policy, and I discovered that many of her principles resonated with the values I admired in Donald Trump’s view of America’s role in the world. I can say with confidence: Tulsi Gabbard is not only supremely qualified to serve as our nation’s eighth director of national Intelligence—she’s the best possible choice for the job.

Five years ago, during the sweltering primary campaign season, we watched as the then-candidate Tulsi Gabbard took the Detroit debate stage. That night, after torpedoing Kamala Harris’ ill-fated first bid for the White House, she made a clear closing argument to permanently end America’s “wasteful regime-change wars.” Tulsi stated her intention to stop what she accurately saw as a “new Cold War” with Russia—underscoring the danger of miscalculation that could lead to conflict and even a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia.

She went unheeded. Three years after her prescient warning, Russia invaded Ukraine.

The director of national intelligence should be a person with this foresight. Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard more than fits the bill. She’s held a top-secret clearance for more than a decade, served on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees while in Congress, and even Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) has praised her patriotism and integrity.

Like Trump, Gabbard believes in open dialogue and negotiation—even with our enemies. As Meghan McCain pointed out in her Spectator op-ed in support of Gabbard, lazy efforts to paint her as an “Assad toady” because she had the courage to meet with President Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2017 on a Congressionally-approved fact-finding mission, is not only a misrepresentation, but lazy.

The last four years have shown the disastrous effects of the opposite strategy. As POLITICO reported in 2022, the Biden White House took “every step” to avoid a diplomatic meeting between the President and Vladimir Putin. Biden’s last reported direct communication with Putin was in February 2022, just days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Half a million deaths later, one must wonder whether the 46th president regrets not picking up the phone or arranging a summit.

Put simply, why is diplomatic engagement—whether Trump with Putin or Kim Jong Un, or Gabbard with Assad—treated as more controversial than the failed foreign policy record of the so-called expert class lobbing these baseless critiques?

Gabbard, like so many American servicemen and women, has experienced the result of these intelligence failures first-hand. She has been a consistent, clear voice against unnecessary American intervention. “They proclaim that we must go to war to spread democracy and freedom,” Tulsi said in 2022 of our entrenched foreign policy class, “while they actively work to undermine our democratic republic and our freedoms right here at home.”

Certainly, the next director of national intelligence will also focus on those freedoms right here at home. On Sunday, the former CIA Director John Brennan, known for presiding over surveillance of Senate staffers and supporting the now debunked and deliberately falsified Russia collusion charade, voiced opposition to Gabbard on MSNBC. Her sin? She insists that vital intelligence operations must not compromise the fundamental freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.

Gabard has consistently spoken out about the weaponization of government targeting domestic political enemies. “We’ve got the Biden Administration, we’ve got the Department of Justice, the mainstream media, Big Tech,” she said, “all colluding to undermine our rights and civil liberties.” Gabbard has never wavered in her commitment to our first Amendment rights: to speak and worship freely without fear of political retribution.

On Sunday, the former vice president Mike Pence raised concerns regarding Gabbard’s record, worrying that she “has a history of being critical of the use of American power.”

After three decades of endless war, trillions of dollars wasted, thousands of American lives lost, decades of government-sanctioned spying on American citizens, and the weaponization of every facet of the U.S. intelligence apparatus against free speech and expression, I’d say a skeptic of “the use of American power” sounds like a pretty good deal.