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Twenty-seven bills and six resolutions were introduced, as follows: S. 505-531, and S. Res. 69-74.
Pages S859-60
Measures Reported
S. Res. 69, authorizing expenditures by the Committee on Armed Services. S. Res. 70, authorizing expenditures by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. S. Res. 71, authorizing expenditures by the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. S. Res. 73, authorizing expenditures by the Select Committee on Intelligence. S. Res. 74, authorizing expenditures by the Committee on Veterans' Affairs.
Page S859
Appointments
Congressional Advisers on Trade Policy and Negotiations: The Chair, in accordance with Public Law 93-618, as amended by Public Law 100-418, on behalf of the President pro tempore and upon the recommendation of the Chairman of the Committee on Finance, appointed the following Members of the Finance Committee as congressional advisers on trade policy and negotiations to International conferences, meetings and negotiation sessions relating to trade agreements: Senators Crapo, Grassley, Cornyn, Wyden, and Cantwell.
Page S865
Washington's Farewell Address
The Chair, on behalf of the Vice President, pursuant to the order of the Senate of January 24, 1901, as modified by the order of February 11, 2025, appointed Senator Wicker to read Washington's Farewell Address on Tuesday, February 18, 2025.
Page S865
Washington's Farewell Address: Agreement
A unanimous-consent agreement was reached providing that notwithstanding the order of January 24, 1901, the traditional reading of Washington's Farewell Address take place on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, following the Prayer and Pledge of the Flag.
Page S865
Gabbard Nomination: Agreement
Senate continued consideration of the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, of Hawaii, to be Director of National Intelligence.
Pages S823-32, S832-55
A unanimous-consent agreement was reached providing that notwithstanding Rule XXII, the vote on confirmation of the nomination occur at 11 a.m., on Wednesday, February 12, 2025; that the motions to invoke cloture filed on Thursday, February 6, 2025, ripen following disposition of the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard; and that if cloture is invoked on the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of California, to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, the post-cloture time count as if invoked at 1 a.m., on Wednesday, February 12, 2025.
Page S847
A unanimous-consent agreement was reached providing for further consideration of the nomination, post-cloture, at approximately 10 a.m., on Wednesday, February 12, 2025, as under the previous order.
Page S847
Nominations Received
Senate received the following nominations: Kirsten Baesler, of North Dakota, to be Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education. Gary Andres, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Sean Cairncross, of Minnesota, to be National Cyber Director. Daniel Aronowitz, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Labor. John Hurley, of California, to be Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes. James Baehr, of Louisiana, to be General Counsel, Department of Veterans Affairs. Charles Kushner, of New York, to be Ambassador to the French Republic, and to serve concurrently and without additional compensation as Ambassador to the Principality of Monaco. Joseph Barloon, of Maryland, to be a Deputy United States Trade Representative (Geneva Office), with the rank of Ambassador. Warren Stephens, of Arkansas, to be Ambassador to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Benjamin Black, of New York, to be Chief Executive Officer of the United States International Development Finance Corporation. Olivia Trusty, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission for the remainder of the term expiring June 30, 2025. Kevin Cabrera, of Florida, to be Ambassador to the Republic of Panama. Olivia Trusty, of Maryland, to be a Member of the Federal Communications Commission for a term of five years from July 1, 2025. Gustav Chiarello III, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Tyler Clarkson, of Virginia, to be General Counsel of the Department of Agriculture. Jason De Sena Trennert, of New York, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Thomas DiNanno, of Florida, to be Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Sean Donahue, of Florida, to be an Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. David Eisner, of New York, to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy. David Fogel, of Connecticut, to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States and Foreign Commercial Service. George Glass, of Oregon, to be Ambassador to Japan. Jonathan Gould, of Virginia, to be Comptroller of the Currency for a term of five years. Catherine Hanson, of South Carolina, to be Chief Financial Officer, Environmental Protection Agency. Landon Heid, of Missouri, to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Peter Hoekstra, of Michigan, to be Ambassador to Canada. Allison Hooker, of Georgia, to be an Under Secretary of State (Political Affairs). Mike Huckabee, of Arkansas, to be Ambassador to the State of Israel. Scott Hutchins, of Indiana, to be Under Secretary of Agriculture for Research, Education, and Economics. Ronald Johnson, of Florida, to be Ambassador to the United Mexican States. Taylor Jordan, of the District of Columbia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Paul Kapur, of California, to be Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs. David Keeling, of Kentucky, to be an Assistant Secretary of Labor. Nicholas Kent, of Virginia, to be Under Secretary of Education. Joseph Kent, of Washington, to be Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Jessica Kramer, of Wisconsin, to be an Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Henry Mack III, of Florida, to be an Assistant Secretary of Labor. Ned Mamula, of Pennsylvania, to be Director of the United States Geological Survey. Jennifer Mascott, of Maryland, to be General Counsel, Department of Education. Jonathan McKernan, of Tennessee, to be Director, Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection for a term of five years. Jonathan Morrison, of California, to be Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Brian Morrissey, Jr., of Virginia, to be General Counsel for the Department of the Treasury. Brian Nesvik, of Wyoming, to be Director of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Kevin O'Farrell, of Florida, to be Assistant Secretary for Career, Technical, and Adult Education, Department of Education. Caleb Orr, of Texas, to be an Assistant Secretary of State (Economic and Business Affairs). Wayne Palmer, of Virginia, to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for Mine Safety and Health. Luke Pettit, of the District of Columbia, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Tina Pierce, of Idaho, to be Chief Financial Officer, Department of Energy. Chris Pratt, of Utah, to be an Assistant Secretary of State (Political-Military Affairs). Brian Quintenz, of Ohio, to be Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Brian Quintenz, of Ohio, to be a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the term expiring April 13, 2029. David Rader, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Commerce. Joel Rayburn, of Oklahoma, to be an Assistant Secretary of State (Near Eastern Affairs). Kimberly Richey, of Texas, to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, Department of Education. Mary Riley, of the District of Columbia, to be Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs, Department of Education. Audrey Robertson, of Colorado, to be an Assistant Secretary of Energy (Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy). Sarah Rogers, of New York, to be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. Reed Rubinstein, of Maryland, to be Legal Adviser of the Department of State. Kathleen Sgamma, of Colorado, to be Director of the Bureau of Land Management. Michael Stuart, of West Virginia, to be General Counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services. Aaron Szabo, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Richard Topping, of Ohio, to be Chief Financial Officer, Department of Veterans Affairs. Craig Trainor, of Virginia, to be an Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Matthew Whitaker, of Iowa, to be United States Permanent Representative on the Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with the rank and status of Ambassador.
Pages S869-70
Nomination Withdrawn
Senate received notification of withdrawal of the following nomination: Luke Petit, of Washington, to be an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, which was sent to the Senate on February 3, 2025.
Page S870
Statements on Introduced Bills/Resolutions:
Pages S861-64
Adjournment
Senate convened at 10 a.m. and adjourned at 8:40 p.m., until 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 12, 2025. (For Senate's program, see the remarks of the Acting Majority Leader in today's Record on page S865.)
Every speech and line is the Congressional Record's own text, read from GovInfo. Speakers are matched to members by GPO's own metadata. Referandom places each turn on the Clerk's video by matching its words: 37 of 85 spoken turns were found. Turns without a time are still listed; they just can't seek.
Mr. President, sometime today, we are voting on the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard. She is going to be Director of National Intelligence after she is confirmed.
Until she was nominated, I only knew her from seeing her in media sound bites and what other people wrote about her. She came to my office, and we had a very good, very substantive conversation. I determined that she is very smart and obviously an articulate person.
In our discussion, we covered many of her past statements on various policy matters, and she was able to clarify what the media got right and what the media got wrong.
Obviously, since she served in the Congress of the United States as a Democrat, I and she may not agree on every policy. However, Representative Gabbard made clear that she does not see her position as Director of National Intelligence as a policymaking position. She understands that President Trump is the one who was elected. As Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard's job will be simply to make sure that the intelligence community is able to provide the best unbiased information to help President Trump make the proper decisions.
She and I also spoke about some of my past oversight work regarding the intelligence community. I have had mixed results in getting legitimate information that I have sought, depending upon who was in that particular position. For instance, when Rick Grenell became the Acting Director of National Intelligence, I suddenly and surprisingly got material that I had asked for after being totally stonewalled by previous Directors of National Intelligence.
Based on my conversation, I expect Tulsi Gabbard, along with CIA Director Ratcliffe, will ensure that the intelligence community will be forthcoming and fully responsible to Congress as we in Congress exercise our constitutional responsibility not only to pass laws and appropriate money but to be a check on the executive branch of government to see that a President--whether that President is Republican or Democrat--faithfully executes the laws as required by the Congress of the United States.
On another matter, yesterday, I took a minute or two to address the Senate to remind my other 99 Senators--which I do not have to remind the members of the Senate Agriculture Committee--that our nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, Mrs. Rollins, was voted out of committee unanimously. You would think, then, that if both Republicans and Democrats think that Mrs. Rollins is the proper person to be Secretary of Agriculture, she would be quickly approved for that position unanimously here in the U.S. Senate and maybe even be lucky enough to do it on a voice vote.
Now, I don't know what is going to happen, but I do know that we are going to be sitting around the U.S. Senate today for several hours to see whether we are going to vote on Ms. Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence or we are going to have that disposed of very quickly and get down to work.
But the people in this country send us to the U.S. Senate to actually do work. And when you are sitting around
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, this week, the Senate will consider the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. President Trump has tapped Mr. Kennedy to lead the charge in making America healthy again--something that has been a concern of Mr. Kennedy's throughout his career.
Mr. Kennedy promises to make HHS a collaborative, transparent, and science-driven Agency under his leadership. I will say that is good to hear. Many Americans' trust in health authorities has eroded in recent years, with the pandemic being a factor. A lot of Americans feel frustrated with confusing and sometimes contradictory guidance from government Agencies. And measures like requiring toddlers as young as 2 years old to wear masks indefinitely not only defy common sense, there was no scientific research to back it up.
Our public health Agencies do critical work. I am a supporter of the research, and I am proud of the contributions they make to American leadership in medicine and innovation. But if we are going to make America healthy again, the Agencies doing this important work have to rebuild some trust with Americans.
I was pleased to hear Mr. Kennedy pledge to increase transparency and accountability, including an unprecedented level of collaboration with Congress that allows for regular and robust oversight of his Agency's activities.
I was also pleased that Mr. Kennedy acknowledged the importance of vaccines and the concerning reality that vaccine uptake in this country is decreasing. Mr. Kennedy has pledged that he will maintain the best vaccine standards, and he has committed to work within existing vaccine approval and monitoring systems and maintain the FDA's review standards.
I look forward to Mr. Kennedy being a partner with Congress on some very important issues. He has brought attention to America's chronic disease epidemic. I am pleased that he wants to put a focus on chronic diseases that affect too many Americans and cost far too much in lives lost and dollars spent.
I am also encouraged that he is committed to implementing President Trump's pro-life policies at HHS. President Trump has been one of the most pro-life Presidents we have ever had. Mr. Kennedy's Agency will be critical in protecting life and supporting mothers and babies.
Mr. Kennedy is also committed to working with farmers and ranchers on policies that affect our food supply. America's farmers and ranchers are a valuable resource, and I look forward to working with him to ensure that the voice of South Dakota's agriculture producers is heard.
I believe that Mr. Kennedy's collaborative approach to this job will help restore some of the trust in our public health Agencies that has been lost in recent years. I look forward to working with him on a number of issues as we restore that trust and work to make America healthy again.
Mr. President, in his first 3 weeks in office, Donald Trump has waged a scorched-earth campaign against the rule of law.
We all know that Donald Trump, of course, won the election last November, and as we all know, he campaigned on a platform to cut back large parts of the government. But nothing--nothing--in the Constitution, nothing in our grand tradition of American separation of powers allows Donald Trump to break the law in order to achieve those goals.
Let me repeat that. Donald Trump campaigned on cutting back the government. That is true. But he is not allowed--not allowed--to break the law to achieve those goals.
That is not how America works. You campaign. You put your ideas forward. In this case, Donald Trump won. But he did not campaign on breaking the law, and the American people don't want him to break the law.
The reason we have a system of checks and balances is so that even when one side wins an election, there is a check, there is a balance. That is what America has been all about for over 200 years. At this point, Donald Trump is trying to break that tradition in area after area after area. So the courts have begun to speak, and their message is very simple: The law is not optional, not even for a President of the United States.
Yesterday, at least five rulings were handed down in Federal courts against the President's brazen conduct in office: court rulings against his attempt to freeze trillions in Federal funding at OMB; court decisions against his heartless, cruel decision to stop billions in medical research funding through the NIH. Courts have ruled against his unlawful attempt to hollow out the Federal workforce regardless of the job they do.
To be sure, these decisions--these five decisions and many others like it; I think there are over 50--are all temporary, preliminary, and it is one step in a long process that will play out in Federal court. But the trend is clear: Donald Trump is not free to bulldoze his way through the rule of law. Donald Trump is not free to bulldoze his way through the rule of law. He is an executive, not a monarch. He swore an oath faithfully to execute the duties of his office, and when the courts speak, Donald Trump must accept their judgments and honor the Constitution.
Now, there are some on the hard right who think Donald Trump should ignore the courts. Even the Vice President seems to suggest the courts can't ``control the powers of the executive.'' With respect to the Vice President, the issue here isn't the courts trying to control the President; it is the President trying to control the law. He
Congress makes the law. Courts interpret the law. We all learned that in grade school. That is how checks and balances work in a constitutional republic. Donald Trump does not reign supreme. When the courts speak, the President must adhere to their judgments. That is what his oath demands.
The courts will be an important venue for holding Donald Trump accountable whenever he breaks the law and breaks his promise to the American people. It is one tool in the toolkit for how Democrats and all Americans who care about the rule of law will make sure that Donald Trump does not break the law and do just what he wants. Our courts will be just one resource of several, but they will be among the most important, and as we have already seen, they are a critical front in the struggle to uphold the rule of law and prevent America from sliding into utter lawlessness.
Mr. President, I just heard Senator Schumer, the minority leader, say that Democrats don't want a government shutdown. Well, I would recommend that the minority leader actually read the newspaper. He is going to see that Democrats are threatening and actually calling for a shutdown of the U.S. Government.
So here is USA Today, today, with a picture of Senator Schumer right there--a big picture in color, with his fist in the air--``Democrats open to shutting down the government.'' So the Senator who just was on the floor, saying, oh, no; they don't want it, is calling for it across the country in USA Today this morning.
That is what we are seeing across this country: Democrats are so much in disarray after the fact that they lost the House, lost the Senate, lost the White House, that the Democrats now want to shut down the government.
Here was the headline in The New York Times on Sunday: ``Democrats Hint at Government Shutdown to Stop Trump's Axing at Federal Agencies.''
President Trump is doing what people elected him to do--to get the wasteful Washington spending to end. So that was in USA Today and The New York Times.
