Nomination of Tulsi Gabbard

Floor Speech

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Ms. WARREN. Madam President, I thank Senator Blumenthal for his unrelenting work to help protect our Nation and in raising this issue around Tulsi Gabbard as a nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence. I appreciate his work here, and I am proud to be able to follow him in this effort.

I am here today because Tulsi Gabbard's nomination is a national security threat. We are being confronted with a vote that could put all of us at risk.

Look, everybody in the Senate understands the threat that Tulsi Gabbard poses, but I want to make sure that everyone understands the job she would have.

Why do we even have a Director of National Intelligence? The short answer is to prevent another 9/11. The Director of National Intelligence position was born in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York that caused the Twin Towers to crash to the ground, that collapsed part of the Pentagon, that led to the deaths of 40 brave passengers on Flight 93. These terrorist attacks together killed almost 3,000 people, and they affected millions of family members, coworkers, neighbors, and people in every State in our country and around the world.

Soon after the attacks, we asked the most obvious questions: How did this happen? Why didn't we see this coming? Why weren't we able to head it off?

It rapidly became clear that our Nation had major intelligence failures. We were gathering intelligence abroad and here at home, but we were not effectively integrating and coordinating foreign, military, and domestic intelligence, and the result of that failure was catastrophic.

That is where the DNI Director comes in. The Director of National Intelligence is the keystone that holds together our intelligence community. This is the person who coordinates across Agencies to make sure that each component of our intelligence system is talking with every other, to make sure that what happened on 9/11 doesn't happen again. This person is the principal adviser to the President on any national security-related intelligence.

The Director of National Intelligence is central to how we make decisions about where our military should be deployed, is central to how we identify our greatest national security threats, and is central to knowing what our enemy is going to do next--all of that.

Tulsi Gabbard is aggressively unqualified for this job, and making her the Director of National Intelligence will increase the risk of a national security crisis. For starters, she has no experience in the intelligence community, and she has never served as a national security official in the executive branch.

Tulsi Gabbard is also disqualified to be Director of National Intelligence--not just unqualified but actually disqualified. Her disqualifications mean she should be kept far, far away from any part of our government intelligence system.

The problems with Tulsi Gabbard are many. She is an apologist for Vladimir Putin, routinely spreading Russian misinformation and Russian talking points about both Ukraine and Syria. She rejected our own U.S. intelligence that Assad used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, and she went to Syria to meet with Assad and with a Syrian cleric who had threatened to activate a network of suicide bombers within the United States and Europe.

So let me say this as clearly as I can: Tulsi Gabbard would be the No. 1 person in charge of all of our Nation's secrets--all of them: all of our intelligence, every piece of secret information that we gather from around the world and every secret that our allies around the world might share with us. She would know all of it, and she would have access to all of it, and she would be the one who would fit it all together. Then she would be one of the people responsible for advising the President on when and where to use our military.

I am deeply concerned about Tulsi Gabbard's track record and whether she can be trusted with our secrets, but I am not the only one who is worried. With the history that Tulsi Gabbard has, can we reasonably expect other nations to trust us with the secret information they gather?

Even if Gabbard behaved admirably as DNI, the United States would likely have less access to sensitive information because our allies just wouldn't want to take a chance on her, just wouldn't want to take a chance that information they gathered and passed along--information that could put their own operatives at risk, for example--would not want to take the chance that they would pass that information along to the United States, that Tulsi Gabbard would see it, and then who knows where it goes.

I am concerned that other countries would say, because they don't want to take a chance on her, that it would further undercut national security if Tulsi Gabbard were confirmed as DNI.

What I am saying tonight is not breaking news. There is nothing here that hasn't been said before. Concerns about Tulsi Gabbard have been circulating on Capitol Hill for years. Every single Senator--Democrat, Republican, or Independent--knows that they are putting our national security at risk if they support Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation to head our Nation's intelligence coordination. Every single Senator--Republican, Democrat, Independent-- knows the threat that Tulsi Gabbard poses. Every single Senator-- Republican, Democrat, or Independent--knows that Tulsi Gabbard could be handing our secrets over to our staunchest adversaries.

