After Donald Trump tapped her for Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard held a round of meetings with Republicans in the Senate that, according to sources, did not go well. From Reuters:
Eight Republican senators are unsure about supporting Tulsi Gabbard to become America’s top spy… increasing doubts about whether her nomination will secure Senate confirmation.
Gabbard in the DNI role, Reuters notes, would oversee 18 agencies inside U.S. intelligence and manage “a budget that in fiscal 2024 totaled more than $106 billion for civilian and military intelligence programs.” Senators apparently had a whole host of questions for which she was, as the article mentions, unprepared.
Her failure to address those questions sufficiently, her 2017 visit to Syria to meet then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and her lack of significant intelligence experience fueled those concerns, the sources said.
Gabbard reportedly also met with Democratic senators John Fetterman and John Ossoff, the latter of which said he was remaining “open minded” about her nomination.
For her part, Gabbard denied the various reports of her weak showing on Capitol Hill, telling ABC that the anonymous accounts were “meaningless.”