What about The Washington Post?
The Democrats say:
The Democrats are calling for a shutdown--in USA Today, The New York
What are Democrats saying on television?
Well, on ``Meet the Press'' this Sunday, Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, said that Democrats in Congress would shut down the government, he says, ``if we have to'' in order to obstruct President Trump--not to help the country, not to provide services for the men and women in uniform, not to provide needs around the country. No--because they want to obstruct President Trump. That is why Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are calling for a government shutdown.
It didn't end there.
Cory Booker of New Jersey--a member of the leadership of the Democratic Party--was on CNN this weekend. What did he say? ``Democrats will use every tool possible'' to stop President Trump.
The Democrats want to stop the President, who was elected with 312 electoral votes and won every one of the battleground States. The Democrats just want to stop him, and the American people want the kind of action and the urgency that we are seeing right now out of President Trump.
Jeff Merkley, a Senator from Oregon, is open to shutting down the government. He said: ``There's no [more] business as usual.'' Shut it down.
President Trump is doing exactly what America voted for, but here are the headlines, and there are the pictures, and those are the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, saying: We don't care what the American people say. We are going to shut down the government.
President Trump is shrinking the size of government. We know the government is too big. We know it spends too much. President Trump is accounting for every single penny, and we are not going to make pennies anymore as a result of the fact that it costs 3 cents to make a penny. That is why Democrats want to shut down the government. They don't like the success that America is having today. They don't like the optimism that is pervasive throughout our country.
So, once again, if there is going to be a shutdown, we are talking about a ``Schumer shutdown'' of our country because they lost the election.
Mr. President, I listened to my colleague and friend from Wyoming, and I am struggling to understand his point of view. He announced at one point that the Republicans were in the majority in the House and Senate. Well, that is a fact. I know it. The Presiding Officer does as well. So to say that you are in the majority suggests that you are in charge, and it also suggests that if there is going to be a budget for the U.S. Government, which we need next month, the majority party in both the House and the Senate has that responsibility to come forward with a budget. That is a simple fact of life. It is a fact of political life.
To blame the minority for no budget is to ignore the obvious: The majority of votes in the House and the Senate belong to the Republican Party. If there is going to be a budget, it is fair to assume that they would have to lead in that effort. I look forward to seeing that leadership. We have seen precious little of it so far.
Mr. President, after the Gabbard nomination, the next issue up for consideration by the Senate is cloture on the Robert F. Kennedy nomination to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. This Cabinet position is responsible for implementing the administration's health agenda.
As Secretary, Mr. Kennedy must spend his time focused on improving the health of all Americans, ensuring HHS is transparent and accountable to congressional oversight, and respecting whistleblowers.
I think Kennedy has made it very clear, in life as a citizen, talking about improving the health of all Americans.
So I would like to outline some of the priorities that Mr. Kennedy should focus on at Health and Human Services. And, obviously, I am asking him to focus on things and issues that are very dear to my heart and take up a lot of my time as a Senator from Iowa and a person very concerned about the quality of healthcare in rural America.
Our country spends more than $4.5 trillion annually on healthcare. Growing healthcare costs don't just strain Americans' pocketbooks. Healthcare is also a major driver of widening budget deficits and the Federal Government's unsustainable fiscal outlook.
We are not getting our money's worth for all of that spending. Major healthcare programs spending eats up 34 percent of the Federal revenue today, and that will grow to 41 percent of revenue by 2055.
Mr. Kennedy must--and I think he is committed to--ensure that the key health programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, are protected and strengthened by rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse.
The nominee must increase transparency and accountability. These actions will help make our healthcare system more efficient for the taxpayers and the consumers.
I am the author of major and more recent updates to the Federal Government's most powerful tool in fighting fraud, and that is people that use the False Claims Act. Since the enactment of this legislation--I am talking about reforms to the False Claims Act--the Federal Government has recovered more than $78 billion lost to fraud and saved billions more by deterring would-be fraudsters.
People in the Justice Department, both Republican and Democrat, say that the False Claims Act is their best tool to get after these fraudsters.
In the 1 year of just 2024--and Attorney General Garland reported this to me just a couple of days before he left office--in 2024, there was more than $2.9 billion in False Claims Act settlements and judgments, with $1.7 billion of it involving the healthcare industry.
Now, as you know, I listen to a lot of whistleblowers, and whistleblowers were responsible for helping to recover nearly all of that $1.7 billion.
And I think I discussed the False Claims Act and the use of it by soon-to-be Secretary Kennedy. He seemed to be very enthused about listening to whistleblowers and use of the False Claims Act, and I think that he was probably being made aware of it for the first time. So I hope he will look into how he can use this act and, particularly, by listening to reports from whistleblowers of the waste of taxpayers' money.
Now, the Justice Department and HHS, in combination, need to more aggressively go after healthcare waste, fraud, and abuse and empower and encourage whistleblowers.
My top healthcare priority is lowering the cost of prescription drugs. We can start by putting more sunshine on pharmacy benefit managers' practices and holding these PBMs accountable.
We should also establish price transparency on prescription drug TV ads. Knowing what something costs before buying it is just common sense and very helpful to the consumer. Transparency will bring more accountability and lower costs to consumers.
Mr. Kennedy must also protect and improve access to rural healthcare. The previous administration dragged its feet in opening up spots for what is termed the Rural Community Hospital Demonstration programs. HHS must also listen to the concerns from rural pharmacies and ensure rural hospitals benefit from additional physician slots that Congress has authorized.
I look forward to strengthening the new and voluntary rural emergency program to ensure that it is working for rural communities, extending telehealth access, and supporting physicians getting a fair reimbursement under Medicare.
I also expect HHS to support healthy moms and babies by improving care, coordination, and using telehealth in rural areas.
HHS should work with me to support kids with complex medical needs so these kids and their families are getting the right care at the right time and at the right place. Our programs helping support kids with complex medical needs covers probably six or--well, depending on how many problems these kids have--but they have to navigate across several different programs, and what we are trying to do through legislation we pass is to have help so that when you have to see five or six different specialists, you have somebody saying what is available and what can we do to help you make access to all this.
I also expect HHS to protect the most vulnerable and older Americans.
I have spoken at length with Mr. Kennedy about some comments that he made in regard to agriculture, and I have heard from farmers in Iowa and agricultural organizations and commodity groups in the State, fearful that Mr. Kennedy has some radical ideas on agriculture.
At the end of the hour meeting I had in his office, prior to his hearing before the Finance Committee, I was calmed quite a bit by what he told me about his views on agriculture. I hope that that calm can be maintained. But if it is not, Mr. Kennedy is sure to hear from me. So when we talked about this in my office, Mr. Kennedy prefaced our initial conversation by saying that he, as HHS Secretary, will not have jurisdiction over agricultural issues. So you can expect that I will expect him to leave agriculture practices regulations to the proper Agencies and, for the most part, that is the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.
I have also sent letters to Secretaries of Agriculture and HHS requiring--requesting they provide information regarding conflicts of interest on the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee to increase transparencies. The problem there is that there is a feeling among a lot of members of the Advisory Committee that they may have an unjustified conflict of interest in what they are suggesting we eat and the type of diet we have.
So I expect Mr. Kennedy to provide Congress with a confidential financial disclosure from the Advisory Committee before finalizing dietary guidelines so that we know that nobody has a vested interest in however those guidelines are written.
On issues of healthcare and agriculture, Mr. Kennedy said in his nomination hearing:
I am quoting him now.
Meaning this Senator.
That is the end of the quote. I don't know whether people, even in the Senate here but particularly outside, know how refreshing it is to have a member of the Cabinet say: If Congress asks me for information, you would get it immediately. Because over the years that I have been in the U.S. Senate, it doesn't matter whether it is a Republican or Democrat administration, carrying out our constitutional responsibilities to see that--checks and balances to see that the executive branch and the President faithfully executes the laws is not an easy process, and we have difficulty getting answers to our questions.
Now, I don't know how much of this--I have had trouble with HHS in the past, but I know when Pam Bondi came to my office, I showed her a file of 158 letters that I had written to the Justice Department in the last 4 years to get information and documents in regard to my investigations of wrongdoing, and most of them weren't answered. Or if we got answers, it was merely words on a sheet of paper. Not very helpful.
So thank you, Mr. Kennedy, for your promise. And I am going to quote again: If Congress asks me for information, you will get it immediately.
Because that is what our job is. Every high school student learns in government about checks and balances of government, that we not only pass laws and we not only appropriate money, but we have a responsibility to the taxpayers and the citizens of this country to make sure that a President does what the Constitution says he should do: faithfully execute the laws.
And Cabinet people are bound by that same thing. Every Cabinet member that comes to my office, I tell them
So I expect Mr. Kennedy's Agency to provide timely and complete responses to congressional oversight. Oversight allows us to hold bureaucrats accountable to the rule of law and helps keep faith with the taxpayers.
So I look forward to working with Mr. Kennedy to improve the health of all Americans, make our healthcare system more efficient, and ensure HHS's adherence to Kennedy's radical transparency commitment.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
Mr. President, the Governor of the great State of Texas, Greg Abbott, has made a request to the U.S. Congress to reimburse our State for the expenses we have incurred in attempting to combat the Texas-Mexico border security crisis during the 4 years of the Biden administration. I am proud to support this request, along with my colleague Senator Cruz and Members of the Texas delegation in the House of Representatives.
Securing the Nation's borders is the responsibility of the Federal Government, plain and simple. Given the division of responsibilities between the States and the Federal Government, there is no doubt that this is a Federal responsibility. For 4 years, though, President Biden and Vice President Harris and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas intentionally and willfully refused to enforce the laws on the books to keep the border secure and to keep our Nation safe.
Even before his first day in the Office, President Biden rolled out the welcome mat to illegal immigrants in speeches during his campaign, inviting--inviting--what ensued.
Early in his Presidency, President Biden ended President Trump's very effective policy known as ``Remain in Mexico.'' This, very simply, provided that those who sought asylum needed to remain outside of the borders of the United States while their asylum claim was litigated and ultimately decided, knowing that only about 15 percent of people who claim asylum ultimately are awarded that by an immigration court.
The Biden administration ended construction of President Trump's border wall, and, instead, spent Federal funds to store those materials that had already been paid for, squandering taxpayer dollars in the process.
And as this crisis was evolving and worsening, President Biden ended title 42 authority, the COVID-era policy that was the last string in place helping to keep the lid on the illegal immigration crisis. So not only did the Biden administration turn a blind eye to what was an international responsibility and thus a Federal Government responsibility, they went a step further and actually actively enacted policies to make it worse.
The Department of Homeland Security invited more illegal immigration when it created an app for your phone called the CBP One app, Customs and Border Protection app, which allowed immigrants to literally schedule an appointment at a port of entry in order to illegally enter the United States. Of course, even those who did not claim asylum were simply paroled or released into the interior, along with a work permit.
Here, again, there was no manner of deterrence saying: Well, if you want to enter the United States, you need to do so according to the rules in an orderly basis.
Essentially, all the rules were set aside, and a big green light and a welcome mat were laid out for anybody and everybody who wanted to come--and come they did. Tens of millions of people--we really don't know exactly how many--took advantage of this open border policy by the Biden administration. Let's say 10 million in round numbers. We know that about 1.7 million people were ``got-aways,'' which is what the Border Patrol calls those who were evading law enforcement who presumably are up to no good because they know they can't enter otherwise because they have either a criminal record or they are transporting drugs or engaged in some other illicit activity.
At the same time that the Biden administration laid out the welcome mat to anybody and everybody who wanted to come to the United States across our border, they issued hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements to nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations that helped facilitate this illegal immigration through FEMA's Emergency Food and Shelter Program. Instead of meeting their responsibilities to secure the border, they essentially funded those organizations that facilitated it.
Vice President Harris was assigned the task, as we know, of being the border czar that helped manage this crisis, but she failed to even understand the assignment and failed utterly at completing that assignment.
She visited the Texas-Mexico border once in sort of what I would call a driveby during the 4 years that President Biden and Vice President Harris were in office.
It is safe to say she had no concept or clue about what conditions were like on the border and how dangerous this open border policy was. Clearly she didn't care and was unwilling to do anything about it.
On her one and only visit to the Texas border, she steered clear of the hotspots, like the Rio Grande Valley, which was the very epicenter of the border crisis at the time. Instead, she went to El Paso for a sanitized, made-for-TV visit. Different parts of the border are very different, and instead of going to the place where she knew the action would be, she went to a place that was relatively calm and sedate. But she did it for a TV hit and no other reason.
In 2024, when the Democratic Party deposed President Biden as their nominee and coronated Vice President Harris as their Presidential candidate, she suddenly found herself campaigning to be President of the United States, but she actually shirked from the responsibilities President Biden had given her as the border czar and claimed that she was never actually tasked to oversee the migration crisis.
Suffice it to say that the Biden administration's handling of border security was an unmitigated disaster. As a consequence, the State of Texas, which has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico, was basically left up to its own devices. We had no choice but to pick up the slack and try to secure some semblance of basic safety for Texans and the rest of the country. Everything the State of Texas did to fill the gap inured not just to the benefit of the 31 million people who live in Texas but to the entire Nation.
Governor Abbott initiated something called Operation Lone Star, which resulted in the apprehension of more than half a million illegal immigrants by Texas law enforcement. Thanks to Operation Lone Star, law enforcement arrested more than 50,000 criminals trying to make their way across the border. Texas also built 240 miles of border barriers when the Federal Government refused to do its job. And officers across the State have seized more than half a billion deadly doses of fentanyl, which is the No. 1 cause of death for young people between the age of 18 and 45 in this country. As a result of Operation Lone Star, without any help at all from the Federal Government, Texas was able to reduce illegal immigration into the State by 87 percent.
Unfortunately, the State had to spend nearly $4.8 billion--money that should have been provided by the Federal Government--Texas taxpayers had to foot the bill for $4.8 billion on walls and barriers, local grants to counties and cities, processing criminal arrests, and moving migrants out of small Texas towns. The State also spent $3.6 billion to deploy the National Guard for building border barriers, guarding and constructing those barriers, and assisting Border Patrol and Customs
But this was just the start. There were costs associated with the prosecution of border crimes. At Operation Lone Star's criminal processing centers, State game wardens had to pitch in to help control the Rio Grande River on the border to help prevent illegal entries, and criminal processing centers required health and safety services.
We are all familiar with the saying ``There is no such thing as a free lunch,'' but President Biden and Vice President Harris failed to pony up for 4 years and then asked Texans to pick up the tab for their bill. All told, Governor Abbott and the State legislature had to spend more than $11 billion to make up for the Biden administration's blunders and malfeasance and nonfeasance when it came to border security and immigration.
