First, it was Matt Gaetz. Then it was Pete Hegseth. And now, the D.C. establishment class has set its sights on smearing Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.
Since being tapped for the position nearly two weeks ago, the former Hawaii congresswoman has come under a barrage of unhinged and dishonest attacks from some of the country’s worst political actors. From legacy media hacktivists to Democrats and neocons, the litany of hit pieces and commentary aimed at sinking Gabbard’s nomination has been virtually nonstop.
While this kind of opposition is expected with any Trump nominee, the attacks on the Democrat-turned-Republican have taken a more sinister tone. Not content with simply lamenting her so-called “lack of experience,” this cabal of establishment cronies has distorted Gabbard’s opposition to America’s aimless overseas interventionism to grossly paint her as a foreign agent willing to sell out her own country to adversarial powers.
Shortly after the announcement of her nomination, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., appeared on MSNBC to contend that Gabbard — a U.S. Army veteran and reservist — is “likely a Russian asset.”
“She is considered to be essentially by most assessments, a Russian asset and would be the most dangerous,” Wasserman Schultz said. The Florida Democrat was reportedly cut off by the host and asked, “Is that what you consider her?”
“Yes. There’s no question,” Wasserman Schultz said. “I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset who would be as the DNI, responsible for managing our entire intelligence community, hold all of our most significant intelligence information and secrets, and essentially would be a direct line to our enemies.”
Gabbard has regularly criticized U.S. interventionist foreign policy, specifically America’s increasing involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war. Shortly after Moscow launched its offensive, the Hawaii native blamed “neocons” and “warmongers” for “stoking” the conflict and argued that the war “serves their own interests, and lines the pocket of the Military Industrial Complex with trillion$.”
“What we have, unfortunately, is Democrats, Republicans, the mainstream media, the Washington elite essentially in the pocket of the military industrial complex,” Gabbard said during a February 2022 appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” “And rather than looking out for what’s in the best interest of the American people, our national security, our country — they see dollar signs when they look at Ukraine.”
[READ: John Bolton Asks Deep State To Deep-Six Trump Nominees Before They Fix Corrupt Intel Agencies]
Gabbard has also expressed disapproval of America’s intervention in Syria. In 2015, the then-congresswoman broke with Democrats to criticize what she called President Barack Obama’s “illegal, counter-productive war to overthrow” the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally. She warned that further involvement would produce “the same mistakes of the past,” referencing prior U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Libya.
(Gabbard reportedly met Assad during a 2017 trip to Syria, in which she claims to have sought to end the country’s internal conflict and “achieve peace.”)
But Wasserman Schultz is hardly the only D.C. establishment figure to use Gabbard’s foreign policy views to cast her as a Russian sympathizer.
In 2019, Russia collusion hoaxer Hillary Clinton baselessly claimed that Gabbard, then a 2020 Democrat presidential candidate, and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, are assets of Moscow.
“She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said of Gabbard. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up because she’s also a Russian asset.”
In March 2022, then-Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, accused Gabbard of being “traitorous” and spreading “treasonous lies,” after the former congresswoman posted a video on X with the claim that the U.S. was funding more than two dozen Ukrainian biolabs that are “conducting research on dangerous pathogens.” The widely circulated allegations were used by Russia to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
While there “are bioresearch facilities in Ukraine, some of which are partnered with the Department of Defense … there is no evidence that the labs were being used to develop biological weapons, or that Russia was under such direct threat from them that they needed to invade Ukraine,” according to The Daily Caller.
Earlier this year, whistleblowers with the Federal Air Marshals Service revealed to Congress that the Transportation Security Administration weaponized the agency’s Quiet Skies program by placing Gabbard on a watchlist and surveilling her travel. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, the revelation came “after the former Hawaii lawmaker and critic of the surveillance state criticized President Joe Biden on Fox News.”
Questioning Gabbard’s previous statements and policy positions isn’t irrational. Like any figure undergoing confirmation, she should have the opportunity to answer for her past, explain her views, and make the case for why she’s the best person for the job.
But that’s not what America’s foreign policy blob is doing. These bad actors are brazenly smearing the former congresswoman as a Kremlin operative because she dares to criticize their disastrous interventionist policies and represents a threat to the status quo.
One can disagree with Gabbard’s views on any given foreign policy matter without slandering her as a Russia-loving traitor. Reviling her as such and laundering other ad hominem attacks, however, exposes these cronies’ ultimate goal of preventing an outsider from cleaning up the corrupt system they’ve spent decades protecting.
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