The risks our Nation faces are rising by the hour. Tulsi Gabbard at DNI. Pete Hegseth at DOD. And it isn't just confirmed Cabinet appointees who are putting our Nation at risk; just look at what is going on with Elon Musk and his team of DOGE minions at Treasury. In order for this handful of programmers to gain access to our over $6 trillion payment system, we don't know what safeguards those hackers pulled down. We don't know what gates they opened. And they have apparently tried to get access to sensitive information at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they have gained access to Medicare and Medicaid records--which, by the way, is another $1.5 trillion in payments every year. They seem to be rushing to access more large datasets across the U.S. Government every day.

When Musk's team got into our Federal databases, were the gates opened for hackers from China, from North Korea, from Iran, from Russia? What criminal gangs and black hat hackers now have access to our personal data?

I never thought we would get to this moment. My colleagues in the Senate, despite our differences, have always taken national security seriously, but at a moment when they are faced with a choice between endangering our country or bending a knee to Donald Trump, too many Republican Senators are too afraid of billionaires and Trump in their own party to do what they know is right.

I want to take some time to underscore just how dangerous Tulsi Gabbard will be to our national security. Let's start with Tulsi Gabbard's ties to Russia. These connections are laid out nicely in the New York Times article ``How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Favorite of Russia's State Media.''

In 2017, when she was still a Democratic member of Congress, Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met the country's authoritarian president, Bashar al-Assad. She also accused the United States of supporting terrorists there.

The day after Vladimir [V.] Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ms. Gabbard blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia's security concerns.

She has since suggested that the United States covertly worked with Ukraine on dangerous biological pathogens and was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022. European prosecutors and U.S. officials say that sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives.

According to analysts and former officials, Ms. Gabbard seems to simply share the Kremlin's geopolitical views, especially when it comes to the exercise of American military power.

Let me just say that again.

According to analysts and former officials, Ms. Gabbard seems to simply share the Kremlin's geopolitical views, especially when it comes to the exercise of American military power.

Back to the story.

In Russia, the reaction to her potential appointment has been gleeful, even if Mr. Putin's government remains wary of American policies, even under a second Trump administration.

``The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling'' . . . Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her ``an agent of the Russian state.'' Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian ``comrade'' in Mr. Trump's emerging cabinet.

Russian media has emphasized Ms. Gabbard's desire to improve relations with Moscow, according to FilterLabs, a firm that analyzes social media, state-run news organizations and other internet postings to track public sentiment in Russia.

``Gabbard fits an overall pattern of Trump breaking with much of the post-Cold War consensus,'' said Jonathan Teubner, the chief executive of FilterLabs. ``She is, for Russia, the one that perhaps most perfectly embodies the changes they were hoping for from the U.S.''

In other words, Tulsi Gabbard is Russia's dream come true.

Mr. Trump's critics called the choice a dangerous one that would undermine national security and that signaled a deference to Mr. Putin's world view.

``Nominating Gabbard for director of national intelligence is the way to Putin's heart, and it tells the world that America under Trump will be the Kremlin's ally rather than an adversary,'' Ruth Ghiat, a professor of history at New York University and author of ``Strongmen,'' a 2020 book about authoritarian leaders, wrote on Friday. ``And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.''

Let me say that again: ``And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.''

``This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia's border,'' Gabbard wrote on Twitter, now known as X, when the war began in February 2022.

A month later, she posted a video on the platform saying the United States was operating 25 to 30 biological research labs in Ukraine. She accused the Biden administration of covering them up and said they could release dangerous pathogens, although she stopped short of claiming the labs were making biological weapons, as Russia has falsely claimed.

Ms. Gabbard's remarks were quickly called out by Republican Members of Congress, including Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah.

Her willingness to criticize the Biden administration made her, like other prominent critics of the government, a favorite source of anti-American content on Russia's state television networks.

Vladimir Solovyov, a popular talk show host, called her ``our girlfriend'' in a segment in 2022. The program included an interview Ms. Gabbard did with Tucker Carlson, in which she claimed that Mr. Biden's goal was to end Mr. Putin's control of the Russian Government, according to Julia Davis, the creator of the Russian Media Monitor, which tracks Kremlin propaganda.