So it is not particularly complicated. Securing the country's borders is a function of the Federal Government. And $11 billion is no small amount of money for a State--particularly one that doesn't have an income tax--to provide that benefits the rest of the country. But this is no different than when the Federal Government steps in to help States that have to deal with extraordinary expenses during the wake of a natural disaster, as they did for Texas in the case of Hurricane Harvey. But instead of a natural disaster, what we had during the 4 years of the Biden administration was a manmade disaster.
While every State became a border State during the last administration, there are costs that Texas had to shoulder that our neighbors had not. It is just fair and right and just for Texas taxpayers to be made whole for the border security responsibilities it took on as a result of President Biden's dereliction of duty.
I am proud to support Governor Abbott's request for the State to be reimbursed. My colleagues on the House and Senate Appropriations Committees should expect me and Senator Cruz and the entire Texas delegation to be strongly advocating for reimbursement for Texas in the coming weeks. I look forward to working with them in order to make this a reality.
Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk to you about President Trump's tariffs. The media is in full meltdown. They are in a full meltdown mode after President Trump imposed duties and retaliatory tariffs this week on countries that have basically been ripping the United States of America off, and they have been doing it for decades.
Apparently, globalists and Democrats are just fine with other countries imposing tariffs on the United States, but when it comes to President Trump trying to equalize it up, establish a level playing field for domestic producers, well, that is a bridge too far.
No one has been paying attention to President Trump. If they have been paying attention to President Trump, they should not remotely be surprised. He campaigned on this platform three times and has been crystal clear on his intentions. Now he is following through on his campaign promises. But in the corporate media--it seems to still be confused about all these tariffs. So let me spell it out.
President Trump's view on tariffs is as both a negotiating tool to get other countries to do a few things that we asked them to do and a way to boost American manufacturing and put American workers and businesses first, not last. President Trump has his work cut out for him after a disastrous 4 years for our small businesses and our corporations under the Biden administration.
The Biden administration made it clear to our friends and foes alike that globalists--the globalist agenda would take precedence over the safety and well-being of the American people. It is mind-boggling. Thankfully, those days are over.
The American people gave President Donald J. Trump a clear mandate to restore our country's superpower status and put all Americans first, all businesses first, everybody that does something in this country, and that starts, No. 1, with securing our borders.
Like I said many times, if you don't have a border, you don't have a country. And we have really struggled in the last four years. That is changing. That is why the master negotiator in chief, President Donald Trump, threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada in just the last couple of weeks.
Over the last 4 years, the Mexican Government basically turned a blind eye while caravans of illegal aliens overran our borders, coming from Mexico, coming from Central America, all over the world, just overrunning our country. Thousands of women and children were trafficked, raped along the way. Drug cartels made an absolute fortune--absolute fortune--not just with drugs, by the way, but from payments of these illegals coming all the way through either Central America or South America to the United States--with a big basically tariff of their own, charging these people to come to the United States.
Lawlessness had become the status quo under President Biden. Nobody cared. The Democrats in this room--they didn't care. They didn't care what was going on. Let's just let them all come in. Let's let the drugs come in. We lose 300 people pretty much every few days to illegal drugs in this country with overdoses, but let's not worry about that. Let's just worry about controlling our country the way they wanted to. Well, it has been a disaster.
Mexico showed zero signs of willingness to negotiate when President Trump took office. When he did take office, on January 20, they woke up real quick. President Trump correctly understands that Mexico's economy is heavily dependent on the United States of America and the citizens of this country. In fact, more than 80 percent of Mexico's exports come to the United States--80 percent come here--and American citizens buy those products that are made in Mexico. Mexico's economy would almost instantly--instantly--feel the effects of a 25-percent tariff, leaving Mexico's President, Claudia Sheinbaum, no choice--no choice--but to come to the negotiating table under the master negotiator, Donald Trump. So that is why he uses his tariffs--to get his point across-- because people across the world take us for granted.
As a result, within hours--hours--of President Trump's announcement of the tariffs, Mexico caved. They saw real quick. Obviously, they are not stupid. They agreed to help the United States secure the border and crack down on the cartels and the illegal drugs coming in almost immediately. We could have done the same thing with the past administration, but it just shows you they couldn't have cared less what happened at our border.
Our neighbor to the north also caved to President Trump after a 25- percent tariff was threatened on Canada. Not only are illicit drugs, like fentanyl, coming into our country from Mexico, but there was also about a 2,000-percent increase in drugs that came across the border in 2023 and 2024 from Canada--a 2,000-percent increase. In the last fiscal year alone, enough fentanyl was seized at the northern border to kill 9.8 million Americans.
To me, that would be a very serious problem, but do you think the Democrats cared? No. There was no action at all by the Biden administration on Canada and no action on Mexico. But thanks to President Trump's leadership, our North American neighbors to the north and south are making changes now daily that will protect American citizens from deadly drugs, criminals, and human traffickers.
The No. 1 job of the President of the United States is to protect the people in this country first, and that is what President Trump is doing.
In addition to using tariffs as a negotiating tool, President Trump also views tariffs as a way to right the wrongs of past ineffective trade deals. That is why, this week, he is imposing a 25-percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports, including those of Canada and Mexico.
Contrary to what the media is telling you, this isn't unprecedented. It is not
Just think about that. We are paying tariffs on things coming into this country, but when we send things out, we get the heck tariffed out of us from other countries. It is not fair trade.
These export imbalances don't just impact bottom lines; they also discourage domestic production. We have got to produce more in this country, and we have got to build more things in this country. That is what President Trump is trying to do. If we don't cut back on spending and start producing more in this country, this will not be the United States of America much longer because we will be bankrupt, and we will be reporting to somebody like China, which is buying our Treasury bills right and left--or they were.
One report conducted by the Department of Commerce in the first Trump administration found that excess production and capacity, particularly in China, have been major factors in the decline of domestic aluminum production. Basically, we are getting overwhelmed by aluminum from China that is not near as good as what we make in this country.
President Trump built one of the strongest economies in modern history in his first term--in modern history--but the Democrats failed to know that. They wanted to change it, and did they ever. They almost destroyed our economy. Jobs and wages were up when President Trump was in, and inflation was down. Americans had more money in their pockets. Thanks to President Trump's strategic tariffs, along with the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, companies were reshoring businesses back in the United States, right and left. They were coming back because they could make a profit.
That is what it is all about when you have a corporation--you have got to make a profit. President Trump was able to, because of tariffs, make more money for manufacturing in this country than going out of this country. You had companies like Ford canceling plans to build in Mexico--back in President Trump's first term--and, instead, opening one in Michigan. This turned out to be extremely important when COVID hit, and we were forced to rely on goods that were manufactured right here in the United States. We also found out pretty quick, just in drugs alone, that we make very few drugs in the United States. Where are they made? They are made in India and China. They have got to come back here. We have to be self-sustaining. Whether it is our healthcare technologies, agricultural products, or steel and aluminum, there is no reason for us to depend on other countries.
We are the No. 1 country in this world--we have been and will be in the future--in manufacturing and production. America has some of the best and brightest manufacturers and the best and brightest producers, farmers, and businesses. We take second to none. And from a national security perspective, it is dangerous to be reliant on other countries, which may not have the best interests of the United States' in mind. You can't blame them. They are looking out for themselves first. Well, we need to do the same thing.
That is not to mention the fact that the United States produces the cleanest steel in the world. You would think the Democrats and the climate cult would at least be happy about that. Think about that.
You know, President Trump just put tariffs on steel and aluminum. A lot of the steel and aluminum come in, and because of how they make it, it is some of the dirtiest steel in the world. We make the cleanest. Why in the world would we want to import something that is going to be detrimental to our country alone with this environment?
The tariffs being imposed this week are an important step in President Trump's plan to restore fairness to trade, to boost domestic manufacturing, and to put consumers and producers first. It is about time.
Three weeks into his Presidency, President Trump is keeping his promises. President Trump's strategic tariffs will strengthen and revitalize our Nation's economy, stop the flow of illicit drugs and illegal immigration, and make sure our trade deals are fair to both taxpayers and American manufacturers--America first. President Trump is utilizing every tool at his disposal, as we speak, including tariffs, to usher in the golden age of the American economy. We have to make that change. If we don't, we will not survive as the No. 1 country in the world. We will not regain that status, and we will be losing our national security.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
Madam President, today I will be speaking about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence and my reasons for opposing her confirmation.
First, I believe the Senate must consider with this nomination the examples of blatant lawlessness of the administration. At every turn, Donald Trump is attacking the rule of law, disregarding the constitutional role of Congress, and trying to purge civil servants who defend our country every day. Meanwhile, Elon Musk's minions are gaining access to some of the government's most sensitive systems and records. American democracy and national security are at stake. If the Senate is going to confirm nominees, we need to know whether they will stand up for democratic principles, no matter what.
At our hearing, I asked Ms. Gabbard what she would do if Donald Trump tried to illegally withhold funds from the intelligence community inspector general. This was hardly a hypothetical question. Donald Trump has, in fact, sought to unilaterally cut off funding for a broad range of organizations despite the money having been appropriated by Congress. It is not just me saying this is illegal, the courts have ordered the administration to cut it out and resume the funding.
But when I asked Ms. Gabbard the question, she said:
Well, he is breaking the law and the country needs leaders who acknowledge that fact and stand up to him.
My concerns about Ms. Gabbard are also based on her recent turn toward extreme partisanship. Other partisans have been confirmed to leadership positions and intelligence Agencies. George Herbert Walker Bush was the head of the Republican National Committee, and he was successful enough as Director of Central Intelligence that they literally named the headquarters after him. Party affiliation is not the issue.
The problem is when partisanship distorts one's views of intelligence matters. Ms. Gabbard has written about a coup being perpetrated by the so-called deep state that includes, among others, the DNC and also the FBI, the CIA, and ``a whole network of rogue intelligence and law enforcement agents.''
Madam President, I have spent almost a quarter century as a member of the Intelligence Committee seeking to bring to light and stop government abuses across a range of programs and activities. These conspiracy theories do not help the bipartisan reform movement. They only serve to encourage a President who wants to tear down the entire intelligence community and replace it with loyalists.
So what happens next? If Ms. Gabbard is confirmed, my first order of
With regard to surveillance policy, she expressed her support for a warrant requirement for U.S. person searches of communications collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. With section 702 reauthorization up next year, DNI support for reforms like these will be critical to protecting the privacy rights of Americans.
Ms. Gabbard also confirmed that she has significant concerns about the constitutionality of several provisions of the PATRIOT Act. Importantly, she opposed mandated backdoors into encrypted communications, which threaten both Americans' privacy and national security. As she stated during her hearing:
We are living in a time of increasingly devastating cyber breaches, including the Salt Typhoon compromise of our telecommunications infrastructure. The lesson from that hack was that surveillance capabilities designed for law enforcement will be targeted by foreign intelligence services. In other words, there is simply no way for the government to mandate access to Americans' encrypted communications and not also expose those communications to the government of China or other adversaries.
Let me mention something particularly alarming last week. The press reported that UK officials insisted that Apple provide them a back door into files backed up to Apple's iCloud service. This is a development that threatens America's national security and Americans' privacy. That is even before U.S. Government officials come around once again asking for the very same dangerous and irresponsible accesses. That is why Ms. Gabbard's statement was so important and why, if she is confirmed, the Congress needs to hold her and the rest of America's intelligence Agencies to it.
During her confirmation process, Ms. Gabbard supported restrictions on the collection of communications records of America's journalists. She endorsed the Biden administration Justice Department policy prohibiting this collection except in very narrow circumstances. That was a policy she said was ``essential to protecting press freedoms and maintaining the critical balance between national security and upholding the First Amendment.'' She also called for making sure that policy was actually codified.
I asked Ms. Gabbard about the collections of communications records of congressional Members and staff, as was detailed in a Department of Justice Inspector General report released late last year. She agreed that this spying on Congress was a ``significant breach of the Constitution and separation of powers'' and, most importantly, she endorsed reforms to keep it from happening again.
During this confirmation process, she also confirmed that the Government Accountability Office should audit the intelligence community to ensure that it is not targeting Americans outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. She also expressed support for the Public Interest Declassification Board, which has the task of promoting transparency.
Finally, I asked Ms. Gabbard whether intelligence Agency whistleblowers must have a clear path to the Senate Intelligence Committee and don't need permission from Agencies to talk to the members. She responded that the answer was ``clearly yes.'' Given Donald Trump's ongoing attacks on public servants defending the rule of law, that protection of whistleblowers that we discussed may be one of the most important principles of all.
Let me wrap up this way, Madam President. In just 3 short weeks since his inauguration, here is the checks and balances scoreboard on President Trump: He has illegally fired inspectors general; he has purged the three Democratic members of the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, not only removing the most pro-privacy members, but leaving the board without enough members to function; he has appointed or nominated people to carry out political retribution, including a nominee to be FBI Director who comes with his own published enemies list. At the same time, Donald Trump has demonstrated thorough contempt for the security of Americans' private information by granting Elon Musk's people unsupervised access to the country's most sensitive security systems and databases.
So what will happen when he attempts to steamroll oversight and the rule of law and put the privacy and constitutional rights of all Americans at risk and on the line? If she is confirmed, it will be up to Ms. Gabbard to stand up to him and stick to the principles and commitments that she has expressed and answered in response to my questions. It will be our responsibility to ensure that she does just that.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Mississippi.
Madam President, I come to the floor to direct Members' attention to a very important article on the front page of yesterday's Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2025, by Thomas Grove. The headline states ``Be Cruel,'' how Russia tortured Ukrainians. This is a most disturbing bit of news, and it demonstrates who we are dealing with in hoping somehow that there will be a negotiated settlement of Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of a smaller neighbor that he thought was weaker, in violation of every international law dealing with this.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have the article by Mr. Grove printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Madam President, it starts out by saying that in the beginning of this war, which now has lasted almost 3 years, word came down from the leadership of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship in Russia to prisoners of war captured by the Russian soldiers, from Major General Igor Potapenko: ``Be cruel, don't pity them,'' the Ukrainian prisoners.
We all know that war is hell. There is no question about it. We also are finding out that Russia has learned this. They thought that it would be a 1- or 2-day excursion and that they would be welcomed by pro-Russian Ukrainians as they rolled their tanks in. They found out very differently soon, and 3 years later, we have seen how the Ukrainians have fought and died for their own homeland.
Also, once a combatant has been captured, there are very important international rules and regulations and a matter of international law-- which can be punished by life imprisonment, which can be punished by the death penalty--about treatment of prisoners of war.
This is what we are learning about what Major General Igor Potapenko told the Russian prison officials that they could do: ``There would be no restrictions against violence'' against these prisoners of war. ``The body cameras mandatory elsewhere in Russia's . . . system would be gone. The guards would rotate . . . serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other units . . . received similar instructions.''
We are not finding this out, by the way, from some international reporter that somehow got into the system and saw this.
This is information given by former Russian prison guards who were so disturbed by these orders that they defected to the West. Three Russian prison guards are telling The Wall Street Journal and Americans and anyone who would listen about the horrors. This resulted in nearly 3 years of relentless torture.
Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners' genitals until the batteries ran out.
I am almost reluctant to speak these words in public.
They beat prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what kind of material would be most painful. Then, when there were medical problems, as there would surely be, medical treatment was withheld to allow gangrene to fester, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told this reporter how Russia planned and executed what United Nations' investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners, and a person who helped the prison officials defect.
Thank God they were able to defect.
This is also borne out by a former prisoner of war, Pavel Afisov, taken prisoner in Mariupol early in the war. He was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2\1/2\ years, this 25-year- old combatant, who was entitled to the protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions, was, instead, moved from prison to prison before being released just last October.
He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia's Tver region north of Moscow, he was led into a medical examination room and ordered to strip. Guards shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard. When it was over, he was told to yell ``Glory to Russia! Glory to the Special Forces!'' and then, still naked, he was ordered to sing the Russian and Soviet--and Soviet--national anthems. When he said he didn't know the words, the guards beat him with fists and batons.
This is hard to read, but what did the former guards say--Russian citizens--who thankfully have been willing to defect and come forward and tell the truth about the vicious, brutal, illegal regime of Vladimir Putin?
The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used often, especially in showers; that officers complained they were running out of batteries too fast. Can't do this anymore because the batteries have gone dead. The guards used police batons until they broke. Officers tested other materials, including insulated hot water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.
This is Putin's Russia. This is the regime that some people are hoping we can somehow negotiate with in good faith and depend on them to keep up their end of the bargain.
The guards intentionally beat the prisoners at the same spot on their bodies every day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection, and at least one person died of sepsis because of this type of brutality.
The guards enjoyed their brutality. According to these Russians who were guards at the facility and who defected rather than countenance what their own government was doing, Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov recalled how guards at a prison in Russia would force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them on the ribs as they ran by. When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to do sit-ups and push-ups, and each time they came up, the guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.
I would say to my colleagues that this is not a bunch of prison guards gone rogue; this is a bunch of prison guards in Vladimir Putin's dictatorship and Vladimir Putin's illegal regime that were following orders from a high-ranking major general.
There are differences about the United States' interest in Ukraine, but I will tell you that the countries around Ukraine--in the neighborhood--know what they are facing, and they know, if Vladimir Putin succeeds in his illegal war to take over a neighbor, that it will not be the end of it. One can only listen to what we are hearing out of neighboring countries--out of the Republic of Georgia, out of neighboring Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Russia intends and the war criminal Vladimir Putin intends to return to as much of the old Soviet Union dictatorship as he possibly can.
I hope this war ends. Frankly, I have hoped for 3 years under the Biden administration that that administration would provide the freedom fighters inside their own country to have the necessary equipment, the necessary ammunition, the necessary permission to defeat this illegal invasion. But I simply, at this point, want to alert anyone who is listening--my colleagues, anyone who is listening to the sound of my voice in any way--to the reality of the utter cruelty, of the unspeakable conditions that Russia uses in violation of every international law.
If Vladimir Putin comes to the negotiating table and agrees to a cease-fire, we need to bear in mind that he is the gentleman who has countenanced this outrage that I have barely been able to speak about today. Any negotiations we have with the Russians and with the current leadership need to be done in light of the facts as outlined in this independent report.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Madam President, I rise to oppose the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence.
In its first few days in office, the Trump administration has been remarkably cavalier and incompetent in its handling of our national security affairs--shutting off foreign aid; threatening Panama, Greenland, and Canada; calling for the mass deportation of Palestinians from Gaza. And just last week, it was reported that the CIA sent an unclassified email, listing all employees it had hired over the last 2 years, in order to comply with an Executive order from President Trump. One former Agency officer called this a ``counterintelligence disaster.''
The President's choices to lead our national security Agencies have also not inspired confidence.
The Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, serves a critical role in leading the intelligence community and in collecting analysis so that the President, Congress, and decisionmakers across the U.S. Government have the best and most timely information for our national security. Indeed, the office was created after 9/11 to better coordinate analysis across the intelligence community. The position of DNI requires someone of great experience, character, judgment, and the confidence to speak truth to power, especially when the findings of the intelligence community differ from the policy objectives of the administration.
While I respect Ms. Gabbard's military service, including overseas deployments, she does not have a demonstrated record of experience to qualify her to lead the intelligence community. As DNI, she would oversee 18 different organizations, tens of thousands of military and civilian personnel, and an annual budget of more than $100 billion. She has never even served in an intelligence role, much less led a global intelligence enterprise.
More concerning than Ms. Gabbard's lack of experience is her record of erratic statements and actions, many of which have run counter to the interests and findings of the intelligence community.
In 2020, Ms. Gabbard and Congressman Matt Gaetz cosponsored a resolution calling on the Federal Government to drop all charges against Edward Snowden. Snowden was a contractor who was indicted for espionage and for publicly releasing the details of some of our most sensitive intelligence efforts, including those that were conducted jointly with foreign allies and partners, before Snowden fled to Russia.
Former Deputy DNI Sue Gordon responded to Ms. Gabbard's defense of Snowden by saying:
Let me be clear: Edward Snowden's betrayal has cost American lives. He is a traitor by every definition of the word.
As the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Cotton, has said in the past, Mr. Snowden is an ``egotistical, serial liar and traitor whose unauthorized disclosures of classified information have jeopardized the safety of Americans and allies around the world. Snowden's close and continual contact with Russian intelligence services speak volumes. He deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life.''
Yet, during her confirmation hearing, Ms. Gabbard was repeatedly asked whether or not she believed that Snowden was a traitor. I think colleagues on both sides of the aisle were stunned that she not only refused to do so but that she continued to defend him.
Our national security leaders consistently emphasize that the greatest advantage we have over our adversaries is our network of allies and partners, including those who share intelligence with us. If Ms. Gabbard is confirmed as DNI, I have serious concerns about whether or not our allies and partners will trust her with their nations' most sensitive intelligence given her past actions.
I am also concerned about the pattern of statements over the years by Ms. Gabbard peddling what the intelligence community has found to be Russian propaganda.
For example, at the outset of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, as eloquently described by the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Ms. Gabbard stated:
After Ukraine bravely withstood Russia's initial assault, the Kremlin began a campaign of misinformation designed to legitimize its illegal war. These themes were repeatedly amplified by Gabbard in her public comments, including with respect to the widely disputed Russian allegation of a U.S.-funded covert biological weapons program in Ukraine.
As our former colleague Mitt Romney tweeted at the time she made these bogus claims, ``Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.''
In reviewing Ms. Gabbard's statements, the New York Times found:
Ms. Gabbard has been roundly and appropriately criticized for her unannounced 2017 trip to Syria, where she met with Syria's then- President Bashar al-Assad. She justified that trip by saying:
Ms. Gabbard's decision to carry out an unofficial trip to Syria in the midst of a civil war--a conflict in which Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons against his own people--showed incredibly poor judgment. Her visit did nothing to advance the cause of peace but, rather, helped to legitimize Assad's brutal dictatorship.
Just months later, Ms. Gabbard criticized President Trump's decision to use military force to deter further chemical weapons use by Assad and even expressed skepticism about whether Assad had actually used chemical weapons.
Madam President, it would be the height of charity to say that Ms. Gabbard has consistently demonstrated poor judgment on critical national security matters, but it is more than just that. Ms. Gabbard clings to her misjudgments even when she is shown to be wrong. That is a disturbing character flaw for this critical role.
Above all else, the DNI must be unquestionably loyal to our national interests and trustworthy with our national secrets. The intelligence they control has life-or-death consequences.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle--some of whom have indicated great discomfort with Ms. Gabbard and her troubling disregard for America's security interests--appear willing to vote for her confirmation despite their misgivings.
At this critical moment, all Senators must honestly answer these questions: Given everything you know about Tulsi Gabbard, do you trust her with life-or-death national secrets? Can you look members of our intelligence community in the eye and say that you believe Tulsi Gabbard will serve and protect them and this Nation?
I have seen enough to know my answer, and I urge my colleagues to vote against this nominee.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. President, I rise today as a very new Senator, a freshman Senator, to talk about the confirmation prospects for the nominee for the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
I think context matters here. I am the first CIA officer to ever be elected to the U.S. Senate. Before I ran for office in Michigan, I had a career in national security. I am what is called a 9/11 baby. I happened to be in New York City on my second day of graduate school when 9/11 happened. It changed my life. I decided to go into national security.
I got recruited by the CIA right out of grad school and then was quickly sent on my first of three tours in Iraq alongside the military, providing intelligence to the U.S. military to deal with the groups that were shooting at U.S. forces and plotting against the U.S. homeland.
I worked in national security roles very proudly in both administrations, Democratic and Republican. I worked in the White House for George W. Bush, and I was there the Friday that he left office and the Monday that Barack Obama walked in. I did the same job for two very different Presidents, one for each party. I went on to be a Pentagon Assistant Secretary of Defense. But in between all of that time, one of the things I got to do was help stand up the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
I was the intelligence briefer in Baghdad for Ambassador John Negroponte, who was the first Ambassador to Iraq under the Bush administration. I would provide him intelligence briefings early, early in the morning.
One day, he came back from a trip to Washington and said: I am going to be nominated to be the first Director of National Intelligence. It is this completely new position. It is a position that has been created because of the failures of 9/11, our failures to anticipate the attacks of 9/11, to put the pieces together between the FBI, the CIA, the military, all those who had a piece of the story but didn't have a place and a venue to combine it all together to anticipate the most devastating attacks on the U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.
I came home and happened to be one of those first employees to set up the Director of National Intelligence. I think I was employee No. 5. I was John Negroponte's first special assistant. So I was his, you know, body person, helping him set up that office.
So when I talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, I don't do it willy-nilly. I don't do it without a background on these topics. And I believe that the people who should be taking the positions that are critical for national security should be people of competence and character.
What does the Director of National Intelligence do? The Office was created, as I said, to combine all of the different threads of information at the 17 different intelligence community Agencies that we have to prevent intelligence failures like we had on 9/11.
This is a serious position. This is a position that in the past has been in the Oval Office every morning with the intelligence briefings provided by the Agencies. This is the position that in the dead of night makes consequential decisions on the security and safety of people here.
Most Americans have no idea the number of threats we still thwart every single month against our homeland. We sleep well at night because the intelligence community is working together to prevent those threats, along with our partners and our allies and our military.
So, for me, I want to know that the person who is going to be woken up in the middle of the night to make those last-minute decisions--do we move on that intelligence? do we act based on that threat?--that they are someone, again, of competence and character, and what I have seen from Ms. Gabbard does not meet that threshold.
She has, first of all, repeatedly questioned the integrity of the intelligence community. She has gone after the intelligence community that she hopes to lead.
She has labeled tens of thousands of intelligence personnel as deep state without even a semblance of understanding of what they do every day to keep her safe.
She has questioned the findings of the intelligence community.
I think more egregious than anything, she has shown a repeated preference for our adversaries over the intelligence community and the United States of America. Most notably, a surprise trip to visit the now-ousted President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
Imagine the decision making that goes into planning a secret trip to visit a man who has killed thousands of his countrymen, thousands of relatives of Michiganders that I represent; a man who we know has used chemical weapons, violating international law, devastating communities; a man who has seemingly sat aside as insurgent groups, terrorist groups took territory in his area and allowed them to project attacks into neighboring states and to plot against the U.S. homeland.
She makes the decision to go and visit this man, throw flowers at his feet, do public TV with him, go publicly and show her support. Now, I don't know if she is just deeply naive. I don't know if in some twisted way, she thought that this was her way of being helpful. But whether she did it out of naivete or she did it knowing what this man has done and the implications of her actions, either way shows a complete lack of judgment.
The same goes for her seeming glorification of Vladimir Putin. It is hard to understand, coming from the country that defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, that we would put a woman in charge of our entire intelligence community who has shown over and over repeated interest in Vladimir Putin, taking his side of the argument, wondering what he has done right and our intelligence community has done wrong.
Can you imagine what it feels like to be a member of the intelligence community right now, with everything going on, with all of the discrediting of what they have done and what they do every single day, and now this woman is going to be in charge of this Agency? It is an insult to people who have dedicated their lives and put themselves in harm's way, to have her confirmed into this position.
Now, we have watched her flip-flop on a bunch of issues, right? Issues that Democrats and Republicans have concerns with. You know, she used to have a lot of concern about what is called section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. She fought against it. Now she is somehow for it. I am not saying people can't change, but I am just saying someone who doesn't have the backbone to stand up and be clear with their principles--I am having a hard time imagining them lead in the heat of the moment, when you are in the Situation Room and consequential decisions are being made.
I think the feeling that I have about where we are in this country right now is that we are sort of in this fever dream. There is this race to discredit, to attack, to cut. And, look, I will be the first person to say that there is fat on the bone in the Federal Government. I worked in the Federal Government. There are plenty of things that can be reformed in the Federal Government. But the double whammy of attacking the people who keep us safe every day, of trying to push them out--I just had a Republican Member on my way here say: Hey, I just heard about what is going on at CIA. Are they trying to get everyone to leave? What about people who are in sensitive positions?
Great question. But the other punch is to put someone in charge of the intelligence community that has such disdain for our allies, for our intelligence officers, and such love for our adversaries.
So I urge all of my Republican colleagues to search their soul. Play the long game. Don't live in fear of the Trump administration and Donald Trump specifically. You know in your heart that these people aren't qualified and that the life and limb of American citizens is in their hands.
So I urge all of my colleagues to vote against Tulsi Gabbard. I will be voting against her here later today.
I hope that we as American citizens can come up for air from this fever dream and remember that reform of the Federal Government does not mean slashing the people that keep us safe every day.
Mr. President, I rise today to discuss an epidemic that is affecting our Nation's youth, a crisis each and every parent should be concerned about and one that so many parents I know already are.
Our kids' worsening mental health is an emergency, and it is an emergency clearly and undeniably linked to social media. Emergency room visits among adolescents for anxiety, mood disorders, and self-harm have all risen dramatically in the years since social media apps exploded onto the scene.
Over that same time period and during the second decade of this century, rates of depression amongst teenagers more than doubled. By 2019, 20 percent of teenagers agreed with the notion that ``life often feels meaningless''--almost a 100-percent increase from a decade earlier.
According to the CDC, in 2021, and buckle up for this, one in three high school--young women said she actually considered death by suicide; 25 percent of teenage girls made a plan to do so; 9 percent of high schoolers and 13 percent of teenage girls actually attempted death by suicide.
As a mom, that is beyond horrifying. I worry for my own kids. I worry for their friends. And as a Senator, I worry about the future of the next generation of Americans.
To make matters worse, social media companies know the harm their platforms create. Instagram's parent company, Meta, conducted internal research that showed that one-third of teenage girls who use the app report: It makes them feel worse, but they cannot stop.
And while social media companies have taken some steps, it is clear that there is work for Congress to do. The last time a U.S. President signed a major piece of legislation addressing children and the internet was--wait for it--1998.
