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Senate votes to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence

Senate approves nomination of former Democrat as Mitch McConnell is sole Republican to vote against Trump pick

Tulsi Gabbard testifies during her Senate confirmation hearing last month. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

Tulsi Gabbard testifies during her Senate confirmation hearing last month. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters

 
Washington (CNN) — The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, a major win for President Donald Trump as Gabbard had been among the most controversial of his Cabinet picks.

The vote was 52-48 mostly along party lines, though Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined Democrats in opposing the confirmation.

Gabbard faced concerns from several Republican senators over her lack of support for Ukraine; her shifting position on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Section 702, a key surveillance and security tool; her 2017 meeting with former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and her past support for Edward Snowden.

McConnell appeared to reference some of Gabbard’s positions in a statement he released after voting against her, saying she has “a history of alarming lapses in judgement.”

“The nation should not have to worry that the intelligence assessments the President receives are tainted by a Director of National Intelligence with a history of alarming lapses in judgment,” McConnell said.

However, key swing Republican senators, including Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Todd Young of Indiana ultimately decided to back her confirmation.

 

On Monday night, Murkowski acknowledged in a statement that she still had “concerns about certain positions (Gabbard) has previously taken,” but added that Gabbard “brings independent thinking and necessary oversight to her new role.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune defended Gabbard’s nomination in a speech on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, in which he highlighted her military service and focused on her promise to “right-size” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “I am glad that Ms. Gabbard plans to focus on identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies to restore the office to what it was originally designed to be,” he said.

He also said that he was “glad to hear” Gabbard refer to FISA Section 702 as essential, after Gabbard seemed to go back and forth on her position on the issue.

Gabbard is Trump’s 14th nominee to be confirmed since January 20.

Her confirmation was a dramatic turnaround for a nomination that, from the start, has been among Trump’s most divisive. A former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard drew scrutiny from Senate Intelligence Committee lawmakers over her views on surveillance and a series of controversial meetings she held in Lebanon and Syria in 2017, including with then-President Assad.

In a contentious hearing, she refused under persistent questioning by Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee to say whether she now believed Snowden’s actions were traitorous.

 

Those repeated dodges appeared to imperil her already-fraught nomination on the committee, where she could afford to lose not even a single Republican vote — even as she had secured the endorsement of the committee chairman, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican. Although no Republicans publicly opposed her, several expressed doubts.

“I’m worried by what I hear from some of my Republican colleagues. I’m worried that her nomination may be in jeopardy,” GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri told Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime” at the time.

Yet, after a series of closed-door meetings, Gabbard appeared to reassure leery members, and her nomination passed out of the committee on a party-line vote.

That apparent reversal came amid what appeared to be an about-face by Gabbard on her position on a key government surveillance authority she once sought to dismantle. Her views on FISA Section 702 — broadly supported by members of the Intelligence Committee — were a key flashpoint in her nomination.

In December 2020, shortly before she left Congress, Gabbard introduced legislation that would repeal the Patriot Act and Section 702.

But as it became clear that her stance on Section 702 could imperil her nomination, Gabbard repeatedly sought to reassure lawmakers that she now supported the law.

 

Gabbard said during her confirmation hearing that reforms had been made to the law since her time in Congress that had led her to support the law; Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, pressed her: “Which reforms?”

“There are a number of reforms,” she said. Warner pointed out that after the reforms were already passed into law, she told podcaster Joe Rogan that the reforms had made the law “worse.”

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas at one point appeared to publicly quiz her on her basic understanding of Section 702; multiple sources familiar with her closed door meetings with lawmakers in advance of her confirmation said that some senators said she appeared to be conflating Section 702 and another part of FISA, Title I, which was used to surveil Trump campaign aide Carter Page, raising questions about whether she understood one of the government’s most significant surveillance authorities.

But in closed-door meetings after the hearing, she was ultimately able to satisfy GOP members, all of whom voted for her. Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma specifically cited follow-up answers she gave him on her position on Section 702 as having won his vote.

Gabbard’s confirmation would make her the most markedly anti-surveillance official to lead the intelligence community in the post-9/11 era. Her previous animus toward what she has described as the “national security state and its warmongering friends,” hell-bent on using the Espionage Act and other tools to punish its enemies, has raised questions about whether she might seek to reshape the rules by which American intelligence agencies have been collecting, searching and using intelligence for decades.

Here’s how each senator voted:

This story has been updated with additional developments.

 
 
 
 

 

Author: Morgan Rimmer and Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

Source: CNN:::

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