President Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, faced tough questions Thursday from several Republican senators at her confirmation hearing over her past praise for intelligence leaker Edward Snowden and her shifting views on an electronic surveillance program supported by senators whose votes she needs.
Gabbard, trying to reassure the GOP lawmakers while accounting for her previous progressive positions, struck a more critical tone on Snowden despite having held him up as a crusading whistleblower. But she declined to answer whether she viewed him as a “traitor.”
“I’m focused on the future and how we can prevent something like this from happening again,” Gabbard said to Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., after he twice asked if she believed Snowden was a traitor.
Gabbard, a former congresswoman from Hawaii who once ran for the Democratic presidential nomination before leaving the party and backing Trump, also sidestepped specific questions from Republican lawmakers about her views on the surveillance program that Snowden helped expose.
Republicans hold a narrow 9-8 majority on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which held the hearing and has the first vote on Gabbard’s nomination. The questions from some of the Republican members raised the possibility that Gabbard may not secure their support.
With Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee expected to oppose her, Gabbard will need the votes of every Republican on the panel to keep her path to confirmation alive. If the committee fails to back her, the full Senate could still vote on her confirmation, but that would require a 60-vote majority — a politically improbable scenario.
Gabbard for years portrayed Snowden — a former government contractor who leaked a vast trove of classified information — as a “brave whistleblower” and called for him to be pardoned. Under questioning from both Republican and Democratic senators at the hearing, Gabbard said she would not seek a pardon for him if confirmed for the top-ranking intelligence job.
When Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, asked Gabbard if she would seek a pardon or clemency for Snowden, Gabbard replied: “Senator Collins, if confirmed as the director of national intelligence, my responsibility would be to ensure the security of our nation’s secrets, and [I] would not take actions to advocate for any actions related to Snowden.”
When Collins followed up to confirm she would not seek a pardon for Snowden, Gabbard said that was correct.
Snowden was a contractor for the National Security Agency in 2013 when he leaked a ream of secret information exposing details of America’s global surveillance operations. Snowden, who fled the country and resettled in Russia, has been indicted for espionage.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Gabbard’s sympathetic statements about Snowden were at odds with the role of the director of national intelligence, who is entrusted with safeguarding the country’s secrets.
“What message would it send to the intelligence workforce to have a DNI who would celebrate staff and contractors deciding to leak our nation’s most sensitive secrets as they see fit?” Warner asked.
Although Gabbard said Snowden should have not have leaked all the secret information that he released, and should have expressed his concerns to Congress through legal means inside the government, she also said he helped uncover illegal spying by the intelligence community.
“The fact is, he also, even as he broke the law, released information that exposed egregious, illegal and unconstitutional programs that are happening within our government that led to serious reforms” adopted by Congress, Gabbard said.
Snowden, now a Russian citizen, responded to the hearing in a social media post.
“Courts have been ruling for ten years that NSA broke the law, guys. Move on,’’ he wrote.
Warner also went after Gabbard for past comments blaming NATO for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and echoing talking points from the former regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
“Now I don’t know if your intent in making those statements was to defend those dictators, or if you were simply unaware of the intelligence and how your statements would be perceived,” Warner said. “In either case, it raises serious questions about your judgment.”
Gabbard pushed back against the criticism, saying she was not “Putin’s puppet” or “Assad’s puppet,” or anyone else’s.
“The fact is what truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet,” Gabbard said.
Gabbard also faced pointed questions from Republicans about her longtime opposition to an electronic surveillance program that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop without a warrant on foreigners outside the country to collect intelligence.
The program, authorized under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also allows U.S. authorities to search through the data, including information incidentally collected from Americans who are in communication with the foreign targets.
Gabbard had previously opposed the program as an abuse of civil liberties. But a few weeks ago, she shifted her stance, saying she now supported the surveillance powers because amendments passed last year had addressed her concerns.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, pressed Gabbard about her views on the need for a warrant to search for Americans appearing in collected surveillance data and what criteria would be required to obtain a warrant. Currently, U.S. authorities are not required to secure a warrant.
Gabbard sidestepped the question.
“The decision about a warrant requirement will be yours to make, not mine,” she said, referring to Congress.
But Cornyn countered that it would be her job as DNI to oversee the program.
“You will be the director of national intelligence, and people will be wanting to hear from you about what we should do as policy makers,” Cornyn said.
Gabbard’s past position on section 702 puts her in alignment with many progressive Democrats in Congress as well as libertarian-minded Republicans, but at odds with the national security hawks who dominate the Senate Intelligence Committee. Kash Patel, the president’s pick for FBI director, has also been an outspoken opponent of the surveillance program.
If confirmed by the Senate as director of national intelligence, Gabbard would oversee 18 spy agencies with a budget of more than $100 billion and have the final say over what intelligence is delivered to the president.
As a presidential candidate, a member of Congress and a commentator supporting Trump’s campaign, Gabbard has been accused of echoing propaganda spread by Russia and the former Assad regime in Syria, including questioning U.S. intelligence assessments that the Syrian government had carried out multiple chemical weapons attacks on its own people.
Gabbard rejected criticism at the hearing that she has sided with U.S. adversaries and said it was outrageous to question her loyalty to the United States given her career in the Army and in politics.
She maintains she is coming under attack for questioning Washington’s national security establishment and opposing U.S. military “regime change” interventions, including the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Gabbard has come under intense criticism over her 2017 meeting in Damascus with Assad, and comments she made afterward that seemed to embrace the regime’s portrayal of the country’s civil war. But Gabbard has said that she was merely exploring ways to end the war and that any peace settlement would require dialogue with Syria’s government.
The chairman of the intelligence committee, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said he was dismayed by what he called attacks on Gabbard’s loyalty to the U.S. The senator noted that Gabbard has maintained an active security clearance for years as an officer in the Army National Guard and Reserve.
“She has undergone five FBI background checks. I spent more than two hours last week reviewing the latest, putting eyes on more than 300 pages. It’s clean as a whistle,” Cotton said.
He also praised her willingness to express “unconventional views” and said that her approach will be needed to reform the Office of the Director of Intelligence, which he said had become a bloated bureaucracy.
Gabbard told Cotton she agreed that the ODNI needed to be scaled back to fit its original mission to coordinate the work of the country’s intelligence agencies.