So you look. Almost 30 years ago, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act was signed into law. For reference, at the time that the law was signed, MySpace didn't even exist.
It is time for an update, and there is a clear place to start. Studies have shown the most damaging time for an adolescent to use social media is during their preteen years. And the 1998 law tried to address that. The law says that websites and other online services cannot collect personal information from children under 13 years old without parental consent. Now, the catch is that those websites have to know that the child is under 13.
The standard minimum age for social media platforms is 13. But current law creates an obvious incentive for companies not to verify whether their users are old enough to be on the app. And because social media companies have to know that a child is under 13 for the law to apply, they simply choose not to verify this information.
Look, anti-child-sex-abuse organization Thorn actually conducted a study in 2021 that showed that 49 percent of respondents between the age of 9 and 12 years old said that they had used Instagram; 52 percent said that they had used Facebook; 58 percent said that they had used Snapchat.
And it was just last week, in a Senate Judiciary Hearing, where I heard not one but two parents tell about their painful story where their children had died of fentanyl poisoning from a pill that they had bought on Snapchat, thinking it was something else. They thought they bought a Percocet; they thought they bought an oxycodone. It was laced with fentanyl, and now they are dead.
Sixty-nine percent of these people in this survey, between 9 and 12 years old, said that they had used TikTok.
The age limits social media companies claim they have mean absolutely nothing. That is why I introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act, alongside Senators Ted Cruz, Chris Murphy, and Brian Schatz. The four of us approached this not as Democrats or Republicans, not as someone who sits on the right or the left, but as four concerned parents that are raising teenagers right now and dealing with this issue.
Our bill would set a minimum age of 13 years old for social media platforms, but that is not the only thing that it would do. The Kids Off Social Media Act would also prevent platforms from feeding targeted content picked by an algorithm to users under the age of 17.
For anyone who is curious about why that is in the bill, all you have to do is ask a teenager, especially a teenage girl. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote that nearly half of all adolescents say that social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. That doesn't seem like an accident.
If you read--and many people have--Jonathan Haidt's book ``The Anxious Generation,'' you will learn that these apps use algorithms that ``home in on and amplify girls' desires to be beautiful in socially prescribed ways, which include being thin.''
Once that starts, once the algorithm starts feeding teenage girls images of increasingly thin and unhealthy women, the vicious cycle begins, and those girls end up finding images or videos promoting anorexia and/or, as Haidt says:
These algorithms on social media platforms are not just leading our daughters to starve themselves; they are leading them to torture themselves as well.
By turning the Kids Off Social Media Act into law, we can put a stop to this. I am so grateful that Senator Ted Cruz, from the great State of Texas, prioritized our bill in the Commerce Committee, and I am sure that parents everywhere are grateful too. After all, parents overwhelmingly support our mission.
A survey conducted by the Count on Mothers group showed that over 90 percent of mothers agree that there should be a minimum age of 13 on social media platforms, and 87 percent of mothers agreed that social media companies should not be allowed to use personalized algorithms to deliver content to our children.
If there has ever been a theme of the legislation that my colleagues and I have pursued so far this Congress, it is keeping American families and children safe. The Laken Riley Act will help keep kids safe from criminal illegal aliens. The Halt Fentanyl Act, which I spoke about on this very floor just last week, will help kids be safe from deadly fentanyl and fentanyl poisons. And the Kids Off Social Media Act will help keep kids safe from mental health effects that these platforms and their algorithms produce.
There is nothing more important we can do as a body than protect the people we serve. So let's do it. Let's get the Kids Off Social Media Act through Congress and to the President's desk. There are parents across this country that are counting on us to step up to put the proper guardrails in place so their children can be safe and their children have an opportunity to both explore and to succeed.
All of our country's children are free to pursue their own American dream, just as our generations were, and this will enable them to do that.
Mr. President, we are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment--what we do right now--and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who, in 1863, looking out over a battlefield where thousands of people had died--thousands of soldiers died in the fight against slavery--and he stated that ``this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.''
Do we stand with Lincoln's vision of America, or do we sit idly by and allow this country to move into a new vision, and that is a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class?
But it is not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, not just the reality that today three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society, 170 million--three people, more wealth than the bottom 17 million Americans. It is not just that the gap between the very, very rich and everyone else is growing wider. And it is not just that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we have ever had.
On top of all of that, the reality is that today we are moving rapidly under President Trump toward authoritarianism, more and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.
Mr. President, as we speak, right now, Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, is attempting to dismantle major Agencies of the Federal Government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These Agencies were created by the U.S. Congress, and it is Congress's responsibility to maintain them, to reform them, or to end them. It is not Mr. Musk's responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional and must be ended.
Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all Federal grants and loans, an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every sixth grader--every kid in the sixth grade--in this country knows, under the Constitution and our form of government, the President can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by the Congress. It is Congress--the House and the Senate--that controls the purse strings.
But in this move toward authoritarianism, it is not just the Congress that is being attacked; it is our judiciary.
This weekend, the Vice President of the United States--a graduate of Yale Law School who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice--said:
Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the Federal courts was to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on the unconstitutional power of the Executive. That is not just what I believe; that is what I suspect every legal scholar and lawyer in America understands to be the case.
Further, Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that the ``worst 1 percent of appointed judges be fired every year,'' and he demanded the impeachment of judges who have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk's rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the worst judges are.
And no, Mr. Musk, I must tell you: You don't impeach judges who rule against you here in the United States. You may or may not know this, Mr. Musk, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the Founding Fathers of this country in the 1770s, and it has worked pretty well throughout our country's history. We have an executive branch, we have a legislative branch, and we have a judiciary.
What we are seeing now is not just an organized attack on the power of the Congress and the responsibility of the judiciary; Mr. Trump and his friends are not just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government--the Congress and the courts; they are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.
Trust me that every Member of Congress will tell you that the people working in the media and media organizations are not perfect. We have all had our experiences with the media. Media, like everything else, makes mistakes every day. But I do hope that every Member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy, that you cannot have a free-flow of information, that you cannot have the pursuit of truth without an independent press--a press not intimidated by Presidents of the United States but a press who writes it and sees it the way they understand it to be.
In that regard, I want to mention to my colleagues what President Trump has done just in recent months.
Mr. Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS and its parent company, Paramount, and is right now in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register for poll results that he didn't like, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and
In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his incredible power and the power of his Agencies to go after media in this country that are saying and doing things he does not like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful Executive in the world?
In the midst of all of this, I think that now is the time to ask a very, very simple question, something, I think, that is on the minds of millions of Americans: What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump, and their fellow billionaires really want? It is not really taking over Greenland or the Panama Canal and all of that stuff. The real question is, What is their endgame? What is their goal? What are they striving for?
In my view, the answer really is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is, in fact, exactly what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed to be their right-- their right--and that is more power for themselves, more control for themselves, and more wealth for themselves, and in their pursuit of more power, more control, and more wealth, they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.
For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the pain, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to, and that is really what they believe. They are entitled to all of the wealth and the power they have, and they are determined to stop anyone who gets in their way.
This process--this phenomenon--that is going on right now is not the first time that we have seen this in our country's history. As I think many Americans understand, in pre-revolutionary America--before the 1770s, before the creation of the United States and the writing of our Constitution--the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the divine right of Kings--the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, that God appointed him, and that he was not to be questioned by mere mortal human beings. He was appointed by God.
In modern times, we no longer have the divine right of Kings. What we now have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that, as a very, very wealthy group of people--often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology--and as high IQ individuals, it is their absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day Kings.
It is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they currently have, they want more and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion, and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With a combined wealth of $903 billion, these three people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society--170 million Americans--and, not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer, and Bezos has become $28 billion richer since election day in November.
Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured in terms of healthcare, 25 percent of our seniors in this country are trying to survive on $15,000 a year or less, 800,000 Americans are homeless, we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on Earth, and real inflation-adjusted wages for the average American worker has not gone up in 50 years.
Does anyone really think that the oligarchs give a damn about ordinary Americans? Trust me, they don't. Musk's decision to dismember USAID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people in this world will either go hungry or die of preventable diseases--tens of thousands of people. But it is not just USAID and what is happening abroad. Here in the United States--mark my words--if we do not stop them, they will soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country--all so that they can raise the money they need to provide huge tax breaks for themselves and for other billionaires.
As modern-day Kings who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice without hesitation the well-being of working people in order to protect their power and their privileges.
Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they entertain us to death. Mr. Musk owns Twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta, which includes Facebook and Instagram. Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post and Twitch.
Further, they and their fellow oligarchs will continue within our corrupt campaign finance system to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.
The bottom line: The oligarchs, with their unlimited amounts of money, are waging a war on the working class of our country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.
Now, I am not going to kid anybody. The problems that our country faces right now are enormously serious, and they are not easy to solve. Our economy is rigged--the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class struggles. Our campaign finance system is totally corrupt. Billionaires can now pour as much money as they want into both political parties. And climate change is ravaging our country and the world with unprecedented levels of extreme weather disturbances, among many other crises our country faces.
In the midst of all of these crises, this is what I do know, and this is what I do believe, and that is that the worst fear of the ruling class of our country is that the American people, whether they are Black or White or Latino, whether they are urban or rural, whether they are young or old, gay or straight--whatever--the fear of the ruling class is that the American people will come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.
Their oligarchs' nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation, or country of origin and will come together and have the courage to take them on.
Will this struggle be easy? No, it will not, and one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind us that they have the power. They control the government. They own the media.
But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to go back and remember the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of Americans have waged over the centuries in difficult times to create a more democratic, just, and humane society. Think about all of the sacrifices and the struggles that Americans went through to create a more democratic, just, humane society, and think about trying to put yourselves where they were in those times of crisis.
Think about what was being said at those times. Think about the 1770s. Overthrowing the King of England--the most powerful person on Earth--the British Empire, to create a new nation and have self-rule here in the Colonies--impossible. So many people thought it could not be done.
Establishing universal suffrage, the right of all people, whether they were wealthy or not, to vote--imagine that. What a radical idea: extending the right to vote to poor people--impossible. It couldn't be done. But it was done.
Ending slavery and segregation, taking on all of the power of the slaveholders--impossible. But it was done.
Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor, taking on the power of big business--impossible. But it was done.
Giving women control over their own bodies, taking on sexism, taking on the powers that be--it couldn't be done--impossible. But it was done.
Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards--impossible. It couldn't be done. But it was done.
In other words, I think back to what Nelson Mandela told us, and he said: Everything is impossible until it is done.
So in these difficult days, when we find ourselves arrayed against the wealthiest people in the world, the most powerful people in the world, people who want to expand the power of the oligarchy, people who want to move us toward authoritarianism--I know. I know that people get discouraged that we can't take them on; that we cannot create a government that works for all and not just the few; that we cannot do what every other major country on Earth does--guarantee healthcare to all people as a human right--that we cannot raise the minimum wage to a living wage so that tens of millions of people do not earn starvation wages; that we cannot make sure that all of our kids get the quality education that they deserve; that we can't expand Social Security or lower the poverty rate among seniors. I know that, in this moment, people say: Well, that is an impossible dream; it can't be done.
But I think, if you look back on American history, you will find that, in very difficult and dark days, when people came together, they did the impossible.
This ain't going to be easy. We are taking on enormously powerful people who really do not believe in democracy or the rule of law. But if we stand together, we are going to win this fight. And not only will we save American democracy; we are going to create the kind of Nation that I think most of us know we should become.
Mr. President, trust--trust is at the very center of our national security: the trust that we share with allies and partners around the world; the trust that the American people have in us and in our armed services and in our intelligence services; the trust that vital allies have that causes them to share with us information about threats, challenges, opportunities. That is the very foundation of our national security.
And today, I rise to warn my colleagues about the risks to our national security posed by the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence.
As ranking member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, I have a significant involvement in our Nation's intelligence apparatus. And over the course of the confirmation hearings and the debate here on the floor about former Congresswoman Gabbard, I have concluded that she has an alarming record, revealed more fully in her confirmation hearings but also in a review of her speeches, her travels, her positions.
As a Democrat, as a Congresswoman, as a candidate for President, as a supporter of President Trump, she has gone quite a distance. She has defended Edward Snowden. Snowden is widely viewed by folks in our intelligence community, our national security apparatus, our Armed Forces, and many here as a traitor who betrayed some of the most important secrets that are critical to keeping the United States secure.
She would not, in her confirmation hearings, answer the question: Is Edward Snowden a traitor?
Ms. Gabbard bemoaned the rise of HTS in Syria, which recently overthrew the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad, without mentioning the fall of Assad. She talked about how tragic it was that HTS overran Damascus, without mentioning the side benefit of the fall of a brutal dictator. And in her confirmation hearings, she repeatedly dodged pointed and relevant questions about FISA and section 702, key tools for our intelligence community.
All of this is in keeping with a longstanding record as an apologist for authoritarians and even enemies of the United States. She has repeatedly blamed the United States and NATO for Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
And I will tell you, as someone who is about to go to the Munich Security Conference this weekend with a broad and bipartisan delegation from this body and from the House: I will never forget being at the Munich Security Conference just before Russia invaded Ukraine broad spectrum. They had been in eastern Ukraine at that point for years. They had occupied Crimea and then launched a war into the Donetsk, the Donbas, the eastern part of Ukraine.
But it was just days after the Munich Security Conference, in February 2022, that tens of thousands of Russian troops--whole divisions--poured over the line in a broad-spectrum invasion that included brutality against civilians, bombardment of the entire nation--ultimately, cruel acts of violence against women and children, fully documented in the press and courts around the world.
And yet Ms. Gabbard blamed the United States and NATO for provoking this invasion by Russia of a sovereign nation--a nation where the United States, in writing, guaranteed its territorial sovereignty in the 1994 agreement that led to them giving up their nuclear weapons.
Ms. Gabbard visited Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad for several days, in 2017, and relied on pro-Assad sources to cast doubt on accounts of his use of chemical weapons against his own people.
She has a long history of repeating pro-Kremlin talking points and has become a favorite on Russian state media. She appears frequently because she frequently is attacking the United States in Russian state media.
Mr. President, this body will all too soon take up the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard. We should not proceed. We should not vote for her. Our Nation faces massive threats that are growing day by day. Our Nation is facing threats around the world--from North Korea and Iran, from China and from Russia--and we need an intelligence service equipped to respond to these challenges.
Can we trust Tulsi Gabbard to lead our intelligence services and to respond to these threats? I cannot. We cannot, and we should not. This body should not vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as the next Director of National Intelligence.
Mr. President, do you remember where you were on September 11? Most Americans do. I do. I was right outside that door. I was in a meeting at 9 in the morning. And as we had the meeting, we looked down the Mall. We were watching a little television set, and we saw these planes flying into skyscrapers in New York.
Nobody could quite understand what was going on. First, we thought it was an accident, as most people probably felt the same way. Then, when the second plane hit, we knew there was more.
