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Floor Speech

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Mr. KELLY. Mr. President, today the Senate is deciding whether COL Tulsi Gabbard should be the person who, each day, makes the call on which intelligence gets in front of the President of the United States. That is what the Director of National Intelligence does. They sift through the intelligence collected and analyzed by all of our intelligence Agencies, from the CIA to the NSA, and decide what to brief the President on. This includes information about terrorists planning attacks here in the United States or on our servicemembers abroad. It includes evidence of adversaries backing cyber attacks.

Often, the intelligence is incomplete, or there are pieces that contradict one another. It is this person's job to cut through the noise and present the President with what he needs to know.

There can't be any spin. There can't be a finger on the scale to get him to do one thing or not do another. It requires impeccable judgment and sound decision making.

Everything we have learned about Colonel Gabbard during her confirmation process suggests that she is not the person for this job. It is that simple.

Now, I went into this process with an open mind. Colonel Gabbard and I, we had a long meeting in my office. She responded to a number of written follow-up questions that my colleagues and I had for her. And I was able to ask her questions in an open and closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

And after each of those steps, I became more and more concerned.

Colonel Gabbard is often dismissive and has been, at times, outright hostile towards our intelligence community and the tools that it uses to protect this country.

Now, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Colonel Gabbard's service to this Nation, and I do think that healthy skepticism is a good thing. It is something that I always valued in my crew members at NASA, and I value it today in the Senate.

But that is not what we have seen from Colonel Gabbard. She has a track record of embracing overblown, flimsy claims that confirm her own viewpoint while easily dismissing the thorough assessments and the methods of our own intelligence community. That is not the person that we should want in this job.

Now, let's start here with her record on Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden was a government contractor who stole and then leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013. Snowden could have used whistleblower protections to securely and legally share concerns that he had about the legality of certain surveillance programs, but he didn't do that. Instead, he stole millions of documents--most of which didn't pertain to the programs that he had raised concerns about--and then he leaked them, without caring about what would the lasting damage be to our national security.

After the Department of Justice revealed charges against him for committing espionage, Snowden fled to Russia, where he was welcomed with open arms.

Edward Snowden exposed our government's secrets to the world, including to our adversaries. He put intelligence operatives and servicemembers around the world at risk, at great risk. And he made all of us less safe, and that is true even today. He should be in prison for betraying our country.

COL Tulsi Gabbard wanted him to be pardoned. She introduced legislation calling on the Federal Government to drop all charges against Snowden and, unsurprisingly, it failed to gain support.

This was in September of 2020, after he had been in Russia for nearly 7 years, and after the House Intelligence Committee had released a bipartisan report to the public detailing about how he had broken the law and made our country less safe. This came after that.

And she publicly lobbied President Trump to pardon Snowden during his first term. He didn't.

And on October 6 of 2020, Gabbard called Snowden a brave whistleblower. Two weeks later, Vladimir Putin gave Snowden permanent residency in Russia.

This should, obviously, be a great concern to anyone considering her for this job, and it is clear that Colonel Gabbard knew it would be an issue in her confirmation hearing. She knew that. So she came prepared with a well-practiced answer, and she used it, word for word, over and over again.

Vice Chairman Warner's first question was whether she thinks Edward Snowden is brave. She said that Edward Snowden broke the law, but that he released information that led to reforms. She didn't mention the harm he did to our national security.

He followed up. She started with the same answer. And on and on it went. Next, with Senator King.

Then Senator Young asked if she agreed with the House Intelligence Committee report that Snowden caused damage to national security. She repeated the same answer she had given just before. At least eight times, by my count, as I sat there in the hearing room, she gave the same answer word for word.

But the real moment of truth came when Senator Lankford of Oklahoma asked her what he himself has publicly said was a softball question, and the question was: Is Edward Snowden a traitor?

It really should have been pretty easy. If you believe Edward Snowden broke the law and the law he broke is the Espionage Act, it is pretty clear that is exactly what he is. He is a traitor.

She wouldn't answer.

Senator Bennet gave her another opportunity. She didn't take it.

Now, Colonel Gabbard came into our confirmation hearing with a plan to give the same nonanswer over and over about Edward Snowden, and she was counting on that being enough to skate by. It wasn't for me.

