[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 27 (Monday, February 10, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S810-S811]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Nomination of Tulsi Gabbard
Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I rise this afternoon in opposition to
the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence
because nothing less than our national security is currently on the
line.
I am going to start by saying that I have nothing but respect for Ms.
Gabbard's many years of service to our Nation, both in uniform and as a
Representative for Hawaii. I don't question Ms. Gabbard's patriotism. I
oppose her nomination because I question her judgment.
Now, many may not understand the important role that the Director of
National Intelligence plays. If confirmed, Ms. Gabbard will lead the 18
Agencies of the intelligence community. She will also serve as the
principal adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and
the Homeland Security Council for all intelligence matters related to
national security; and in this role as well, she will be responsible
for over $100 billion between the national intelligence program and the
military intelligence program.
Now, the stakes here have become all the more critical in recent
days. Just in the past couple of weeks, President Trump has issued
several directives that could irreparably harm our intelligence efforts
and our Nation's ability to defend itself against the many threats we
face.
At the FBI, some of our most experienced agents who have protected us
for decades from terrorists, drug traffickers, spies, and violent
criminals have all been unceremoniously fired. Thousands more may have
reason to fear they may be next based on the vindictive list apparently
being assembled of every FBI official who was involved in the
investigations into the Capitol riot on January 6.
It is not just the FBI. Across the IC, including the CIA, DIA, NSA,
NRO, and NGA--an alphabet of Agencies that most folks don't fully
appreciate or understand--in every one of these Agencies, I am hearing
that intelligence officers and analysts with irreplaceable skills are
unfortunately being indiscriminately pressured to resign or retire.
Reportedly, senior law enforcement and national security officials
are being asked to take political litmus tests, such as whether the
2020 Presidential election was stolen and whether the January 6, 2021,
attack on the U.S. Capitol was an inside job.
Across the government, whole Agencies are being eliminated and
funding impounded in flagrant defiance of the Constitution and the law,
while unvetted, unqualified DOGE bros--one who formally worked for a
Russia hacker group and was fired for leaking sensitive company secrets
to a competitor and yet another who proudly declared himself a
``racist'' and said he would not mind if ``Gaza and Israel were both
wiped off the face of the Earth''--that individual, I understand, has
actually been rehired after he initially quit--these DOGE bros are
illegally burrowing into classified and other sensitive information,
jeopardizing our national security and violating Americans' privacy.
To take just one recent example of what is at stake here, just last
week, the CIA sent an email, using an unclassified system--an
unclassified system--to the White House listing the names of all
recently hired employees. This is, again, from the CIA.
It takes months to get a CIA employee security clearance and then a
year to train. Suddenly, all of their names are out. This happened
evidently in an attempt to comply with an Executive order to reduce the
size of the workforce no matter how badly their skills might be needed.
These 200-plus individuals--and I can assure you, with a name or the
last letter of a name and appropriate AI tools, based on where these
folks are working, you can find out their identities, and these agents
may be burned before they even start their careers.
I know that many of my Republican colleagues profess to take the
issue of unclassified servers very seriously indeed. There was a whole
litany of attack on this earlier. But the fact is, beyond the
counterintelligence risk of foolishly exposing these officers' names
using channels known to be targeted by foreign hackers, this careless
effort to identify and potentially dismiss recently recruited and
trained CIA officers also imperils the longstanding bipartisan efforts
by the Senate Intelligence Committee to actually modernize and
streamline the Agency's hiring process, because we need to make sure
that we continue to recruit and retain talented young officers when it
comes to confronting the growing national security threat posed by the
PRC.
We need leaders in the intelligence community and throughout
government who are prepared to stand up to those shortsighted attempts
to attack our workforce at the expense of our national security.
Unfortunately, I don't believe Ms. Gabbard is such a leader, nor is she
well-suited by dint of experience or judgment to serve as Director of
National Intelligence.
The DNI is a position of great importance and significance to our
national security, created, candidly, after one of our worst security
failures in our Nation's history--9/11. For that reason, when Congress
established this position--in many ways due to the efforts of my good
friend Susan Collins--it mandated in law that any individual nominated
for the position must have ``extensive national security expertise.''
As I noted previously, the DNI was created to fill this gap after 9/
11. Its mission is to share intelligence not only between the 18
entities that make up the American IC but also to work with our allies.
This sharing of information, sharing of intelligence with our allies,
is predicated on trust--there is no agreement--trust that we and our
allies will protect each other's secrets. Yet, repeatedly, Ms. Gabbard
has excused our adversaries' worst actions and instead often blamed the
United States and our allies for them.
For example, she blamed NATO for Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
And
[[Page S811]]
despite the unanimous assessment of the Trump administration's DOD,
State Department, and IC, she rejected the conclusion that Syrian
dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
Now, I don't know if her intent in making those statements was to
defend those dictators or if she was simply unaware of the intelligence
and how her statements would be perceived. In either case, it calls
into question her judgment and if she has what it takes to build and
develop the trust relationships necessary to give not only our IC
workforce but, equally important, give our allies confidence that they
can share their most sensitive intelligence with us.
