[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 27 (Monday, February 10, 2025)]
[Senate]
[Pages S811-S814]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Cloture Motion
Pursuant to rule XXII, the Chair lays before the Senate the pending
cloture motion, which the clerk will state.
The assistant bill clerk read as follows:
Cloture Motion
We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the
provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate,
do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the nomination
of Executive Calendar No. 18, Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii, to be
Director of National Intelligence.
John Thune, John R. Curtis, Tommy Tuberville, Kevin
Cramer, Ashley Moody, Mike Crapo, Markwayne Mullin,
David McCormick, Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, John Barrasso,
Pete Ricketts, James C. Justice, Jon Husted, Bernie
Moreno, Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. By unanimous consent, the mandatory quorum
call has been waived.
The question is, Is it the sense of the Senate that debate on the
nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii, to be Director of National
Intelligence, shall be brought to a close?
The yeas and nays are mandatory under the rule.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. BARRASSO. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the
Senator from North Carolina (Mr. Tillis).
[[Page S812]]
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Pennsylvania (Mr.
Fetterman) is necessarily absent.
The yeas and nays resulted--yeas 52, nays 46, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 49 Ex.]
YEAS--52
Banks
Barrasso
Blackburn
Boozman
Britt
Budd
Capito
Cassidy
Collins
Cornyn
Cotton
Cramer
Crapo
Cruz
Curtis
Daines
Ernst
Fischer
Graham
Grassley
Hagerty
Hawley
Hoeven
Husted
Hyde-Smith
Johnson
Justice
Kennedy
Lankford
Lee
Lummis
Marshall
McConnell
McCormick
Moody
Moran
Moreno
Mullin
Murkowski
Paul
Ricketts
Risch
Rounds
Schmitt
Scott (FL)
Scott (SC)
Sheehy
Sullivan
Thune
Tuberville
Wicker
Young
NAYS--46
Alsobrooks
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Blunt Rochester
Booker
Cantwell
Coons
Cortez Masto
Duckworth
Durbin
Gallego
Gillibrand
Hassan
Heinrich
Hickenlooper
Hirono
Kaine
Kelly
Kim
King
Klobuchar
Lujan
Markey
Merkley
Murphy
Murray
Ossoff
Padilla
Peters
Reed
Rosen
Sanders
Schatz
Schiff
Schumer
Shaheen
Slotkin
Smith
Van Hollen
Warner
Warnock
Warren
Welch
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING--2
Fetterman
Tillis
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ricketts). On this vote, the yeas are 52,
the nays are 46.
The motion is agreed to.
The Senator from Colorado.
Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am grateful to be on the floor here
tonight with my colleague from California, Senator Schiff, and others
to talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard--now the successful
nomination, I guess, of Tulsi Gabbard--to be the Director of National
Intelligence.
To say the least, I never thought that we would see a moment in the
history of the United States, in the history of our attempt as a
Congress to ensure that the American people and that the President get
the intelligence they need. In all of these years and over all of these
decades, I never imagined we would see someone like Tulsi Gabbard
approved on the floor of the U.S. Senate for that job, and I wanted to
speak tonight, just briefly, to say why I think that was the wrong
direction for the Trump administration and, more importantly, the wrong
direction for the American people.
Let me say, first of all, intelligence--and being a member of the
Intelligence Committee, I know this is unlike anything else we do
around here, because a lot of what happens--my colleague Senator King
from Maine is here--is done in secret. One of the great privileges of
being on the Intelligence Committee is that--I think, in part--because
it is in secret, there isn't the kind of partisanship that you see on a
lot of the other committees. There isn't the jockeying for position or
for political notoriety; that people on that committee are very serious
about our work. In part, it is because we all have a responsibility, on
behalf of all of the Senators who are not on the committee, to be able
to transmit, as well as we can, the intelligence needs of our country,
the intelligence findings of the intelligence community, and to play a
very important role in oversight, because if we didn't provide that
role, the intelligence Agencies could run amuck without the American
people ever knowing about it or their Representatives knowing about it.
In fact, the whole reason we have the Intelligence Committee in the
Senate is because so many terrible decisions were made by the
intelligence Agencies in the postwar period, in the 1950s and 1960s--
some of it well-intentioned, you know, during the Cold War, but a lot
of it were really bad judgments--that included things like, you know,
the attempt to assassinate foreign leaders and to plot revolutions
around the globe. This Congress, this Senate, decided that we needed to
have oversight for the American people, and we created the Intelligence
Committee to do that. It means that we have an institutional structure
that ensures that the American people get the best service out of the
intelligence community and that the President gets the best
intelligence. And that structure was put in place by people who thought
it was important for intelligence Agencies not to run amuck and for the
President to get the best intelligence possible.