And I still can't understand. To this day, I still can't figure it out, why she will not call this guy a traitor. Colonel Gabbard would be leading the men and women of our intelligence Agencies whose work and lives Edward Snowden put at risk.

I ask my Republican colleagues: How can we entrust this responsibility with someone who wanted to free Edward Snowden and still, to this day, cannot say whether or not he is a traitor?

For a lot of nominees, that would be a way big enough issue to prevent them from getting this job. That is pretty clear. But so, too, would her hostility toward FISA 702, one of the most important intelligence collection tools that we have. This is the program that enables us to monitor the communications of foreign actors outside of the United States. It has stopped terror attacks. It has protected American troops serving abroad. About 60 percent of the President's brief every single day is derived from intelligence that is gathered from this program, the very brief that Colonel Gabbard would be responsible for compiling every single day. Without it, we would be exposed. We would be less able to detect and prevent terror attacks or other attacks against the American people.

But that is exactly what Colonel Gabbard tried to do. She voted against reauthorizing this program in 2018. And in 2020, she introduced legislation to repeal it--all of it. Not just the piece--the piece of it that Congress was debating how to reform, she wanted to just get rid of the whole thing, all of it. And when she advocated for doing away with the program, she made false statements about how it works and how it impacts American citizens.

This should be a concern for anyone being considered for this job. Because while the Senate Intelligence Committee has a range of views on how this program should work, none of us on the committee, on either side of the aisle, has any interest in getting rid of it because we know how important it is, how critical it is to the safety of all of us. In fact, we came together with others in Congress to deliver reforms that further protect our civil liberties as Americans while retaining the tools our President needs to stay ahead of threats.

Once again, Colonel Gabbard knew that this would be an issue with her confirmation. And, again, she bet that she could just say as little as possible to just get by. That is why, in a written response to the committee, she said:

My prior concerns about FISA were based on insufficient protections for civil liberties . . . Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues.

Sounds reasonable. Well, here is the problem. Just last year, she was on a podcast trashing those very reforms she is now saying back up her position on FISA. She said:

This legislation that was just passed recently expanded those authorities . . . in some other ways, it took an already bad problem and made it many, many times worse.

So which is it? Did these reforms fix the issues she had with FISA, as she said in her written response? Or did they make the problem worse, as she said on the podcast? It can't be both.

Colonel Gabbard was asked about this inconsistency during her confirmation hearing, and she couldn't answer for it. In fact, she couldn't answer for what these reforms are and how they address her concerns or don't.

And, folks, this is not trivial. The Director of National Intelligence works with the Attorney General to assess compliance with the law and improve internal procedures that decide how the intelligence community will collect, use, and store foreign intelligence to combat threats like terrorism while ensuring Americans' constitutional rights are protected. That means Colonel Gabbard would be responsible for implementing these reforms and advising Congress on their effectiveness.

Finally, as we are all aware--well, all of us in the Senate, we are aware--this program is up for reauthorization in just over a year. President Trump has been all over the map on this program, but as recently as last year, he told Congress to kill FISA. The next Director of National Intelligence is going to play a critical role in advising the President and making recommendations to Congress about this program, FISA. Do we really trust that Colonel Gabbard will fight to protect this program, given her track record on this?

I know I don't. That, too, should be disqualifying for this job.

But the last example of Colonel Gabbard's hostility toward the intelligence community is the one that should give everyone the most concern. It is for me. As I said earlier, the primary responsibility of this job is to coordinate across 18 intelligence organizations and sift through intelligence, make some sense of it, and decide what to take to the President of the United States. In her confirmation hearing, I asked Colonel Gabbard: What does a good process look like?

And her answer to this question--it was fine. She said: Build a strong team, welcome dissenting voices, and make sure the truth is reported.

That is great. But then we got into a real-life example when she had sought out the intel, claimed to be reporting the truth, and then got it wrong. That is where, for me, it was obvious she is not the right fit for this job.

Colonel Gabbard accepts the conclusion that former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, except for two incidents. She has publicly disputed the confident conclusion of our intelligence community and international experts that Assad used chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and in Douma, both in Syria, in 2018. She authored a report--this was put on her campaign website-- questioning whether these attacks were staged by anti-Assad groups, despite the repeated determinations that this was yet another incident of him murdering his own citizens.