Her appearances were regularly picked up by Russia's state media, including the international network RT, which promoted her critiques and lauded her with headlines such as ``Tulsi Gabbard dares to challenge Washington's war machine'' and ``Biden wants regime change in Russia--ex-congresswoman.''

By this year, Ms. Gabbard's politics converged with Mr. Trump's. In October, she joined the Republican Party and hit the campaign trail on his behalf, extolling him as a peacemaker.

``A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a man who wants to end wars, not start them,'' she said at Mr. Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden shortly before Election Day, ``and who has demonstrated already that he has the courage and strength to stand up and fight for peace.''

That is the end of the article.

Ah, Tulsi Gabbard--beloved by Russian press, touted in Russian press, an attacker of American's military.

Or take key sections from this letter that William Webster--the only person to lead both the FBI and the CIA--sent to me. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, remained Director under President Ronald Reagan, and Reagan tapped him to be the head of the CIA.

I will quote directly from the letter:

Dear Senator Warren,

I had the honor of serving as Director of both the FBI and CIA, organizations vital to safeguarding our Nation. Their effectiveness depends on operating with complete independence from political influence--a principle essential to maintaining public trust and national security.

History has shown us the dangers of compromising this independence. When leaders of these organizations become too closely aligned with political figures, public confidence erodes and our nation's security is jeopardized. This underscores the necessity for these institutions to serve the American people, not the political agendas of the executive or legislative branches.

Congresswoman Gabbard's profound lack of intelligence experience and the daunting task of overseeing 18 disparate intelligence agencies, further highlight the need for seasoned leadership. Effective management of our intelligence community requires unparalleled expertise to navigate the complexities of global threats and to maintain the trust of allied nations. Without that trust, our ability to safeguard sensitive secrets and collaborate internationally is severely diminished. As someone who transitioned from the FBI to the CIA, I can attest to the steep learning curve even for a seasoned professional. This is no time in world history for a novice in the field to learn this role.

Every President deserves appointees they trust, but the selection process must prioritize competence and independence to uphold the rule of law. As you consider these and future nominations, I urge you to weigh the critical importance of nonpartisan leadership and experience. The safety of the American people--and your own families--depends on it. Trust in our intelligence and law enforcement agencies is also crucial for our international partners. Without that trust, we cannot be effective in guarding sensitive secrets or collaborating to address shared threats.

Thank you for your careful consideration of these pivotal appointments. Sincerely, William Webster, Former director of the CIA and FBI.

That is the end of his letter. I just want to say how grateful I am both for William Webster's outstanding public service and commitment to our Nation and for his willingness to stand up now and call out the threats posed by Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to DNI.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists echoes these concerns in a piece they published this week entitled ``Tulsi Gabbard as U.S. intelligence chief would undermine efforts against the spread of chemical and biological weapons.''

Gabbard's confirmation would undermine one of the signature foreign policy accomplishments of President Donald Trump's first term: countering the threat posed by chemical weapons. Following a sarin attack on the Syrian city of Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017, the Trump Administration launched a cruise missile strike against an airbase that U.S. intelligence determined Assad's forces had used to launch the chemical assault. After intelligence agencies determined that Syrian helicopters had conducted a chlorine gas attack on Douma on April 7, 2018, Trump authorized another missile strike, this time along with the United Kingdom and France, against Syrian chemical weapons facilities. Both strikes were effective at deterring further Syrian use of chemical weapons. After April 2017 the Syrian air force did not use sarin and after April 2018 Syrian helicopters stopped dropping chlorine barrel bombs.

Gabbard, however, has repeatedly claimed, including at her confirmation hearing, that the chemical attacks against Khan Sheikhoun and Douma were staged by anti-Assad groups to provoke a Western military intervention. In 2019, Gabbard, then a Democratic presidential candidate, accused Trump of launching the strikes based on flawed intelligence: ``Rather than waiting for evidence, Trump acted on impulse and emotion, relying on social media posts and unverified sources originating from within territory held by al Qaeda. In March 2021, Gabbard repeated her unfounded allegation that there is no evidence supporting the Syrian government's responsibility for conducting the ``alleged'' chemical attack on Douma. She accused the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, (OPCW), which administers the global treaty banning chemical weapons and investigated the attack, of a cover-up and claimed that Trump's missile strikes on Syria were ``unconstitutional.''