Now we are putting somebody in the job of Director of all of the
intelligence Agencies, in a sense, the ODNI, so-called--that is sort of
the clearinghouse and the coordinator for all of the intel that the
President gets--Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Now, look, she has had a record of public service in the Congress and
in the military. I don't dispute that, and I am not calling into
question whether or not she is serving the interests of other
countries. But I do want to say--and I will be brief--that I think her
judgment has been extraordinarily--I would say, exceptionally--bad.
I share her view that there were profound intelligence errors in the
lead-up to the Gulf war and in the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan.
In the Gulf, in particular, you will remember, you know, the weapons of
mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have had. He
didn't have them. It was a terrible, terrible failure of our
Intelligence Committee and a terrible failure of oversight from this
Congress, and she is right about that.
The problem is she has, I think, learned the wrong lesson from that,
and over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to
support the interests of the United States--I hate to say it--versus
those of our adversaries', time and time again, she picks our
adversaries or even our allies.
I have heard her say how worried she is about what she describes as
the remilitarization of Japan, which, of course, Japan is doing because
of the threat from China, with our very, very close cooperation. That
is of concern to Tulsi Gabbard.
She went to Syria and famously came back disputing our own
intelligence Agencies' findings about Assad's gassing of his own
people. To this day, she hasn't really taken that back, and it makes no
sense at all.
But the thing that drives me the craziest is that she has been an
apologist for what Vladimir Putin has done since the day Vladimir Putin
invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was a peaceful country with a peaceful border,
and Vladimir Putin was the first tyrant since World War II ended. We
had set up all of these multilateral institutions across Europe and
across the world to prevent the kind of hostility that we had seen
break out in World War II, and Vladimir Putin decided he would invade a
peaceful country next-door to him. In his mind, he had a right to do
that because Ukraine has been viewed by czars--going back hundreds and
hundreds of years--as Russian territory.
That is not the way the Ukrainian people look at this. They think of
themselves as an independent country. They think of themselves as
living in a place where history actually has moved on over the last 500
years or 1,000 years, and they were sitting there, peacefully, when
Vladimir Putin invaded them with no provocation at all.
On the evening that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard
tweeted out at 11:30 at night--her local time--referring to the war,
Putin's invasion of Ukraine: This war and suffering could easily have
been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO had simply
acknowledged Russia's ``legitimate security concerns'' regarding
Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, which would mean U.S.-NATO forces
right on Russia's border.
Now, she gets mad when people read that stuff. That is what she said,
and she says: Well, don't tell people that I am carrying propaganda for
the Russian Government or for Putin. That is not fair.
I don't have to say that, but the Russian television put on TV, in
the days after the aftermath of Putin's invasion, the very thing that
Congresswoman Gabbard had said about his invasion because they saw it
as something that ratified what they had done. And it was so
consistent, so aligned with his position--and it continues to be his
position today--that he thought it would muddy the waters with people
around the world about what they were doing in Ukraine.
I believe Ukraine's battle, from the very beginning, has not been a
battle for Ukraine. I think it is a battle for democracy. I think they
are on the tip of the spear, you know, in a way that nobody has been
since World War II.
[[Page S813]]
The Ukrainian people have been unbelievable, and the Ukrainian soldiers
have fought magnificently. There was a view, when Putin invaded
Ukraine, that, in 3 days, they were going to be in Kyiv--the Russians--
and because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people, because of the
bravery of the soldiers, many of whom have given up their lives, they
have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anybody on this floor, of
any of the Monday-morning quarterbacking that has happened in this
Capitol and in other capitols around the world. And our allies all
around Europe--but also in the Pacific area, as well--all have seen
what the Ukrainian people have accomplished.
When she had an opportunity to say something about the Ukrainians and
when she had the opportunity to stand with the United States and stand
with our allies, she made another choice. She is entitled to that
choice. She is entitled to that choice, just as she is entitled to her
views about the intelligence failures during the Gulf war. But the fact
that she has the idiosyncratic views that she has, whether it is
Putin's invasion of Ukraine or her writing a bill in the House to give
Edward Snowden a pardon, doesn't qualify her to be the lead
intelligence official for the United States of America.