Then, there came a moment when somebody said: Look down the Mall.
We looked down the Mall and saw black smoke billowing across the Mall here in Washington from the Pentagon, because a plane had crashed into the Pentagon.
And there was this moment where people didn't know which way to turn, where to get answers, what was going on. Someone came racing into the room and said: Evacuate the Capitol Building. Another plane is coming directed toward this building.
We all raced out down the steps and stood on the lawn outside, didn't know which way to turn, had no idea what was going on.
Tourists were coming up to me because I had a suit and tie on and saying: Where are we supposed to go?
I told them where the Metro stations were and pointed in several directions.
That is a day you won't forget.
Most of us, I am sure, felt at that point that we had to figure out what happened first and to stop it from ever happening again.
So where did we turn? First, we turned to law enforcement, for obvious reasons. That is who you call--9-1-1--to see if they can give you any information, give you any advice, keep you safe.
But also in this town, you think: We hope our intelligence Agencies, the ones that collect information, know who those people were so we can stop them from ever doing this again.
Those intelligence Agencies are critical, not just for the security of this country but the survival of this country.
In the wake of September 11, the most historic terrorist attack in our Nation's history, we learned the hard way that Agencies within the intelligence community need to be good, effective, and coordinate what they are doing. So we embarked on several
It seems so obvious. They need to coordinate. But they had what they called smokestacks where they kept their information to themselves and didn't share it with other Agencies. Well, that changed. It changed the whole attitude towards intelligence and coordinating information.
We created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It oversees 18 different intelligence Agencies that span the CIA, Defense Department, State Department, Energy Department, and others. It is now essential to modern safety in America. Yet the President, Donald Trump, has selected a person to run this critical Agency, coordinating 18 different intelligence Agencies, who has little or no experience leading this critical American security apparatus. Her name is Tulsi Gabbard.
During President Trump's first term, he made clear of his fondness for certain leaders in the world that were controversial, such as Viktor Orban of Hungary, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Kim Jong Un of North Korea. So he ends up picking a person to run his intelligence network who shares a similarly terrible judgment on critical leaders.
Tulsi Gabbard, a former Congresswoman, is infamous for spending time with despots and autocratic leaders of the world, including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and traitors to the United States like Edward Snowden.
Her fondness for these oppressive, anti-democratic regimes does not go unreciprocated. They know her, they like her, and they say quite a few things about her. Let me show you one of these posters.
Hosts of Russian state media have cheered her nomination. Russia is cheering her nomination as Director of National Intelligence because it will ``dismantle America.'' Some on Russian state channels have even referred to her affectionately as their ``girlfriend.'' Russian state TV also called her a Russian ``comrade'' in Trump's emerging Cabinet. A pro-Putin propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, once called Gabbard ``our friend.'' Later, when asked if she was ``some sort of Russian agent?'' he replied, of course, ``yes.''
What is going on here? This woman wants to head up the intelligence Agencies, and she is being cheered on by the Russians?
In a glowing profile in a Russian state newspaper, it said of Tulsi Gabbard, ``The C.I.A. and F.B.I. are trembling,'' noting that Ukrainians consider her ``an agent of the Russian state.''
Imagine that--the person tapped to head America's intelligence community being called a puppet of an adversary's country by that very same country. It seems too ridiculous to be true, but I am sorry to say that it is.
To merely join America's intelligence community, never mind lead it, candidates have to go through a vigorous background check and earn a security clearance. I will just tell you that based on what she has done since serving in Congress, she could not pass a routine security clearance. If Tulsi Gabbard were applying for an entry-level position, her relationship with Russia alone would disqualify her for the job. Why, then, would we trust our entire intelligence network to the No. 1 friend of our No. 1 enemy? Why, then, would we want to put that sort of person in charge?
Given the examples that abound of Tulsi Gabbard proving publicly, shamelessly, and carelessly her sympathies for nations that undermine U.S. interests and security, that is unexplainable and irresponsible.
Perhaps this is summed up best by one of her people who worked with her for years. Here is what he had to say, according to The Atlantic magazine:
And to head up all of our intelligence Agencies? It is as controversial as choosing Kash Patel to head up our Federal Bureau of Investigation--no experience which qualifies him, nor does she have any experience either.
You see, our allies depend on us as much as we depend on them for security and to share critical intelligence. Now they are looking at us in disbelief that we would let someone like Tulsi Gabbard, with such an appalling record, anywhere near the leadership of the intelligence community.
Intelligence professionals from Canada and the United Kingdom-- members of the critical Five Eyes intelligence alliance along with the United States, Australia, and New Zealand--have expressed concern about even working with her if she is in charge. In order to keep Americans safe throughout the world, we need to have the trust of our allies and their cooperation.
This position she is aspiring to at DNI does not just impact the collection of intelligence; it also impacts the action taken on it. Because of this, I have great concern about the impact Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation would have on our support of Ukraine in defending itself against Russia.
Since Russia's full-scale invasion, Gabbard has taken Russia's side many times, claiming, in reference to Ukraine and Russia, ``Russia had legitimate security concerns.'' The words of Tulsi Gabbard. And then she blames NATO, our alliance--one of the most significant security alliances in the world.
Let me be clear. Supporting democracies has not historically been a partisan matter. For example, contrast Tulsi Gabbard's nonsense with former President Ronald Reagan's clear-eyed understanding of the danger of the communist Russia empire.
Nearly 40 years ago, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and famously challenged the Soviet Union to ``tear down this wall.'' Reagan understood the true nature and threat of the Russians.
We have all seen the horrific costs of Russia's war in Ukraine and increasing attacks on NATO allies. Is there a deal to be made to end this war? Perhaps. Doing so must be with the best intelligence available, a clear eye about who we are negotiating with and for, and long-term guarantees of the security of Ukraine, of Europe, and the transatlantic alliance.
One would think any American President navigating such difficult waters would want a top official to serve as the head of National Intelligence. Tulsi Gabbard fails that test. She would not be qualified for an entry-level position within the intelligence community and is certainly not qualified to lead it, period.
Some of the President's Cabinet nominees are hard to imagine because they are so unqualified, but for the position of Director of National Intelligence, putting someone unqualified in charge is not funny at all; it is life-or-death dangerous.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
Mr. President, I want to speak about what Elon Musk is doing to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Here is what is happening. Mr. Musk--of course an unelected billionaire who knows really nothing and cares less about how the Federal Government works--is demolishing one of the most important Agencies we have for countering Russia, China authoritarianism, and anti-American extremism around the world, all being done in the name of ``efficiency.''
One former State Department official said:
Mr. Musk bragged about feeding USAID into a wood chipper. What he is really doing, after locking USAID's staff out of their offices and blocking their access to email, is destroying the careers of thousands of professionals who administer programs that are critical to U.S. national security, not to mention the well-being of their families.
I want to acknowledge something. Many Americans ask me and they ask
Both parties have an obligation to address these issues, and our citizens do come first, but we also have a role in the world that is absolutely vital to our own national security.
There is a sense--magnified by a lot of the misinformation Mr. Musk and others put out--that foreign aid is this huge component of our budget really compromising our ability to meet those needs that affect all of our citizens here in the country. People think it is like 25 or 30 percent of the budget. Foreign aid is less than 1 percent of our budget. So as a percentage, it is really quite modest. Incidentally, not that we necessarily want to compare, but as a per capita spending portion of our budget, what we spend in the United States on foreign aid is a lot less than our European allies and Japan. So it is modest but significant.
But even at this less than 1 percent, the foreign aid budget is very important to America, and it serves our national interest. Why is that? Our USAID program started 64 years ago under then-President John F. Kennedy.
He asked the question:
His answer:
There were adversaries then, and there are adversaries today.
President Kennedy went on to say:
That is, our Nation's interest--
The words of John F. Kennedy.
But fast-forward. Only 5 months ago, George Bush's Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice said about the need for continued U.S. engagement in the world:
The words of former Secretary Condoleezza Rice.
So the question that we need to answer today is not why we spend money on foreign aid. I don't believe we need to answer that because I think President Kennedy and Secretary Rice explained that very well. The question is, How can we make the best use of the 1 percent of the Federal budget to protect our interests in an increasingly unstable and dangerous world?
As Secretary Rice said, ``if we don't shape the international environment, then others will''--because no matter how many times President Trump and Elon Musk say ``America first, isolationism,'' this is a decision that each one of us in the U.S. Senate must make. Isolationism is not an option. What does happen in Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia does threaten our own security, far more so today than in President Kennedy's time.
Our Secretary of State, Marco Rubio--a valued former colleague, someone we are all quite proud of--has said this administration is not going to eliminate foreign aid and that many of USAID's programs will continue. He and others in the administration have called what the administration is doing a ``review.''
Let's talk about that a minute. If this were a review, I would be all for it. We should always be looking at the best way and the best use of taxpayer dollars to get the best outcomes from the programs we fund. I have been calling for a review of FEMA, an organization that was very helpful to Vermont to recover from the floods of 2023 and 2024. In my view, we should be doing a review of every Agency--from food stamps to the Pentagon. So if it were a review, I would be all in favor of it. But it is not a review. It is a frontal assault to destroy USAID.
Just consider: Emails go out telling people not to go to work. Emails go out telling people in foreign lands they have got to come home. Websites are closed down. Work is stopped in its tracks. That is not a review. That is a decision. It is an action to dismantle and destroy an organization. By the end of the so-called 90-day review, people in Africa working for USAID will be in the United States. There won't be anything left.
And the administration really makes no secret about it. It acknowledged that it has decided to reduce the number of USAID staff from 14,000 to a few hundred. That is not a review; it is a decision.
Many of us know a lot about USAID. Bring on reform, yes. But this organization has helped our country by doing good work in other countries. Many of us have met USAID staff at posts overseas, often in some of the world's most dangerous places. The folks in that organization are serious, purposeful, and patriots. They put their lives at risk every day, and they don't have body armor.
If the goal really is reform of USAID, then I say to Secretary of State Rubio and I say to my Republican colleagues: I want to work with you. Anything we can do to make any program that we are responsible for better, I am absolutely all in. And we know there are ways we could make USAID better.
But what Elon Musk is doing is dangerous. It is cruel, and it is illegal. It is illegal because this Congress has appropriated money for these programs, and Elon Musk is making a unilateral decision, without any congressional oversight or authority, to discontinue those authorized programs.
Also, you know, what does it really say to the millions of people and governments around the world, when we have made a commitment, whether it is one that you agreed with or I did--but as a body, as a country, we made a commitment. And then, suddenly, there is an email out saying: We are just kidding. We are not going to follow through.
And what does it mean, when you think about it--that because of, in effect, this stop-work order, we have food for hungry people that is not being delivered? We have vaccines, medicines that can save lives, avert injury, and they are not being delivered. Why are we doing that? Why would anyone do that? It would be like your neighbor's house is on fire, you have a hose, and you won't let them use it. That is not the way we operate--at least, I hope so.
And, you know, the USAID work is invisible to most people. It shouldn't be invisible to us. We are supporting civil society leaders who are inspired by our own Declaration of Independence. These folks fight for human rights and democracy, and they do that in the face of corrupt and abusive governments that imprison their political opponents. These programs have been stopped. There are programs that have strong bipartisan support and have had it for decades. And I want to acknowledge many of my Republican colleagues who have done so much-- in particular, Senator Lindsey Graham, who knows this does protect our national security, and they present the best face of America that the rest of the world sees.
You know, the administration talks about waste, fraud, and abuse. And when they talk about that, I ask myself the question: Is there a single American any of us can identify that is in favor of waste, fraud, and abuse?
So they raise the question without proof of where that waste, fraud, and abuse is found. And instead of looking to identify it specifically so they can actually take action to eliminate it, they just leave it out there as an explanation to justify shutting down a valuable program and not doing the hard work of reform.
That is applying not just as an approach, not just to USAID, but to many other programs, like farm programs, where I am getting calls from farmers: What happened to the agreement I had with the Federal Government, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about doing a new type of crop rotation in exchange for getting a contract price?
What has happened to folks running domestic violence shelters who can't get on the portal to get money paid to them that they are owed?
This is happening throughout our non-profit systems, including at our community health centers. We had a woman who had an appointment with a dentist at a community health center and got a notice that it was closed because of the order that went out from the administration.
So I believe in USAID. I believe it is wrong for the administration to essentially make the decision to feed it to the wood chipper. I believe in reform, but I do not believe that this is a serious effort at reform. It is a serious effort to destroy the program started by President Kennedy that has been embraced by Republican and Democratic Presidents since President Kennedy started it 64 years ago.
And while there is a perception that it is 25 to 30 percent of our budget, it is 1 percent. And it is at a time when the reputation of the United States as a country that is going to stand behind the commitment it has made is being jeopardized.
So my hope is that all of us, whether we agree or disagree about the ultimate value of USAID, will stand up for protecting what we have already committed ourselves to, and that to the extent there is reform to be made, we work together on that so that the American taxpayer and American national security interests can continue to be served by the men and women of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Mr. President, I come to the floor this afternoon to join a number of my colleagues because of my concern for the national security of the United States.
Whether it is a terror attack, a cyber attack from a nonstate actor, whether it is a threat from Russia or China or Iran, we in the United States are the targets of foreign adversaries every single day.
But thanks to our intelligence community and the thousands of Americans who dedicate their lives to our security, we are safe. These brave men and women are counting on us to have their backs, which is why the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard is so concerning. Our adversaries will be thrilled if we confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence--none more so than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Ms. Gabbard has not hidden her positive views of Russia and President Putin. While Ukrainians fight valiantly to protect their homeland and defend freedom and democracy, Tulsi Gabbard cozies up to Putin and publicly defends Russia's brutal invasion. The former Congresswoman has parroted Russian propaganda, saying that the war could have been avoided if NATO and the Biden administration had ``simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns.''
We know that the nominee is problematic when the Kremlin has such nice things to say about her. On November 17, 2024, a major Russian state-controlled news agency called Tulsi Gabbard ``superwoman'' and noted her past appearances on Russian TV. I don't relish the idea of America's Director of National Intelligence, a role that includes such sensitive responsibilities as producing the President's
Not only does Putin have kind words for Ms. Gabbard, but they also share mutual friends, namely ousted Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Since her clandestine meeting with Mr. Assad in 2017, a visit that took place while she was serving in Congress, former Congresswoman Gabbard has faced numerous questions about why she went to Syria and arranged this meeting in the first place.
She has answered none of those questions, nor has she provided any substantive details on her conversation with Assad. In fact, Ms. Gabbard has repeatedly refused to call Assad what he is, and that is an enemy of the United States, a brutal dictator who is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians--Assad, who is Putin's best buddy in the Middle East, Assad who is backed by Iran, whose regime openly seeks to undermine and destroy American interests and values worldwide--this is the person who co-Presidents Musk and Trump want to lead our intelligence Agency, to spearhead our national security operations?
