Tulsi Gabbard’s pro-Putin views surprise Intel experts, but they echo Trump’s views.

WASHINGTON — Critics concerned about potential Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s praise for foreign enemies likely have an insurmountable problem. That means the soon-to-be commander-in-chief shares the same, even more extreme views.

A former Democratic congressman from Hawaii who was appointed by President-elect Donald Trump as Director of National Intelligence has now been appointed as a Republican. She has come under criticism from both parties for years of sympathetic comments about Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his allies, including the recently deposed Syrian military. Dictator Bashar Assad.

“I have many questions about Ms. Gabbard. But that’s why we have an advice and consent process, that’s why we have these hearings.” Mark Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and likely the ranking Democrat in the new Congress, told reporters last month. “Some of the claims that she has ties to enemies like Russia or Syria require both knowledge and explanation for this.”

John Bolton, President Trump’s former national security adviser, said Gabbard’s appointment would please America’s enemies. “Her judgment is non-existent and the idea that she will somehow assume this important function will give a lot of comfort to the enemies of Moscow and Beijing,” he told CNN.

Trump aides did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about Gabbard.

Trump could still win Gabbard’s confirmation without losing three or fewer Republican senators, as Republicans gained four Senate seats to take control of the Senate in last month’s election and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance could be a potential tie-breaking vote. You can. .

North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis said Gabbard should be prepared to draw. “There are going to be hard questions and there have to be good answers to them,” he said. “This is how it works here. Candidates must be prepared to answer questions to the satisfaction of the committee.”

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina met with Gabbard on Monday and said she may hear more from her afterward.

“I don’t think she is a Russian agent. She may have different views on foreign policy than I do. That’s not a disqualification.” Republicans spoke out, noting that Gabbard did not support the U.S. assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani in 2020. “I will ask her some questions about her thoughts. She was against killing Soleimani.”

The problem is that Gabbard’s comments are consistent with the propaganda promoted by President Putin’s Russia over the past decade. After President Putin began bombing Syrian hospitals in 2015 to quell an uprising against Assad’s authoritarian rule, Gabbard accused those fighting Assad of being the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. I identified with them.

“Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. President Putin did that,” she wrote in a social media post.

That same year, when she visited the Syrian border as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, she asked three young girls who had suffered severe burns during an airstrike how they knew it was Assad or Russia. Even though ISIS didn’t have planes, they bombed them, not ISIS terrorists.

Two years later, she personally visited Assad, as the U.S. government continued to accuse him of using chemical weapons against its own people. “Let the Syrian people, not the United States or foreign countries, decide their own future,” Gabbard said, amplifying Russia’s claims that the United States incited the uprising against Assad.

Recently, she questioned U.S. support for Ukraine’s efforts to repel an invasion launched by President Putin to take control of its neighbor. In a video she posted on social media in 2022, she repeated a conspiracy theory advanced by Russia that the United States was secretly funding a bioweapons lab in Ukraine.

Adam Schiff, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and soon-to-be Democratic senator from California, posted a statement shortly after Trump announced Gabbard’s appointment. Our intelligence agency. If our allies don’t believe she can trust the information, they will stop sharing it. And the American people will become less safe.”

But while Gabbard’s comments and views are surprising to bipartisan intelligence experts, they are consistent with Trump’s claims that he has had differences with U.S. intelligence agencies since concluding that Russia helped elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2016. Hillary Clinton.

Trump famously declared at a summit with Putin in Helsinki in 2018 that he trusted Putin over his own intelligence agencies on the 2016 election issue. He soon thereafter set out to prove related conspiracy theories propagated by Russia. In other words, it was Ukraine that helped Clinton win in 2016. Trump’s efforts along these lines ultimately led to his first impeachment, when he attempted to extort a Ukrainian leader. Trump announced an investigation into Joe Biden, the most feared Democrat as his 2020 rival.

When Putin invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Trump called him a “genius” even as the United States and its NATO allies rallied behind Ukraine.

In any case, if the Trump transition team is concerned about Gabbard’s history of repeating Russian conspiracy theories, there is no sign of it being so. On Monday, she released a letter signed by veterans supporting Gabbard.

Among the signatories are Michael Flynn, a hero of the pro-Trump QAnon cult, and Jack Posobiec, a right-wing provocateur best known for pushing the QAnon conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C., pizzeria was actually the headquarters of a satanic child murder operation.