As I said--and I will finish here--we work well in a bipartisan way
on these issues. The American people need the President to get
intelligence in a way that is trustworthy, that is not shaded in one
direction or another, and we all need to be able to trust each other in
the delivery of that intelligence.
I will say that I think the President, in nominating Congresswoman
Gabbard for this position, has fallen short. I voted for the CIA
Director. This is not an issue of his appointments to the intelligence
Agencies. But in the case of Congresswoman Gabbard, I think he missed
the mark.
I apologize to my colleague from California for going on for so long.
I will yield the floor to him.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from California.
Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. President, after Tulsi Gabbard was selected as Donald
Trump's nominee for Director of National Intelligence, the Russian
newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda was overjoyed. They wrote: ``The CIA and
FBI are trembling.'' Sadly, the Russian newspaper is probably right
about that.
Another Russian state outlet called her a ``Comrade.''
On a separate broadcast, top Putin mouthpiece Vladimir Solovyov,
after gushing about Kash Patel, said: ``And what about our girl? We
have our girl there.'' ``Our girl'' is evidently the Kremlin's way of
referring to our nominee Tulsi Gabbard. His guest asked, so as to be
sure, ``Intelligence?'' The answer was yes.
RT, yet another Russian outlet that Ms. Gabbard ``regularly read and
shared articles from,'' took to Twitter to defend her: ``We've got your
back, Tulsi.'' Yes, they certainly do. In September, it was revealed
that RT was acting covertly on behalf of Moscow to spread propaganda in
the United States. It is not a surprise that RT has Tulsi Gabbard's
back. The question is, Should we?
The Director of National Intelligence is the nerve center of our
Nation's intelligence network. It is the linchpin between 18 Agencies
tasked with detecting and preventing threats to our national security
and coordinating our intelligence resources. It is a job that requires
judgment. It requires experience. It requires a high degree of trust.
Above all, it requires a deep and unwavering commitment to the truth
and a willingness to stand up to despots. Yet the nominee before us is
stunningly lacking in all of these qualities.
Ms. Gabbard's record in Congress is not one of distinction in
intelligence matters. She did not serve on the Intelligence Committee
in the House and was not known for advancing meaningful legislation on
intelligence in this space. When she did sign on to legislation, it was
to eliminate critically important intelligence programs or it was to
praise those who leaked classified information and did great damage to
our Nation, like Edward Snowden.
She did not wrestle with the complexities of the intelligence-
gathering analysis process. In fact, in the moments when her voice was
heard on matters of foreign policy, it was in ways that should concern
all of us. She has echoed, amplified, and at times outright defended
the positions of autocrats and despots.
When now-deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad gassed his own
people, she cast doubt on the findings of our own intelligence
Agencies--cast doubt on them just like the Russian propaganda outlets
did--this, after she engaged in her own form of freelance foreign
policy, traveling to Syria to meet with Assad and get the full scoop on
his government's narrative of that murderous crusade.
On her return, she positively crowed about how lovely this dictator
was. ``He wants to be seen as someone who cares for his country.''
Well, maybe if he wanted to be seen as someone who cares for his
country, he shouldn't have gassed his own people. ``He wants to be seen
as someone who would not conduct these kinds of atrocities,'' Tulsi
Gabbard said--except that he did. He did commit these kinds of
atrocities.
When Vladimir Putin launched his brutal war against our ally Ukraine,
she once again parroted Kremlin talking points about so-called
``provocations'' by NATO. She repeated Russian propaganda claims that
the United States had set up secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and
argued that the United States, not Russia, is responsible for Putin's
nuclear brinksmanship.
This is the nominee for our intelligence Agencies--not the Kremlin's;
this is our nominee, Tulsi Gabbard. This is who this President seeks to
hand over the keys to our national security; to entrust her with the
Nation's most closely held secrets; to be the final voice in the room
advising the President on intelligence; to be, in the plain words of
the law, ``the principal adviser to the President, to the National
Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence
matters related to the national security''--this, Tulsi Gabbard.
This nomination is not just unwise, it is dangerous.
Make no mistake, Ms. Gabbard is entitled to her own personal
opinions. She can apologize for Assad or Putin or any other murderous
dictator to her heart's content. But we are not considering Ms. Gabbard
for some position in which her bizarre fondness for foreign despots is
beside the point. She is not the nominee for Postmaster General. We are
considering her for one of the most important jobs in our intelligence
community. For that, Tulsi Gabbard is a walking five-alarm fire and
must be rejected--must be.