Well, that doesn't make me comfortable sleeping at night. To talk amiably about a brutal dictator who is openly opposed to American interests and human rights, a dictator like Assad--and like Putin, for that matter--shows, at best, a lack of judgment and, at worst, allegiance to our adversaries.
And even in cases of proven espionage against the American intelligence community, the very organization she seeks to lead, Tulsi Gabbard instead has sided with criminals. Of course, I am speaking about her support for Edward Snowden. In 2020, while she was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, she introduced a resolution suggesting that the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden. There was only one other Member who cosponsored this resolution, and that was former Congressman Matt Gaetz.
In 2025, Ms. Gabbard still refuses to call Snowden what he is: a traitor to the United States. When she was asked about that at her hearing, she was given several opportunities to indicate that she understood that Edward Snowden is a traitor who put at risk the lives of thousands of Americans in the intelligence community. She refused to acknowledge that he is a traitor.
With such a track record, how are we supposed to expect that she will properly classify our enemies? How are we to expect that she would label Xi Jinping or Kim Jong Un enemies of the United States or simply as foreign leaders or as friends? Who knows what Ms. Gabbard will do?
I think there is a stark difference between our adversaries who want to undermine the United States and those who are our allies. It doesn't appear that Tulsi Gabbard understands the difference.
How can the men and women of the intelligence community trust that Ms. Gabbard will protect their secrets; that she will protect our secrets, the secrets of the United States? How many Russians are going to risk their lives to pass along information to our intelligence officers if they are worried that Ms. Gabbard will sell them out? How much will our allies in NATO and the Indo-Pacific share with Ms. Gabbard in charge?
The work of American covert operations and intelligence-gathering is based on one central principle, and that is trust. I wouldn't trust Tulsi Gabbard any further than I can throw her.
I think this Chamber faces a choice. We can choose to defend America's national security and keep our promise to our constituents to protect their lives and safety and their interests, or we can choose to give a gift to Vladimir Putin and our adversaries, to usher them into the inner halls of the American intelligence system.
I know which choice I intend to make. I intend to vote no on Tulsi Gabbard, and I hope that my colleagues, particularly those across the aisle--at least some of them--will have the courage to do the same.
Mr. President, every Member of this body is sworn to protect our national security and safety and the well-being of the American people. There is no more important responsibility for Congress to fulfill than this.
Senators take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And when the American people go to sleep at night, they rest assured that our homeland will be kept safe.
As Senators, we play a key role in making sure that the men and women in charge of our Nation's security--well, that they are up to the task, that they are experienced, that they are qualified, that they are prepared. These are jobs with enormous responsibility. There is zero-- zero--room for failure here. When unqualified or inexperienced candidates make mistakes in these jobs, often the result is that innocent people get hurt and in some cases die.
That is why the Senate's confirmation process is just so important-- because the stakes are so high, because there is no room for error when it comes to those who are placed in national security roles.
I take this aspect of my job incredibly seriously. Our intelligence community is made up of courageous men and women who collect and analyze information on our threats from around the globe. They are an integral part of our Nation's defense.
The Director of National Intelligence oversees and compiles intelligence from domestic, from military, from foreign sources for the President, who then uses it to make life-or-death decisions. The Director is a direct line from our intelligence community to the President. That is why this position needs to be filled by an experienced and trustworthy candidate--key qualities that Tulsi Gabbard does not have.
At a time of rising global threats, having Tulsi Gabbard serving in this role would make America less safe. I want to say that again. It would make us less safe--full stop. Our allies are dumbfounded. And our adversaries? Well, in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and all over the world, they are laughing at us. They are laughing at the idea that the United States of America would weaken its national security by placing someone so deeply unqualified in such a critical role for our safety, for our security. Our adversaries? Well, they are overjoyed that they are going to have an ally leading the American intelligence community.
My concerns are not political. After all, Ms. Gabbard and I used to serve in Congress together, in the same caucus, when she represented a district from Hawaii as a Democrat. My concerns are that she not only lacks the qualifications needed but that she has also peddled talking points straight from the Kremlin.
Think about it. Tulsi Gabbard has never worked in intelligence before. As a Member of the House of Representatives, she didn't even serve on the House Select Committee on Intelligence. During her time in the House, Ms. Gabbard actually voted against--she voted against-- critical national security-related legislation, like increased funding for preventing terrorism in high-density, high-threat level urban areas like my city of Las Vegas. She voted against all of that security for Nevada.
This funding was actually pursued by former Nevada Congressman Joe Heck, who is a Republican, and it is something I have continued working to secure here in the Senate. Yet Tulsi Gabbard voted against this bipartisan proposal to protect our cities from terrorism.
She was the only member of the House Armed Services Committee to vote against the National Defense Authorization Act every year during markup.
As concerning as her lack of experience and tendency to vote against our security are, Ms. Gabbard's history of cozying up to America's adversaries is far, far more troubling. Her actions and words suggest that she has been directly influenced by foreign propaganda, whether that comes from Russia, from Syria, or other brutal dictatorships.
This isn't just me saying this; it is the view of many of Ms. Gabbard's former staff members during her time
Is this who Donald Trump wants to lead America's intelligence community? Is this who he wants in a prominent national security role-- someone who is so easily swayed by foreign propaganda?
It is clear that she has taken this propaganda and disinformation to heart. Just look at her justification of Russia's brutal invasion of Ukraine, for which she did not blame Vladimir Putin, who--let's be clear--is entirely responsible for the invasion. Instead, Ms. Gabbard has parroted Putin's talking points and placed blame on the United States and on NATO for Russia's vile assault upon the Ukrainian people.
We can also look at her attempts to give cover to Syria's former dictator, Bashar al-Assad, who used chemical weapons on his own people--killing kids, killing babies--killing babies in his own attempt to hold on to power. Ms. Gabbard even went to Syria to buddy up with Assad. She then came back to the United States to defend his killing of innocent men, women, and children--those babies he killed--to hang on to power. It is sickening, actually. It is a betrayal of our country's values.
Time and time again, Ms. Gabbard has rejected the findings and conclusions of our own intelligence officials and has instead chosen to, well, cozy up to dictators and our adversaries. She did so again in her defense of Edward Snowden, a man who committed treason against the United States of America by leaking highly classified information that jeopardized our national security, the safety of our troops, our men and women in uniform, who take an oath to serve and protect us every day. She jeopardized the clandestine intelligence operatives who are out there, working behind the scenes, again, to keep us safe and secure every day.
After committing these serious crimes against the United States, Mr. Snowden fled to Russia in his continued attempt to escape justice. Those weren't the actions of a whistleblower; they were the actions of a traitor to the United States of America--a traitor whom Tulsi Gabbard has repeatedly defended.
Because of these incidents and so many more, America's allies are rightfully concerned about what Tulsi Gabbard would do if confirmed to lead our intelligence community. In fact, there have been reports that if Ms. Gabbard is confirmed, our allies might stop sharing crucial information with us in order to protect themselves, to protect their own country, to protect the people they love.
So think about that. If our allies no longer share intelligence with us, think about the damage that does to our national security, to our safety, to our men and women in uniform, to our operatives around the world, and to each and every one of us here in the United States of America. It doesn't make us safer, I can tell you that. Our allies do not trust her, and neither should we.
I urge my colleagues to review Ms. Gabbard's recent hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence. In response to almost every question, Tulsi Gabbard avoided providing any real answer, whether it came from a Democrat or a Republican. She simply dodged the questions over and over and over. That is not leadership. This is not an example of someone who is qualified, and this is not a candidate who will keep America safe.
I urge my Republican colleagues to join me in listening to common sense, in thinking about our men and women who serve, in thinking about folks around the globe, and in thinking about everyone here in America and to reject this clearly unqualified and dangerous nominee.
It doesn't have to be this way. Let's have President Trump nominate someone else we can agree is qualified for this critical and consequential role and who has our Nation's best interests in their heart. Tulsi Gabbard is not that person. The safety and well-being of our country depend on having a qualified nominee.
Again, I urge Republicans to join us--to reject Tulsi Gabbard--and to put someone up who has the heart and experience to do this important job.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Louisiana.
Mr. President, with me this afternoon are three of my colleagues from my office: Ms. Jess Andrews, my communications director; Mr. Henson Webre; and Mr. John Lowery. As I said, they are three of my colleagues in my office. I depend on their counsel and their advice and their good judgment every day.
I want to talk for a few minutes about public broadcasting in America, but first I want to make a brief comment about the continuing saga that our new President is doing, in my judgment, a good job of prosecuting here in Washington. I am talking about his audits of Federal Government spending and all of the wasteful spending--I call it spending porn--that he is finding.
I want to make two quick points.
No. 1, it strikes me as breathtakingly ironic--the Senate might say cynical--that the people who are screaming so loudly about President Trump's decision to audit Federal spending are the very same people who, under President Biden, wanted to hire 80,000 new IRS agents--with guns--to audit the American people. As I have said before, if it weren't for double standards, there wouldn't be any standards at all in this town.
The battle lines are drawn. The battle lines are drawn. Some of my colleagues have decided to support the bureaucracy and the spending porn over the American taxpayer. That is what they have done. And some of the same people--it is not just my Democratic colleagues. There are many people in Washington, DC, who have grouped together. They have circled the wagons, and they have decided to support the spending porn and the bureaucrats over the American taxpayer. That is their right. It is not against the law or unconstitutional to be foolish in America. But these are the same people--these are the same people--who chose to support illegal immigration over the rule of law. These are the same people who have chosen to support teachers unions over parents and kids. These are the same people who have chosen to support criminals over cops and victims. These are the same people who have chosen to support transgender athletes over women's sports. These are the same people who have chosen to support Hamas over Israel.
They think they are winning. Maybe in this town--in this town--they are if you listen to a lot of the pundits up here, if you listen to a lot of the members of the ``wokerati'' in Washington, but they are not winning in America. The justice stick is coming, and I am very proud to be a part of that effort.
Mr. President, I rise in opposition to the nomination of former Representative Tulsi Gabbard to serve as our Nation's Director of National Intelligence.
Intelligence is absolutely fundamental to our national security. Our intelligence community, spread out all across the Federal Government, has built the world's greatest network of information gathering and analysis. This information keeps us and our community safe by providing the people who make policy decisions with a full picture to understand the current as well as potential threats to our national security, from terrorism risks to our homeland to emerging conflicts across the globe.
Spearheaded by the Director of National Intelligence, the U.S. intelligence community is responsible for monitoring terrorist activities, tracking foreign military capabilities, and even intercepting nefarious cyber attacks.
The courageous men and women in this community, stationed both here as
Their work is absolutely critical, particularly in today's modern digital era where information is power. But the foundation of intelligence is trust.
We must trust that our intelligence experts are providing completely unbiased, fact-driven analysis of the intelligence that our Agencies are collecting. Our experts must trust their ability to pursue intelligence that keeps Americans safe, wherever it may lead, without fear that discovery of the wrong issue might result in the end of their career. Our intelligence Agencies must trust that government officials will protect their sources and their methods to ensure that critical missions and safety of Americans all across the globe are not placed into jeopardy.
Unfortunately, I do not believe that Tulsi Gabbard has the qualifications--nor has she earned our trust--to serve as Director of National Intelligence. She has spread conspiracy theories peddled by our adversaries. She claimed that those who were investigating domestic terrorism and the deadly January 6 insurrection were ``domestic enemies''--more dangerous than the individuals who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, attacked law enforcement officers, and tried to overturn a free and fair election.
She cannot differentiate between our adversaries and our allies, between those who seek to harm our country and those who seek to defend it. Time and time again, Ms. Gabbard has proven that she does not hold the judgment to serve as the leader of our intelligence community.
Let's start with Russia. Start with Russia. As we know, Russia engaged in a widespread disinformation campaign before its deadly invasion of Ukraine in an attempt to justify its actions and manipulate public opinion. Russia actually claimed that the United States was to blame for the war for failing to recognize Russia's ``legitimate'' security concerns about Ukraine's accession to NATO. Tulsi Gabbard agrees with Putin and Russia. She said that the United States was entirely to blame for the war in Ukraine. Russian propaganda efforts also push lies that the United States was supporting bioweapons labs in Ukraine--a claim, by the way, that has been debunked by Ukraine's Government, the U.S. Government, news organizations, and independent researchers around the world. But Ms. Gabbard posted on her social media, in 2022, supporting this conspiracy and accusing the Biden- Harris administration of a coverup.
Former Republican U.S. Senator Mitt Romney called Ms. Gabbard's post treasonous, saying she was ``parroting fake Russian propaganda.''
So now let's talk about Syria.
Tulsi Gabbard has a long history defending former Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad. In 2015, she even introduced a bill to end U.S. support to the opposition to the Assad regime. She didn't think the opposition to Assad, who is responsible for crimes against humanity and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own people, should be supported.
Not only did she oppose the support, Gabbard then traveled to Syria and met with Assad in 2017. Gabbard tried to justify her meeting, going as far as to say that Assad is not the enemy of the United States.
And despite U.S. intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard continued to turn a blind eye to Assad's horrific use of chemical weapons on civilians, claiming there was no real evidence linking this regime to those attacks, even though the intelligence community under the first Trump administration attributed these chemical attacks to the Assad regime.
Ms. Gabbard has promised to ``end the politicization of the intelligence community,'' but what we have seen in just the last few weeks from the administration--in the name of freeing our government from politicization and weaponization--should certainly give us pause.
This administration has fired dozens of prosecutors in a matter of days for doing their duty to provide justice on criminal cases stemming from the January 6 attack on our Nation's Capitol. The administration has also fired most of the senior leaders of the FBI and is trying to go after every single FBI agent who was involved investigating January 6, even if they were just doing their job as ordered by their superiors.
Let's be clear. January 6 was an attack on our Nation, our Constitution, and our democracy.
But to be a part of the Trump administration, you have to show absolute loyalty to him over anything else. Don't worry about facts; just show loyalty. And don't worry about the law; just show loyalty.
So this pattern certainly begs the question: With Ms. Gabbard at the helm, will the intelligence analysts and operatives who worked on investigations into January 6 or any other domestic terrorism plot--are they now going to be fired as well? Will Ms. Gabbard follow the lead of Trump's newly confirmed Attorney General and shut down U.S. efforts to collect intelligence on malicious foreign influences from our adversaries, like China and Russia? Will she penalize anyone who has been responsible for tracking our adversaries' misinformation and disinformation campaigns that target our elections? Will she stand up to President Trump if he seeks to use the powers of the U.S. intelligence community against the American people? Will individuals in the intelligence community who disagree with her views on Russia, Syria, or the threats of chemical and biological weapons be in danger of censorship or, worse, even retribution?
We have no reason--no reason--to trust that Ms. Gabbard will not simply follow the lead of others in this administration and oust those who do their jobs to serve all the American people and not just Donald Trump.
