‘This Is Pretty Bad’: National Security Expert Sounds Alarm On Tulsi Gabbard
A national security expert unpacked some of the “really concerning” ramifications of Donald Trump’s decision to nominate former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence.
“Obviously, qualifications are important. Obviously, this is a critically important job for the United States for keeping us safe,” Jamie Metzl, who served on the National Security Council and State Department in the Clinton Administration, said on CNN Wednesday following the president-elect’s announcement.
Metzl explained that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after 9/11, “because we realized we were not safe, because we didn’t have serious people doing a serious job of integrating all of the data information that was coming in through our intelligence agencies.”
The DNI was formed in 2005 following the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, which identified intelligence failures that occurred before the 2001 attack and recommended the creation of the role to prevent similar occurrences in future.
“Tulsi Gabbard has never worked in intelligence. She has no real background for this job,” Metzl added, noting that Gabbard has been a “booster” for autocrats such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“If you are part of a foreign government, even an allied government, are you really going to want to share your most important intelligence with the United States government, recognizing that there are people who are at central nodes in our government who are so sympathetic to our adversaries?” he asked. “It’s really concerning.”
“The good news is, this isn’t the worst of the Trump nominations, but this is pretty bad,” he added.
Gabbard, formerly a Democratic congresswoman for Hawaii, has no formal intelligence experience. After running for president in the Democratic primaries in 2020, she quit the party in 2022 and took an extreme rightward turn, ultimately endorsing Trump and joining the GOP.