There is a reason the Director of National Intelligence must have the
confidence of both the intelligence professionals that they oversee and
the national security establishment--because the job requires
accountability; it requires trust; it requires truthfulness.
In 2015, Ms. Gabbard joined a congressional delegation trip to the
Middle East, the kind that so many of us in this Chamber have
participated in. She visited a Turkish town near the Syrian border
where countless refugees were sheltering. Her guide took Ms. Gabbard to
meet two Syrian girls, age just 9 and 4 years old, who had been badly
burned in a bombing carried out by the Syrian dictator's warplanes. The
children's parents had been killed in that attack. These brave, small
children told their story to the then-Congresswoman.
In this situation, I think any of us would have roughly the same
response: some form of sympathy, some form of empathy, some attempt to
provide comfort to these children who saw their lives and their
families destroyed in front of them. But Ms. Gabbard had a very
different response.
By the account of the guide who was with her, she looked at the
children and said: ``How do you know if it was Assad? What if it was
ISIS?''
I should note that ISIS, of course, has no air force. But, of course,
that wasn't really the point, was it? The point was perhaps best
illustrated by her guide who was with her that day and who said of that
experience--those days with Ms. Gabbard--he said: ``It dawned on me
that Tulsi wasn't misinformed or ignorant.'' He said he worried instead
that she ``had a worldview that was adversarial to the United
States''--``adversarial to the United States.'' Think about that:
``adversarial to the United States.'' And consider whether this is the
right person to be the Director of National Intelligence.
[[Page S814]]
Where do we draw the line with Donald Trump? What level of unfitness
in a nominee? What level of unconstitutionality in an Executive action?
What level of abject disregard of our judicial system? What national
security threat or risk will it take? What action could he commit where
we would be joined by our Republican colleagues in saying we have had
enough?
Where is the line? When is an action too egregious or an appointment
too absurd, a risk or threat that is too big? Where is the line? Is it
disobeying a lawful court order, which this administration seems to be
laying the groundwork to do? Is it confirming a patently unqualified
FBI Director who wants to close down FBI headquarters and makes music
with felons who beat law enforcement? Is it a Director of HHS who
doesn't believe in vaccines or a Director of National Intelligence who
has sought to undermine vital intelligence operations and whom the
Russians and others viewed as aligned with them instead of with us?
Where is the line? Because, for me, that line has been crossed a
long, long time ago.
I cannot--I will not--support this nomination, and I urge my
colleagues to think long and hard before they do because if Ms. Gabbard
is confirmed, we will not need the luxury of hindsight. We already have
the luxury of hindsight. The threats to our Nation are real. Those who
wish us harm are busy plotting against us. There are plots to conduct
attacks on U.S. soil. There are intelligence warnings about China's
intentions to replace U.S. influence around the world and about
Russia's relentless assault against our friends and allies.
At a moment when the world is watching, when our allies and our
adversaries are questioning America's stability and leadership on the
global stage, we cannot afford to confirm a Director of National
Intelligence who lacks the qualifications, the judgment, and the
credibility to lead. We cannot.
Remember that Russian broadcaster I mentioned earlier, Vladimir
Solovyov? Here is some of the rest of that exchange with the guest on
his show: ``Well with Tulsi Gabbard it's not that simple,'' the guest
replied. ``It might not work because . . . what if it's not approved?''
The Russians are worried that Tulsi Gabbard might not be approved by
this body. That should tell us something.
People, please, do we need the Kremlin to spell it out for us, what
they are hoping and, if they prayed, would be praying for us to do?
Solovyov seemingly answered that question for us live on Russian TV:
``Why are you suddenly so doubtful?'' he asked his guest. Solovyov
seemed nervous about the chances for confirmation of the woman he
described as ``our girl,'' Tulsi Gabbard. Perhaps he fears that
Congress has more common sense than to confirm someone who prefers
Russia's worldview over matters like Ukraine's sovereignty to our own
national security professionals. But do we? Do we possess that basic
common sense? For the sake of our country, for the sake of our Nation's
most sensitive classified information, and for the sake of the
workforce that keeps us safe, I hope and pray that we do, that we
possess the common sense to vote down Tulsi Gabbard. We will soon find
out.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Moreno). The majority leader.
____________________