Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an Army Reserve officer who has faced allegations of parroting Russian propaganda, is now in charge of the U.S. intelligence community.
The Senate voted 52-48 on Wednesday to confirm Gabbard to the job of director of national intelligence, giving her the responsibility of delivering President Donald Trump's daily intelligence briefing and overseeing the nation's 18 intelligence agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency and the intelligence arms of each military branch.
Gabbard was confirmed with near unanimous GOP support despite initial discomfort from some Senate Republicans about her past positions, including her opposition to a key surveillance program and her casting doubt on U.S. intelligence assessments that Syria's former regime used chemical weapons on its citizens.
Read Next: 'We Welcome DOGE': Hegseth Says Musk Can Find Billions of Dollars in Pentagon Cuts
In 2017, as a member of Congress, Gabbard took a trip to Syria and met with its then-leader Bashar Assad in a trip seen as helping legitimize Assad at the height of the Syrian civil war. While Gabbard has called Assad a "brutal dictator," she also said she was "skeptical" that he was behind chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Syria -- echoing Russian disinformation.
More recently, Gabbard also echoed Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine, including the falsehood that Ukrainian labs were building bioweapons with U.S. support.
Gabbard's defenders have pointed to her military service in pushing back against allegations that she has sided with America's enemies. She is a current lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, where she transferred after 17 years in the Hawaii National Guard.
Gabbard faced questions about the Syria trip throughout her confirmation process, particularly after Assad was overthrown in December, upending U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. At her confirmation hearing, Gabbard said she used the trip to press Assad on his human rights record.
Gabbard was also grilled by lawmakers in both parties about her past opposition to Section 702, which allows intelligence agencies to collect the communications of suspected terrorists overseas, and support for Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information about U.S. surveillance programs and fled to Russia after being charged with violating the Esponiage Act.
Gabbard said at her confirmation that she now supports 702, but she refused to answer repeated questions about her current position on Snowden.
Despite appearing frustrated at the hearing, most Republicans ultimately backed Gabbard.
"After working through a process, examining her nomination, consulting with experts and following my conscience, I will be voting for Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence," Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, who had been seen as a potential "no" vote on Gabbard, posted on social media as Wednesday's vote started. "Anyone that followed my process knows my vote wasn't predetermined, but the fact that my trusted colleagues in the intelligence community supported her was significant. I hope she is highly successful in her new role."
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who was the Senate GOP leader until this year, was the lone Republican to vote against Gabbard. McConnell, who has said he intends to focus on national security issues in his post-leadership Senate tenure, also voted against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Gabbard served as a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii from 2013 to 2021 and ran for president as a Democrat in 2020. She left the party to become an independent in 2022 before announcing last year that she was backing Trump's bid for a second term and officially registering as a Republican.
While Democrats are powerless to stop Trump's nominees from getting confirmed on their own since they are in the minority in the Senate, they have been putting up procedural roadblocks to slow the approval for some of the nominees they consider to be the most objectionable.
In the case of Gabbard, Democrats would not agree to waive Senate rules to allow the final confirmation vote to take place sooner than the 30 hours required after a procedural vote. The 30 hours expired at about 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, and Republicans had initially planned to vote on her then, but senators agreed to wait to vote until late morning because of a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., overnight.
"Of all people Donald Trump could have picked to oversee national intelligence, he picked someone known for repeating Russian propaganda and getting duped by conspiracy theories," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "Senate Republicans know very well that Ms. Gabbard has no business advising the president on matters of classified intelligence."
Related: Tulsi Gabbard, Trump's Pick to Oversee US Spy Agencies, Grilled About Snowden, Syria and Russia
