In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.
Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.
“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.
It was a revealing insight into Gabbard’s conspiratorial views of the conflict, and it shocked Moustafa to silence. He knew, as even the young children did, that Isis did not have jets to launch airstrikes. It was such an absurd question that he chose not to translate it because he didn’t want to upset the girls, the eldest of whom was 12.
“From that point on, I’m sorry to say I was inaccurate in my translations of anything she said,” Moustafa told The Independent. “It was more like: How do I get these girls away from this devil?”
Even before Gabbard left the Democratic Party, ingratiated herself with Donald Trump and secured his nomination to become director of National Intelligence, she was known as a prolific peddler of Russian propaganda.
In almost every foreign conflict in which Russia had a hand, Gabbard backed Moscow and railed against the US. Her past promotion of Kremlin propaganda has provoked significant opposition on both sides of the aisle to her nomination.
Her journey from anti-war Democrat to Moscow-friendly Maga warrior began in Syria. The devastating conflict was sparked by pro-democracy uprisings in 2011, which were brutally crushed by the Assad regime. It descended into a complex web of factions that drew extremist Islamists from around the world and global powers into the fray.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based monitoring group with a network of sources on the ground, documented the deaths of 503,064 people by March 2023. It said at least 162,390 civilians had died in that same time, with the Syrian government and its allies responsible for 139,609 of those deaths.
But Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War, viewed it all as a “regime-change war” fueled by the West and aimed at removing the dictator from power. She saw Assad – and Russia, when it entered the conflict – as legitimate defenders of the state against an extremist uprising.
In 2015, when Russia entered the Syrian war on the side of the dictator Assad, Gabbard expressed support for the move, even as the civilian toll from Moscow’s devastating airstrikes grew into the thousands.
“Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911,” she wrote on Twitter.
It was precisely because of her support for Assad and Russia’s war that Moustafa was keen for her to attend the congressional delegation to southern Turkey to meet the victims of the conflict.
“From experience, everyone that we bring over to the border, and they see the victims, they always come back with a realistic view of what’s happening and who is behind the mass displacement and killing and atrocities and so on, and so that was the objective,” he said. “What was shocking was her lack of empathy. She’ll sacrifice the facts, even when it came to little girls in front of her telling her they got bombed by a plane – it didn’t matter.”
Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute who testified twice on Syria to the House Foreign Affairs Committee when Gabbard was a member, spent years debunking her various conspiracy theories about the war.
“Her consistent denial of the Syrian regime’s crimes is so wildly fringe that her potential appointment as DNI is genuinely alarming,” he told The Independent.
Lister said her views “appear to be driven by a strange fusion of America First isolationism and a belief in the value of autocratic and secular leaders in confronting extremism.”
They included a suggestion that Syrian rebels staged a false-flag chemical weapons attack against their supporters to provoke Western intervention against Assad — something the US intelligence agencies she will soon lead had concluded was false. She declined to call Assad a war criminal when pressed, despite masses of evidence, and used a video of Syrian government bombings to criticize US involvement in the war.
“Her descriptions of the crisis in Syria read like they were composed in Assad’s personal office, or in Tehran or Moscow – not Washington,” Lister added.
Gabbard was not swayed by meeting the victims of Assad’s airstrikes in 2015. In fact, two years later, she went to Damascus to meet the Syrian president in person and came away even more convinced of her opinions.
The congresswoman said her visit to meet Assad – the first by a sitting US lawmaker since the conflict began – was aimed at bringing an end to the war.
“I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we could achieve peace,” she told CNN at the time.
Gabbard was forced to defend her embrace of Assad and other dictators during her 2020 run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Democratic primary debate, she clashed with Kamala Harris, who accused her of being “an apologist for an individual – Assad – who has murdered the people of his country like cockroaches.”
“She has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal. I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously and so I’m prepared to move on,” added Harris, who would subsequently drop out of the race and later be selected as Joe Biden’s running mate.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard again defended Russian aggression.
“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/Nato had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter in 2022.
Gabbard appeared to fall for various conspiracy theories about the conflict that were promoted by Russia, as she had done in Syria. One of those conspiracy theories was a Russian claim about the existence of dozens of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine that were supposedly producing deadly pathogens.
She later walked back on those remarks, suggesting that there might have been some “miscommunication and misunderstanding.”
