Image Credits: CNN.
Donald Trump has made some very provocative cabinet nominations in the last couple of days, including Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense and Matt Gaetz for Attorney General. But the most dangerous is former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. Here’s why.
Back in January 2023, I wrote a piece called “If It Walks Like A Russian Stooge….” It was about Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard, and it took a close look at how they had discussed the civil war in Syria and Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine. Almost a year earlier, Nancy LeTourneau wrote a similar (subscription) piece for this site called “Who’s Spreading Putin’s Talking Points These Days?.” Her article didn’t mention Taibbi, but it also noted Greenwald and Gabbard’s disturbing use of Kremlin propaganda.
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. I recommend looking at those pieces to see why Nancy and I both independently concluded that something extremely fishy was going on. I wrote that they “show all the signs of being either compromised or compensated (or both) by the Russians” and “When you peel away the onion, their consistency over time is not in being on the left or the right, but in criticizing anything America does that Russia doesn’t like and in defending Russia at every turn, often with Russia’s own talking points.” Nancy wrote:
How did they all latch onto the same talking points? Was it a coincidence? Did they simply follow Greenwald’s lead? Or is there someone behind the scenes feeding them these lines?
These folks become enraged when accused of promoting Putin’s talking points. But, as much as I’d like to avoid being a conspiracy theorist, it’s hard to ignore that they’re all singing from the same page with this obscure, preposterous theory.
With respect to Gabbard, this wasn’t a novel observation. When she ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 2019-2020, Hillary Clinton speculated that the Kremlin was “grooming her to be the third-party candidate” and said “they have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” David Plouffe straight up called her “a Russian asset.”
And, as Naveed Jamali of Newsweek observed at the time, they had good reason to make these bold claims:
When Gabbard announced her candidacy, Russian state media quickly picked up the news, and the coverage by the likes of RT and Sputnik was on their English-language sites, indicating that it was not aimed at Russians. An NBC investigative piece found that there were at least 20 such pieces about Gabbard’s candidacy, such as those on RT that proclaimed “Tulsi Gabbard is ready for America.”
I noted in my original piece that there were people on the left who had genuine concerns about American support for Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO and the European Union, seeing it as provocative and disrespectful of Russia’s legitimate national security interests. There were people on the left, including me, who were opposed to U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war, in which Russia was aggressively taking the side of the butcher, Bashar al-Assad. These positions aligned with the Kremlin’s view, but that didn’t mean anyone holding them was a Russian asset. What stood out with Gabbard was her use of Russian talking points, as well as the clear reciprocal support she received in return.
If you really think about it, it’s remarkable that Hillary Clinton made those comments about Gabbard precisely because they sounded so out of character. Clinton had been in the public eye for over a quarter century by 2019, and she’d never been known to espouse conspiracy theories. But she felt the case was obvious enough to make without fear of sounding crazy.
Trump has nominated Gabbard to the top job in the American Intelligence Community. It’s a position that gives her access to the identity of every employee, including those serving overseas with either official or non-official cover. She’ll have insight into exactly who in the Russian government is feeding information to America, and it has been clear for a while that America has some well-placed agents working in high positions in the Kremlin. This is one of the reasons the U.S. was so confident Russia would launch a full-bore invasion of Ukraine even as our European allies (and even Ukraine) remained skeptical.
I don’t think there is any way Gabbard could pass a normal background check to authorize her to see highly classified information, but Trump doesn’t care. Maybe he’s just stupid, or reckless, or it could be that he too is a Russian asset, as has long been speculated. It doesn’t really matter because there’s simply no way that we can risk having Gabbard in a position to compromise all our intelligence officers and their foreign agents.
Matt Gaetz would be an extremely dangerous Attorney General and Pete Hegseth could do irreparable damage to the U.S. military. I don’t want to downplay the seriousness of their nominations. But Gabbard is far more frightening, and preventing her nomination should be the first priority.
