Compromising Position: Making Gabbard Director of National Intelligence Really Isn't Smart

The furor about the real risk to American national security posed by President-elect Donald Trump's choice of Tulsi Gabbard as the next Director of National Intelligence has obscured what is the even greater risk, and that's the one posed by the president-elect himself. It's somehow all but forgotten that Trump was indicted for intentionally pilfering classified military secrets on his way out of the White House, intentionally secreting them, intentionally retaining them and intentionally deceiving the United States government about the pilfering, the secreting and the retaining. These virtually indisputable violations of the Espionage Act by Trump have been washed out of America's consciousness by a Supreme Court ruling making Trump immune from prosecution for criminal conduct, the (very) friendly U.S. District Court judge presiding over the Espionage Act case against him and the election results.

But between Trump's consequence-free declaration that classified military secrets are his personal property and his, shall we say (very) warm relationship with Vladimir Putin, there'd be plenty of reason to be alarmed about the security of our most precious secrets even if Trump had picked someone reassuring as his DNI.

Which he most assuredly has not.

If confirmed as DNI, Gabbard will oversee the analysis and the national security recommendations generated by all 18 intelligence agencies and be responsible for briefing the historically superficial and intellectually vacant Trump on each day's international threats or, more properly, what Gabbard regards as threats. As Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA officer who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, puts it, "The DNI has access to every single secret that the United States has, every single bit of information that we know. ... It's the keys to the intelligence community kingdom."

It isn't that Gabbard is erratic, though she surely is that. She endorsed socialist Bernie Sanders for president in 2016, moderate Democrat Joe Biden in 2020, and pick-the-appropriate descriptor Donald Trump in 2024.

But it isn't the chameleon-like qualities that are her biggest problem. It's where she seems to have landed: with America's enemies. After Vladimir Putin launched a brutal invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, slaughtering civilians in an effort to subjugate a population that only wants the right to self-determination, Gabbard started off mindless and then descended to mouthing the Kremlin's talking points, pointedly declining to criticize the Russian invasion or the man who launched it. "It's time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love for the Ukrainian people," yammered the former congresswoman from Hawaii, "by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country." In other words, sweet Ukrainians, in the spirit of "aloha," just surrender to the Russian war machine.

Had Gabbard merely stayed vapid, it would have been better than what followed: a full-throated siding with Putin against the United States, actually blaming America and its allies for Putin's invasion, earning lavish praise from the Russian state media in the process. "The war and suffering could have easily been avoided," Gabbard posted in February 2022, "if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO." This was pure propaganda, and also pure balderdash. The war and suffering could easily have been avoided, all right, had Russia not invaded Ukraine for the purpose of crushing it and its people's hopes of living as free people into submission. To be plain, we do not really want a cheerleader for Vladimir Putin to be in charge of American intelligence, serving under a president who has himself repeatedly sided with Putin over American intelligence agencies.

When Putin falsely charged that the United States and Ukraine were collaborating on developing biological and chemical warfare facilities in Ukraine to threaten Russia, Gabbard picked up Putin's drumbeat. It was, she claimed, an "undeniable fact" that there were at least 25 U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine that could generate deadly pathogens, another false claim.

Gabbard's secret meetings with Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, her pooh-poohing of his massacre of Syrian civilians and her attacks on American intelligence agencies for doing the jobs she is unqualified to do raise the question: Can she be trusted to serve American interests? That it can legitimately be asked should disqualify her from being anywhere near the position to which she's been appointed.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.