You might be asking yourself: Why? Why did Colonel Gabbard go to such great lengths to sow doubt about these two attacks, knowing that it would have to be useful to Assad's goals? Why did she doubt our intelligence community's conclusion in these two cases, but not the others?

Well, I asked her, and here is how that answer began. This is a quote from Colonel Gabbard:

These two cases are being looked at to be used as a pretext for major military movement. And another--my fear was a repeat of the deployment of another half million soldiers like we saw in Iraq towards what was the Obama administration's goals, which was regime change in Syria.

Setting aside that Obama didn't deploy a half million soldiers to Syria, here is the problem. By her own admission, Colonel Gabbard's doubts about U.S. intelligence in these two situations began with her disagreements about how the intelligence was going to be used. She didn't want the United States and our allies to strike Syria as punishment for these chemical weapons attacks. So instead of making a strong argument on the policy, she tried to question whether the attacks happened in the first place.

Colonel Gabbard also invoked the Iraq war. She is right. We needed to learn important lessons from the lead-up to the invasion. The biggest lesson was to carefully follow the intelligence where it actually leads, rather than bending it to fit the outcome that you want, which is exactly what Colonel Gabbard did in this case.

It is that simple, folks, and it is also that dangerous, especially for someone in this job. If she has already disputed intelligence because of how it would be used, would she do it again in this position--the position of the Director of National Intelligence? She is the person deciding what the President would see.

Would she withhold information or would she seek out confirmation without regard for whom it came from or that her viewpoint was correct? Because that is what she did in this case--the report she authored questioning whether these attacks were staged relied on a professor without expertise in chemical weapons. His theories in this case were deeply flawed and have been widely debunked by experts.

I asked Colonel Gabbard if she was aware that this professor had appeared on Russian propaganda news stations. She said she had no idea.

To produce his findings, this professor relied on an Australian chemistry student with a history of defending the Assad regime. I asked her if she was aware of that. She said she was not--not at the time-- but since she has been made aware.

Here is what that tells me: Colonel Gabbard was unwilling to even examine, let alone weigh, the biases and shortcomings of the sources she was seeking out and elevating. She embraced these people and their half-baked theories because they confirmed what she wanted to be true-- that Assad didn't gas his own people in these two cases. She wanted it to be true so badly that, 5 years later, she says that she was still unaware of the facts of their background--facts that me and my staff found with some rather routine searching of public information. It was not hard.

And she trusted and further publicized their claims without verification, despite our government making clear that Assad and Russia would attempt to raise these sorts of questions and theories to distract America and our allies.

Mr. President, if that is not a redflag, I don't know what is. Still, 5 years later, Colonel Gabbard came before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and repeated all of this as if it weren't in contention. She continues to apply less skepticism toward these sources and narratives than the assessments of American intelligence operatives, professionals who have a ton of experience at this and whom she is nominated to lead--all because they support her point of view: The United States should not have struck Syria in retaliation for their use of chemical weapons. That is why she believed the people online.

Now, that kind of reverse engineering to try to steer a policy outcome is dangerous in a job like this.

Mr. President, the next couple of years are going to be challenging for our national security. I think we all agree upon that. We face threats that grow more complicated each and every day. And our intelligence community, they are the best in the world. They are really good at gathering intelligence of all kinds. The hardest part is sifting through that information and making some sense of what it all means, making determinations. That is what this job is all about. And everything we have seen from Colonel Gabbard throughout this process suggests that she is the wrong person for this job.

She lifted up Edward Snowden as a hero and is unwilling to call him a traitor. She tried to get rid of one of the most important intelligence collection tools that we have and has contradicted herself when answering for it. And most central to this role, she has displayed poor judgment and poor decision making when assessing intelligence, especially when it comes to chemical weapons use in Syria.

Each of these--each one of them on their own--should be disqualifying for holding this job. Taken together, they paint a picture of someone who is especially ill-suited and unprepared to take on this responsibility.

I know that these concerns are shared by my Republican colleagues. So let's be honest about it. Let's say no to the political pressure. And let's put our national security first, and let's vote no on this nominee.

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