Make no mistake about it, if our allies stop sharing that
intelligence, we will be less safe. To offer just one example, last
summer, intelligence sharing between the United States and Austria
saved countless lives by disrupting a terrorist attack at a Taylor
Swift concert, underscoring the importance of these relationships.
Ms. Gabbard has also been publicly outspoken in her praise and
defense of Edward Snowden--someone who betrayed the trust and
jeopardized the security of our Nation. The vast majority of the
information he stole and leaked--before, I would remind you, he ran off
and hightailed it to both China and Russia--most of this information, I
can assure you, had nothing to do with America's privacy but did
compromise our Nation's most sensitive collection sources and methods.
In many ways, we are still paying a price for Snowden's betrayal, and
it is beyond dispute that his actions put our men and women in uniform
in places like Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. Yet Ms. Gabbard has
celebrated Snowden as a ``brave whistleblower'' and advocated for his
pardon. This is someone that my friend Tom Cotton, who is the chairman
of the Intelligence Committee, called a ``traitor'' who should ``rot in
jail for the rest of his life.''
A week ago, at the hearing, member after member--particularly my
Republican friends--gave her chance after chance to just be willing to
call out Snowden as a traitor. She repeatedly declined. Instead, she
said:
The DNI has no role in determining whether or not Edward
Snowden is a lawful whistleblower.
Not only does she seem to believe that someone who divulged sensitive
national secrets to Russia and China should be celebrated as ``brave''
and not denounced as a ``traitor,'' she also does not seem to
understand the DNI's role in whistleblower determinations, because, in
fact, the DNI has a significant role in transmitting lawful
whistleblower complaints to the Intelligence Committees. It would be
irresponsible to confirm someone who cannot distinguish between
complaints that are made lawfully and those that are not.
Further, it is the statutory responsibility of the DNI to ``protect
intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.'' What
message would it send to an intelligence workforce to have a DNI who
would celebrate staff and contractors deciding to leak our Nation's
most sensitive secrets as they see fit?
Now, let me move to another issue of pressing relevance to this
nomination, and that is section 702 of FISA. This bill, this tool--it
is really hard to overstate the importance. The information we derive
from this tool is responsible for about 60 percent of the intelligence
in the President's Daily Brief, and it has been instrumental in
disrupting everything from terrorists attacks, to fentanyl trafficking,
to foreign cyber attacks.
Many in Congress have at various points supported reforms to 702 to
better balance security and civil liberties, but, again, Ms. Gabbard
has gone so much further. Not only did she vote against reauthorizing
702, she introduced legislation to repeal the whole thing and called
its very existence a ``blatant disregard for our Fourth Amendment
constitutional rights.''
I do understand that after she was nominated to be DNI, she had a
conversion--a confirmation conversion--and expressed a change of heart.
Now, that is welcome, but it is just not credible. Just last May, she
criticized the reforms put into 702. Just last May, she criticized
those very reforms she now credits with changing her mind. Again, the
reforms, she claimed, ``made the law many, many times worse.''
The DNI is responsible for making annual certifications under section
702, without which all collection under the law will cease, and the law
itself is up for reauthorization in just over a year--a process
typically led by the DNI. I have no confidence in Ms. Gabbard's
commitment to either task.
Nor is it the only issue where she has demonstrated poor judgment
that should be disqualifying for the role. During an ill-advised trip
to Syria and Lebanon in 2017, Ms. Gabbard exercised terrible judgment
and elected to meet with Bashar al-Assad amid a conflict in which Assad
was using gas and other chemical weapons against his own people. On
that same trip, she also met with Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun. Many
Americans may not be familiar with Mr. Hassoun, but in 2011, he
threatened to commit suicide bomb attacks against the United States.
At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Gabbard claimed not to know about
Hassoun's past, but reporting following the hearing makes it clear that
her staff made her aware of that at the time of her trip in 2017, to
say nothing of the fact that if she had simply googled this guy, that
would have revealed his past.
What does it say about her judgment and experience that she would
willingly meet with someone who has very publicly issued threats
against the United States of America?
Nor is this an isolated lapse. Just last summer, she accepted a trip
to Italy that was paid for by the foundation of Pierre Louvrier--a man
with deep connections to sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
At her confirmation hearing, she seemed unable to recognize why the
national security interests of the United States might be better
protected if TikTok--a social media app that reaches into the homes of
millions of Americans--was actually under American ownership rather
than being subject to the controls of the PRC and ultimately the
Communist Party of China.
The world today is more complex and more dangerous than ever before,
and we need serious people with the experience, expertise, and judgment
to navigate that complexity. Unfortunately, Ms. Gabbard is not such a
nominee.
A vote in favor of her confirmation is an endorsement of President
Trump's lawless efforts to hollow out our national security workforce,
and her confirmation will further strain the alliances that have kept
our country safe for decades; therefore, I urge my colleagues to oppose
Ms. Gabbard's nomination.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
THE PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. MORENO. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the
mandatory quorum call with respect to the Gabbard nomination be waived.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.