Gabbard's claims about false-flag attacks, however, ignores intelligence put forward by the Trump Administration and France, an investigation by the United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism, and multiple investigations by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. These national and international investigations based their conclusions on a compelling combination of signals intelligence, eyewitness testimony, photographs, videos, chemical forensic analyses, medical records, analyses of munitions fragments, satellite imagery, and information provided by third parties. For Gabbard to accuse opposition groups, [who were] the victims of Syria's chemical atrocities, of attacking themselves with chlorine and sarin is a grotesque perversion of the truth.

And yet she continues it.

Instead of relying on reputable sources, Gabbard has repeated Russian and Syrian disinformation and discredited conspiracy theories to call into question the quality of US intelligence, Trump's judgment, and the credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. In March 2021, Gabbard signed a ``statement of concern'' about the organization's investigation of the Douma attack that echoed Russian propaganda and was promoted by a group linked to Wikileaks. Gabbard has made her claims about the Syrian chemical attacks despite warnings from the US intelligence community that these types of allegations are a common feature of the Kremlin's disinformation campaigns. Her reliance on these dubious sources demonstrates a dangerously poor lack of judgment for someone seeking the highest-ranking position in the intelligence community.

Gabbard's deeply flawed position on Syria's use of chemical weapons is still highly relevant today. With the fall of the Assad regime last December, the issue of how to secure and destroy Syria's remaining chemical weapons is back on the international agenda. How can Gabbard be trusted to oversee intelligence on this topic if she refuses to believe that Syria used chemical weapons after it joined the Chemical Weapons Convention, CWC, that treaty banning chemical weapons, in 2013? Will she provide Trump with intelligence that undermines her own strongly held position on this issue or will she twist intelligence to fit her [own] worldview?

And there is more at stake than just the threat posed by Syria's remaining chemical weapons. Between 2017 and 2020, the Trump Administration found Russia in violation of both the chemical weapons treaty and the Biological Weapons Convention, which bans biological weapons. Trump imposed two rounds of sanctions on Russia for using the Novichok nerve agent to poison a Russian defector. In August 2020, Trump blacklisted three Russian institutes responsible for developing chemical and biological weapons. Since then, the United States has accused Russia of using the chemical weapon chloropicrin, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has confirmed Russia's use of riot control agents on the battlefield in Ukraine, both of which are violations of the chemical weapons treaty. There are also disturbing signs that Russia is modernizing its biological weapons program by building a new maximum containment laboratory in a military facility.

To divert attention from its own chemical and biological weapons, Russia has made a series of unfounded and debunked allegations that the United States and Ukraine are developing and using these weapons. Gabbard came perilously close to endorsing these claims in 2022 and she did embrace other elements of Russian (and Chinese) disinformation about the allegedly nefarious and dangerous activities of US-supported public health labs in Ukraine, including labs built during Donald Trump's first term. How can Gabbard be trusted to advise the president on issues related to the verification of Russia's compliance with chemical and biological arms control?

Based on this track record, it is difficult to see how Gabbard can be relied upon to provide the quality of intelligence and national security advice needed by the commander in chief during these perilous times. For the Senate to confirm Gabbard would be national security malpractice.

And that is the end of the piece.

I am looking to see who else is going to be here.

Just finish up? OK. Just wanted to make sure, because I know what is happening here.

In a relay race, it is always important to know if you have to hand off the baton.

Look, I will conclude with this: National security officials and experts in intelligence are begging the Senate to exercise their constitutional duty and vote no on Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. We are being asked to vote for someone whose loyalty to this country has been questioned repeatedly and has raised alarms for our allies across the globe. It would be a dangerous mistake to give Tulsi Gabbard access to all of our secrets, and an even greater mistake to trust Tulsi Gabbard to protect this country.

I urge all of my colleagues to vote no.

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