Senate confirms Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s controversial pick for director of National Intelligence

Gabbard’s confirmation serves as Trump taking control of the intelligence community that defied him during his first presidency. The Senate voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as President Donald Trump’s director of National Intelligence despite numerous concerns from Republicans during her confirmation process. Every Republican but Mitch McConnell of Kentucky ultimately fell in line and voted to confirm Gabbard, while all 47 Democrats opposed her confirmation. Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman, endorsed Trump during the 2024 election and has become an outspoken critic of her former party.

Before her confirmation hearing, some Republicans had serious questions about her prior opposition to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for the U.S. government to collect intelligence on non-U.S. nationals outside of the United States. And during her hearing, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle asked about her previous call for Trump to pardon Edward Snowden for his leaking to the press about surveillance programs. Gabbard repeatedly declined to say whether Snowden, who later escaped criminal charges in the U.S. by flying to China and later Russia, was a traitor.

Gabbard also received criticism for her decision to travel to Syria to meet with the country’s now-deposed president, Bashar al-Assad. She also criticized U.S. support for Ukraine as Russia invaded the country, saying in 2022 that the war could have been avoided if the Biden administration “simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.”. Nevertheless, two of her biggest Republican critics on the Intelligence Committee – Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Todd Young of Indiana – announced they would back her, giving her unanimous support from Republicans on the committee.

On Monday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski announced that she would support Gabbard’s confirmation. “While I continue to have concerns about certain positions she has previously taken, I appreciate her commitment to rein in the outsized scope of the agency, while still enabling the ODNI to continue its essential function in upholding national security,” she said in a statement on X. “As she brings independent thinking and necessary oversight to her new role, I am counting on her to ensure the safety and civil liberties of American citizens remain rigorously protected.”.

But Democratic senators warned that Republicans had rolled over for Trump despite their own personal misgivings. “I think you can see it on the faces of individual members that you that they know that this is not a good fit for this position,” Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, a member of the Intelligence Committee, told The Independent. “So they have to sleep with that at night.”. The nomination also symbolizes a coup for Trump, who regularly clashed with the intelligence community during his first presidency largely regarding the role that Russian interference played in his 2016 victory, which he repeatedly downplayed. Many of Trump’s most loyal supporters have blamed the “deep state” for undermining his presidency.

During his meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, he famously said he had “no reason” to believe that the Russian president or the country meddled in the 2016 election. At the time, Sen. John McCain called the remarks “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”. In response, Trump has sought to fill the highest echelons of American intelligence with steadfast loyalists. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence prepares the President’s Daily Brief that lays out high-level information about national security.

On top of Gabbard, Trump installed John Ratcliffe, who served as director of National Intelligence during the tail end of his first term, to lead the Central Intelligence Agency. Ratcliffe received an easy confirmation. Gabbard’s confirmation also sets up a potentially smooth confirmation process for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services. Democrats and Republicans repeatedly grilled Kennedy about his repeating the debunked claim that childhood vaccinations led to autism during his hearings before both the Senate Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

But Collins and Sen. Bill Cassidy, the HELP Committee chairman and a physician, both announced they would support Kennedy. Gabbard’s confirmation symbolizes how Trump has faced significantly less opposition to his nominees than he did in his first tenure in the White House, when Republicans occasionally stonewalled some of his picks. So far only Matt Gaetz, the former firebrand Republican congressman from Florida, saw his nomination for attorney general sink before the confirmation process even began.