President-elect Donald Trump has nominated former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after September 11 to address what U.S. policymakers believed was a lack of coordination among the various national intelligence agencies, and the DNI sits at the top of all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA.

Gabbard is stunningly unqualified for virtually any Cabinet post (as are some of Trump’s other picks), but especially for ODNI. She has no qualifications as an intelligence professional – literally none. (She is a reserve lieutenant colonel who previously served in the Hawaii Army National Guard, with assignments in medical, law enforcement, and civilian support positions. She has won a number of local elections and also represented Hawaii in Congress.) She has no significant experience directing or managing much of anything.

But leave aside the fact that she is apparently unprepared to run any kind of agency. Americans generally accept that presidents reward loyalists with jobs, and Trump has the right to stash Gabbard away in some work office in the bureaucracy if he feels he owes her. It’s not a great tradition, but it’s not unprecedented either.

However, making Tulsi Gabbard a DNI doesn’t just mean handing a bouquet to a political gadfly. Her appointment would pose a threat to the security of the United States.

Gabbard ran for president in 2020 as a Democrat, trying to position himself as something like a peace candidate. But she is no peacemaker: she has been an apologist for both Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Her politics, otherwise incoherent, tend to be sympathetic to these two strongmen, portraying America as the problem and the dictators as misunderstood. Hawaii voters have long been dismayed by the way she positions herself politically. But Gabbard is a classic case of “horseshoe politics”: her positions can seem either far left or far right, which is probably why people like Tucker Carlson – a conservative turned into… whatever pro-Russian right-wingers are now called – have become sympathetic to the former Democrat (who was previously a Republican and is now a member of the Republican Party again).

In early 2017, while still a member of Congress, Gabbard met with Assad and said peace in Syria was only possible if the international community held talks with him. “Let the Syrian people determine their own future, not the United States, not any other country,” Gabbard said, after speaking with a man who had stopped the Syrian people from determining their own future by using chemical weapons on them. Two years later, she added that Assad “was not the enemy of the United States, because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States,” and that her critics were merely “warmongers.”

Gabbard’s shilling for Assad is a mystery, but she is even more committed to carrying Putin’s water. Tom Rogan, a conservative writer and certainly not a liberal hand-wringer, summarized her record succinctly in the Washington Examiner Today:

She has blamed NATO and the US for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (again, to the credit of both Russian and Chinese state media), has repeated Russian propaganda claims that the US has set up secret bioweapons laboratories in that country, and has argued that the The US, not Russia, is entirely responsible for Putin’s nuclear mismanagement.

When she appeared on Sean Hannity’s show in 2022, even Hannity paled in comparison to Gabbard, drifting off into a haze of Kremlin talking points and cheerleading for Russia. When Hannity tries to lead you back to the airlock before you run out of oxygen, you’ve gone pretty far.

A person with Gabbard’s views should not be allowed anywhere near the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence. I have no idea why Trump nominated Gabbard; she was a supporter, but she hasn’t been central to his campaign, and he owes her very little. For someone as vilely transactional as Trump, it’s not a meaningful arrangement. It’s possible that Trump hates the intelligence community — which he blames for many of his first term problems — so much that Gabbard is his revenge. Or maybe he just likes the way she handles herself on television.

But Trump could also use a trick to bring in someone else. He may suspect that Gabbard cannot be confirmed by the Senate. Once she gets into trouble, he could bring in an even more disgusting nominee and claim he has no choice but to use a break date as a safety net. (Hard to imagine who could be worse as DNI than Gabbard, but keep in mind that Trump has promised at various times to bring retired Gen. Mike Flynn back into government. Flynn is a decorated veteran who was fired from the Trump White House in a scandal over lying to the FBI; he is now a conspirator who fully supports Trump’s desire for revenge on his enemies.

Gabbard has every right to her personal views, no matter how inscrutable they may be. As a private citizen, she can apologize to Assad and Putin to her heart’s content. But as a safety hazard, Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree full of warning lights. If she is nominated as America’s top intelligence officer, it’s anyone’s business.

Last spring, I described how authorized U.S. government employees are trained every year to spot “insider threats,” people who could compromise classified information for a variety of reasons. Trump’s open and continued affection for Putin and other dictators, I said, would be a concern for any security organization. Gabbard’s behavior and her admiration for dictators are no less troubling – especially since she would be at the top of the entire US intelligence community.

Presidents must be given respect when staffing their cabinets. But this nomination should be one of the few Trump appointments where incoming Majority Leader John Thune and his Republican colleagues take a hard line and say no — that is, if they even care about exercising the Senate’s constitutional advisory duty. and consent.

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