Gabbard’s frequent echoing of Kremlin talking points has earned her praise in Russian state media. Indeed, an article published on 15 November in the Russian-state controlled outlet RIA Novosti went so far as to call Gabbard a “superwoman.”
The possibility that Trump would tap someone with Gabbard’s history to be America’s top intelligence official shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who followed the president-elect’s first four years in the White House.
During his 2018 summit with President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, the then-president was asked if he believed the US intelligence community’s assessment, which stated that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election on his behalf.
That assessment was based on analysis of what was determined to have been state-sponsored campaigns of fake social media posts and ersatz news sites to spread false stories about his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, as well as cyberattacks targeting the Democratic National Committee and prominent operatives associated with the Clinton campaign.
But Trump, who’d just spent several hours in a closed-door meeting with Putin, stunned the assembled press and the entire world by declaring that he trusted the Russian leader’s word over that of his own advisers.
"President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be," he replied.
Trump would go on to repeatedly clash with his own intelligence appointees during the remainder of his term. He sacked his first DNI, former Indiana senator Dan Coats, after Coats repeatedly declined to back away from the government’s assessment of what Russia had done during the 2016 presidential race.
Larry Pfeiffer, the director of George Mason University’s Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy, and International Security, said Gabbard’s apparent susceptibility to foreign disinformation and her affinity for strongmen will give pause to American allies with whom the US routinely shares intelligence on common threats.
Intelligence services, he explained, are notoriously territorial and tight-lipped on sources and methods – particularly when it comes to so-called human intelligence, or Humint, which refers to information collected by and from spies and sources within hostile governments.
Pfeiffer said foreign allies are likely already concerned about how a second Trump administration will handle intelligence, given the president-elect’s record. He also predicted that Gabbard’s confirmation as DNI would cause even more problems among skittish partners.
“I think they wouldn’t feel like they’ve got an American confidant that they can deal with on a mature level,” he said. “I can guarantee you that the foreign intelligence services of Europe, including the Brits, are all having little side conversations right now about … what is this going to mean, and how are we going to operate, and what are we going to do now.”
The former US intelligence veteran also said Gabbard’s record of spreading foreign talking points calls into question whether she will be able to carry out the DNI’s important responsibility of briefing the president on threats to the nation.
He told The Independent: “Somebody like Tulsi Gabbard, you look at her long history of statements that seem to come out of the Kremlin’s notebook, her propensity to be influenced by their viewpoint – [it] raises questions as to whether she has the ability to present the intel community’s perspective as it is, or is she going to be one who’s going to want to discount it, influence it, color and change it, or ignore it and just present her own view?
“I think it also raises questions of judgement. You know, here’s an individual who seems very prone to misinformation, prone to conspiracy theory. That should worry anybody who’s worried about America’s national security,” he added.
Trump’s selection of the former Hawaii congresswoman could be a problem for the senators tasked with confirming her, on several different levels. For one, the position is unique among cabinet agencies in that there are strict requirements for who can serve in the director’s role.
The text of the 2004 law which established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington and the intelligence community’s failures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq, specifically states that any person who serves in the DNI job “shall have extensive national security expertise.”
The first person to serve as DNI, John Negroponte, was a widely respected foreign service veteran who had served as US ambassador to Iraq, Mexico, Honduras and the Philippines, as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, and as a deputy national security adviser during the Reagan administration. The next three people to hold the office were flag-rank military officers with significant intelligence experience.
Pfeiffer, a US intelligence veteran of three decades’ standing who once ran the White House Situation Room and served as chief of staff to then-CIA director General Michael Hayden, told The Independent that Gabbard’s experience in the House and her military service, while admirable, do not match the standards envisioned by the authors of the 2004 law which established the office.
“That’s national security experience … but she was a freaking military cop … operating at a largely tactical level, not that strategic, long-term national security perspective that one would expect,” he said.
Gabbard may have left the Syrian conflict behind, but Moustafa still works with its victims every day. And he believes the connection between her views on Syria and Ukraine is clear.
“What happened in Syria is what allowed the Russians to feel that they could do the very same in Ukraine,” he said.
“And what she is doing with Ukraine shows that it goes beyond her maybe misunderstanding one conflict. She is, hook, line and sinker, a Russian puppet.”
