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Floor Speech
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Ms. SLOTKIN. Mr. President, I rise today as a very new Senator, a freshman Senator, to talk about the confirmation prospects for the nominee for the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
I think context matters here. I am the first CIA officer to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate. Before I ran for office in Michigan, I had a career in national security. I am what is called a 9/11 baby. I happened to be in New York City on my second day of graduate school when 9/11 happened. It changed my life. I decided to go into national security.
I got recruited by the CIA right out of grad school and then was quickly sent on my first of three tours in Iraq alongside the military, providing intelligence to the U.S. military to deal with the groups that were shooting at U.S. forces and plotting against the U.S. homeland.
I worked in national security roles very proudly in both administrations, Democratic and Republican. I worked in the White House for George W. Bush, and I was there the Friday that he left office and the Monday that Barack Obama walked in. I did the same job for two very different Presidents, one for each party. I went on to be a Pentagon Assistant Secretary of Defense. But in between all of that time, one of the things I got to do was help stand up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
I was the intelligence briefer in Baghdad for Ambassador John Negroponte, who was the first Ambassador to Iraq under the Bush administration. I would provide him intelligence briefings early, early in the morning.
One day, he came back from a trip to Washington and said: I am going to be nominated to be the first Director of National Intelligence. It is this completely new position. It is a position that has been created because of the failures of 9/11, our failures to anticipate the attacks of 9/11, to put the pieces together between the FBI, the CIA, the military, all those who had a piece of the story but didn't have a place and a venue to combine it all together to anticipate the most devastating attacks on the U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
I came home and happened to be one of those first employees to set up the Director of National Intelligence. I think I was employee No. 5. I was John Negroponte's first special assistant. So I was his, you know, body person, helping him set up that office.
So when I talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, I don't do it willy-nilly. I don't do it without a background on these topics. And I believe that the people who should be taking the positions that are critical for national security should be people of competence and character.
What does the Director of National Intelligence do? The Office was created, as I said, to combine all of the different threads of information at the 17 different intelligence community Agencies that we have to prevent intelligence failures like we had on 9/11.
This is a serious position. This is a position that in the past has been in the Oval Office every morning with the intelligence briefings provided by the Agencies. This is the position that in the dead of night makes consequential decisions on the security and safety of people here.
Most Americans have no idea the number of threats we still thwart every single month against our homeland. We sleep well at night because the intelligence community is working together to prevent those threats, along with our partners and our allies and our military.
So, for me, I want to know that the person who is going to be woken up in the middle of the night to make those last-minute decisions--do we move on that intelligence? do we act based on that threat?--that they are someone, again, of competence and character, and what I have seen from Ms. Gabbard does not meet that threshold.
She has, first of all, repeatedly questioned the integrity of the intelligence community. She has gone after the intelligence community that she hopes to lead.
She has labeled tens of thousands of intelligence personnel as deep state without even a semblance of understanding of what they do every day to keep her safe.
She has questioned the findings of the intelligence community.
I think more egregious than anything, she has shown a repeated preference for our adversaries over the intelligence community and the United States of America. Most notably, a surprise trip to visit the now-ousted President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Imagine the decision making that goes into planning a secret trip to visit a man who has killed thousands of his countrymen, thousands of relatives of Michiganders that I represent; a man who we know has used chemical weapons, violating international law, devastating communities; a man who has seemingly sat aside as insurgent groups, terrorist groups took territory in his area and allowed them to project attacks into neighboring states and to plot against the U.S. homeland.
She makes the decision to go and visit this man, throw flowers at his feet, do public TV with him, go publicly and show her support. Now, I don't know if she is just deeply naive. I don't know if in some twisted way, she thought that this was her way of being helpful. But whether she did it out of naivete or she did it knowing what this man has done and the implications of her actions, either way shows a complete lack of judgment.
The same goes for her seeming glorification of Vladimir Putin. It is hard to understand, coming from the country that defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that we would put a woman in charge of our entire intelligence community who has shown over and over repeated interest in Vladimir Putin, taking his side of the argument, wondering what he has done right and our intelligence community has done wrong.
Can you imagine what it feels like to be a member of the intelligence community right now, with everything going on, with all of the discrediting of what they have done and what they do every single day, and now this woman is going to be in charge of this Agency? It is an insult to people who have dedicated their lives and put themselves in harm's way, to have her confirmed into this position.
Now, we have watched her flip-flop on a bunch of issues, right? Issues that Democrats and Republicans have concerns with. You know, she used to have a lot of concern about what is called section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. She fought against it. Now she is somehow for it. I am not saying people can't change, but I am just saying someone who doesn't have the backbone to stand up and be clear with their principles--I am having a hard time imagining them lead in the heat of the moment, when you are in the Situation Room and consequential decisions are being made.
I think the feeling that I have about where we are in this country right now is that we are sort of in this fever dream. There is this race to discredit, to attack, to cut. And, look, I will be the first person to say that there is fat on the bone in the Federal Government. I worked in the Federal Government. There are plenty of things that can be reformed in the Federal Government. But the double whammy of attacking the people who keep us safe every day, of trying to push them out--I just had a Republican Member on my way here say: Hey, I just heard about what is going on at CIA. Are they trying to get everyone to leave? What about people who are in sensitive positions?
Great question. But the other punch is to put someone in charge of the intelligence community that has such disdain for our allies, for our intelligence officers, and such love for our adversaries.
So I urge all of my Republican colleagues to search their soul. Play the long game. Don't live in fear of the Trump administration and Donald Trump specifically. You know in your heart that these people aren't qualified and that the life and limb of American citizens is in their hands.
So I urge all of my colleagues to vote against Tulsi Gabbard. I will be voting against her here later today.
I hope that we as American citizens can come up for air from this fever dream and remember that reform of the Federal Government does not mean slashing the people that keep us safe every day.
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