But in addition to this questionable lack of judgment on who our Nation's enemies are, Tulsi Gabbard is simply, simply, unqualified. Tulsi Gabbard does not have the extensive experience needed to oversee this highly complex network of intelligence operatives and analysts-- experience that Directors of National Intelligence, until this point, have all possessed because it is understood how essential this position is and why these qualifications are critical.
There is broad, bipartisan consensus that we are facing one of the most dangerous times in American history. Threats from our adversaries, like the Chinese and Russian Governments, continue to grow and evolve with every passing minute. We need the person leading our intelligence community to be the most qualified candidate available. This is the person briefing our senior leaders, all the way up to the Commander in Chief, on the real threats that face our Nation each and every day. This is the person tasked with protecting our vast network of sources and highly classified methods of collecting information.
We need someone we can trust to safeguard the tools that our intelligence Agencies need to access the darkest corners of the world, but also someone with the knowledge and understanding of this community to protect the brave Americans who are risking their lives gathering this information and intelligence firsthand, on the frontlines.
We need someone who our allies will trust to share their own intelligence, to help protect our people and our interest, because without America's utmost confidence in Ms. Gabbard's ability to do this job, where will that leave us as a country? It will leave us in the dark, vulnerable against our adversaries. It will make our allies question whether or not they should share their intelligence with us because they do not know whether the head of our intelligence community will actually share that information with our adversaries instead of our allies. It will leave us with an intelligence community that is afraid to speak truth to power, or even just do their jobs for fear of offending the Trump administration and then getting fired.
We are in unprecedented times with an administration that has shown that it is willing to break the law in order to break our government. We are in uncharted times, with an administration that would rather target our institutions than protect our people.
We are in perilous times, with foreign adversaries waiting to pounce, as the administration strips away the tools that we have used to protect ourselves.
Our national security is on the line. We cannot destroy our intelligence community and the progress that generations of Americans have built to
Mr. President, almost 3 years ago, President Vladimir Putin launched a massive, illegal ground invasion of Ukraine, which has become the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Now, I have stood up, again and again, with my fellow Senators-- leaders of both parties--and our allies across the world to condemn Putin's war, which has killed thousands of civilians, including hundreds of children, and left millions of Ukrainians displaced. It is not a hard position to take.
But Tulsi Gabbard has repeatedly justified Putin's expansionist war. She chose to blame the United States, our NATO allies, and even Ukraine itself for Putin's war.
Now, Mr. Trump--excuse me; President Trump--wants Ms. Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence. The day the war started, she echoed Russian state media and said: The war could have been avoided if the U.S. and NATO had acknowledged Russia's ``legitimate'' security concerns.
She made baseless claims that Russia was justified in invading Ukraine because the United States had secret biolabs there. Where did she find that claim? It came directly from a Kremlin propaganda website.
The Director of National Intelligence position was created after the September 11 terrorist attacks to act as the principal adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council on intelligence matters related to our national security.
It seems obvious to anyone who holds this position that they should have extensive national security experience, something Ms. Gabbard doesn't have. And somebody who holds this position should not be parroting Russian talking points.
Now, I have worked with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to make sure that Putin is held accountable for the atrocities that have been committed in Ukraine. It is shocking to me that we are on the cusp of confirming a Director of National Intelligence who was so quick to defend one of the United States' biggest adversaries.
Now, cozying up to Putin would be bad enough, but, unfortunately, he is not the only autocrat that Ms. Gabbard has ties to. She also has an alarming connection to the ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Assad was a ruthless dictator who engaged in human right abuses, and that is a documented fact. But, inexplicably, Ms. Gabbard disputed credible accusations that Assad used chemical weapons against his citizens, and, worst of all, she actually chose to travel in her personal capacity to Syria to meet with this dictator in person. All the while, she repeatedly cast doubts on our intelligence community's assessment of the extent of the horrors of Assad's regime.
Now, I understand the desire to seek out multiple points of view. But, again and again, Ms. Gabbard has taken healthy skepticism too far, suggesting to the American people that they can't trust our intelligence while, instead, echoing Russian and Syrian disinformation. That is just unacceptable.
President Trump claims that he wants to make America safe. He says he wants to maintain American's standing in the world. He says he wants to forge stronger ties with our allies.
Well, confirming Ms. Gabbard to be Director of National of Intelligence is in opposition to those goals. The Director of National Intelligence oversees 18 Agencies in the U.S. intelligence community, including the CIA and the NSA. The Director has the legal authority to direct intelligence gathering and choose which intelligence to share with foreign Agencies.
As Director of National Intelligence, Ms. Gabbard would have access to our most closely guarded secrets. She would know the identities of the brave men and women who gather intelligence from our foreign adversaries. There should be absolutely no question about the trustworthiness or the judgment of our Director of National Intelligence.
The Director of National Intelligence should not sympathize with autocrats, blame our allies for wars of aggression, or parrot Kremlin talking points. This is a low bar to clear.
I am here in the Senate to represent the people of Nevada. They are relying on me to work to keep them and our community safe. And I tell you what: I pledge to help keep Nevada safe by opposing Ms. Gabbard's confirmation, and I hope my colleagues follow suit.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Mexico.
Mr. President, every one of us remembers where we were when the first plane struck the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day, we watched in horror as the North and South Towers fell, terrifying debris clouds flooding the ground beneath them. We witnessed the Pentagon, the heart of our national defense, engulfed in flames as a hijacked plane crashed into it head-on, taking the lives of all the people aboard that flight and over 125 employees in the building itself. Our hearts broke as we saw yet another plane go down in an open field in Pennsylvania, after brave Americans decided to fight back and regain control of the aircraft before it reached its intended target here in this very Capitol building.
From that day forward, we pledged to never forget the nearly 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day and the thousands more who were first responders that have died since. That pledge led us to immediately establish a bipartisan commission devoted to understanding how our Nation's intelligence Agencies could have left us vulnerable to this attack.
And the 9/11 Commission discovered that our intelligence community had received warnings about the dangers posed by al-Qaida but that a systemic lack of communication and coordination between intelligence Agencies that were effectively stovepiped off from one another had left glaring blindspots at the highest levels of our government. And to fix this, the Commission recommended that our government establish a new Cabinet-level position called the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI.
The DNI is specifically dedicated to coordinating all of our intelligence-gathering operations that protect the safety and security of the American people. For the last two decades, the Director of National Intelligence has played a vital role in every administration as the leader of our intelligence community overseen in coordinating 18 of our intelligence Agencies.
The Director of National Intelligence is also one of the main voices that any President hears from, literally, each and every day. That is because the DNI serves not only as the coordinator of our intelligence community but as the compiler and presenter of the President's daily brief. This is the daily high-level, highly classified briefing on the most pressing and sensitive national security matters. This is where all of our Presidents have gathered critical information needed to make incredibly difficult military or foreign policy decisions. And it is where our Presidents learn about potential threats from our adversaries, from nonstate terrorist organizations, and to think through how to combat those.
Put simply: Our national security depends on the person that we entrust in that role.
In fact, we need to implicitly trust that this person is relying on and providing incredible and accurate information so that our country's Commander in Chief can make the decisions that will determine our security as a nation. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for the last 12 years, I do not say this lightly: I do not believe that Ms. Gabbard has demonstrated the judgment to merit our trust as Director of National Intelligence.
Ms. Gabbard's statements and actions leading up to and during the confirmation process should make all of us question her qualifications for this essential national security role, and they should make us seriously question her basic judgment.
Time and again, Ms. Gabbard has elevated conspiracy theories, parroted
Let me give you some specific examples of her statements and her legislative track record. In 2017, while she was still serving in the House of Representatives, Ms. Gabbard exercised seriously questionable judgment in scheduling a foreign trip into Bashar al-Assad's pariah state of Syria. This was after Assad had committed well-documented crimes against his own people, including the use of chemical weapons, and plummeted his country into a bloody civil war and devastating humanitarian crisis.
Both before and after this trip, Ms. Gabbard undermined U.S. intelligence and echoed Russian and Syrian disinformation regarding Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people. She has made statements that appear to defend Assad.
For example, on February 6, 2019, Ms. Gabbard claimed in an interview that:
This is a shockingly narrow view of threats to U.S. national security. During the course of Syria's civil war, Assad used chemical weapons more than 300 times against his own people, killing and wounding thousands. To this day, Syria has still not accounted for this.
The U.S. has also described Syria as being in ``flagrant noncompliance'' with the Chemical Weapons Convention. And there is no question that Assad's regime posed a serious threat to international peace and security.
It is mystifying to me how Ms. Gabbard could not understand this then and still, apparently, doesn't understand it today.
Ms. Gabbard's 2020 Presidential campaign website stated that she remains ``skeptical'' about two particular chemical weapons attacks in Syria in 2017 and 2018. Her website wrongly stated that:
Of course, there never was such evidence.
Disturbingly, Ms. Gabbard decided to take the views of a discredited professor, who was himself taken in by a Syrian Australian YouTube influencer, that somehow the opposition forces had staged these chemical weapons attacks.
As a Member of Congress, she could have taken the time to read the summary of a declassified U.S. intelligence report released the week after the 2017 attack, warning that claims shifting blame to rebel groups reflected the ``false narratives'' spread by Syria and its patron state, Russia.
Instead of looking to the intelligence community for answers, Gabbard sought out fake intelligence, demonstrating her distrust in the very intelligence Agencies that she could soon coordinate and oversee.
Her trip to Syria and her visit with Assad himself should be alarming to all of us. Normally, if any Member of Congress goes on a foreign fact-finding trip like this, we take precautions to not jeopardize our vital national security interests. We coordinate with the State Department. We coordinate with the Pentagon. We carefully account for our schedules. And we sure as hell make sure we are not giving a platform to state-sponsors of terrorism or terrorist leaders.
Ms. Gabbard did none of these things on this rogue trip into Assad's Syria. In fact, she sat down for an unscheduled meeting with Assad himself, not once but twice. She also met with the Grand Mufti of Syria. The Grand Mufti was appointed in 2005 to be Syria's most senior Sunni Muslim cleric. In 2011, he threatened Western countries, including the United States, against taking military actions in Syria. And he said in his speech:
During her confirmation hearing last month, I asked Ms. Gabbard directly about this meeting with the Grand Mufti, Mr. Hassoun. She claimed that this was the first she had ever heard about Mr. Hassoun's threats to set up some suicide bombers to target America and our European allies. However, records from her congressional office suggest that almost immediately after returning from her controversial trip, she was fully aware that she had met with a leader with direct ties to terrorism.
According to recent reporting in the Washington Post that helped to unearth these records right after she returned from Syria, Ms. Gabbard and her congressional staff worked feverishly to account for her meetings and official paperwork and to contain the political fallout. In the documents that the Post reviewed, Ms. Gabbard's staff asked her:
And her response in those documents:
I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that Ms. Gabbard endorsed or endorses the despicable views or actions of this particular Syrian terrorist leader. What I am suggesting is that Ms. Gabbard's false denial to me in her confirmation hearing of any prior knowledge of this terrorist leader whom she personally met with should be evidence enough that we cannot trust her. And in the position that we are being asked to confirm her for, telling the whole truth accurately is the whole point.
On top of this, Ms. Gabbard has repeatedly made public statements that echo Russian justification for Putin's unjustified, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. She has blamed our NATO allies for failing to recognize Russia's ``legitimate security concerns.''
Those are literally her words. And she has amplified Russia and Putin's disinformation campaigns alleging Ukraine's development of bioweapons.
On February 23, 2022, Ms. Gabbard echoed Russian talking points blaming Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the Biden administration. Specifically, she tweeted:
As my colleague Senator Bennet said so powerfully as he pointed out at Ms. Gabbard's confirmation hearing, she sent this tweet at the very moment that Russian tanks were rolling over Ukraine's border, essentially saying that Vladimir Putin was justified invading the free nation of Ukraine.
Then-Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted in response saying, this is ``simply not true,'' noting that the week before the invasion, Putin once again demanded NATO leave every country that joined after 1997, including Bulgaria, Romania, and 12 others.
Ms. Gabbard chose not to listen to the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee or the intelligence community itself, which had issued a declassified threat assessment two weeks prior. Ms. Gabbard decided, instead, to give the benefit of the doubt to Vladimir Putin. How can we trust that she won't do that again?
Ms. Gabbard has also repeatedly praised Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who fled to China and then to Russia after he was charged in 2013 with illegally exposing government surveillance methods and classified information.
Ms. Gabbard has called him a ``brave whistleblower'' and even went so far as to introduce legislation in the House of Representatives to pardon Edward Snowden.
In 2016, the House Intelligence Committee issued a declassified, scathing report that found Snowden leaked secrets that caused tremendous damage to U.S. national security. This included leaking secrets that protect American troops and American personnel overseas. As that report made clear, Snowden was not a whistleblower; he was and is a traitor to this Nation.
Ms. Gabbard and anyone who is interested in understanding the impact of the leaked secrets has access to the declassified House Intelligence Committee report and many other public sources of information explaining the damage that Snowden caused to our national security. Yet she continues to
Let me be clear. Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a traitor. Ms. Gabbard should know this full well.
If we confirm her as our next Director of National Intelligence, Ms. Gabbard will be responsible for transmitting lawful whistleblower complaints to Congress. Her past statements on Snowden reveal a deficient understanding of our Nation's whistleblower laws that should be patently disqualifying for any Director of National Intelligence, much less any national security appointee.
When my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee pressed Ms. Gabbard during her confirmation hearing about whether her views had changed and if she would acknowledge that Mr. Snowden were a traitor, she refused. This is who we want to lead our intelligence community--someone who outright refuses to condemn the actions of someone who jeopardized our national security and put the lives of many members of our intelligence community and national security community at risk? It is hard to believe that we could be so reckless.
Finally, Ms. Gabbard has also advocated for a full repeal of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Section 702 is one of our intelligence community's most important tools to effectively fight terrorism, disrupt foreign cyber attacks, impede drug trafficking, and protect U.S. troops serving abroad. Ms. Gabbard introduced a bill in the House that would have completely repealed section 702.
I will be the first to say that there are reforms to section 702 that we should make to ensure that this law always focuses on the communications of foreign targets abroad and is never inadvertently used in a way that threatens the privacy of innocent Americans. In the past, including just last year, I worked closely with my colleagues to advance some of these reforms. A wholesale repeal of section 702, however, is a wildly out-of-step and dangerous proposal.
Do we really want to confirm a Director of National Intelligence who has advocated for the dismantling of such a foundational source of foreign intelligence to protect our national security?
Any number of Ms. Gabbard's statements or actions would be disqualifying for a nominee to lead our intelligence community and keep our President accurately informed on pressing national security matters. But I am not alone in raising concerns about this nomination. As with many of President Trump's unqualified nominees, I have heard from many New Mexicans--from many constituents in my own State--in opposition to Ms. Gabbard's nomination, and I want to take a moment to read to you from some of these letters that I have received.
Addie from Mountainair wrote to me to share her concern about Ms. Gabbard's lack of experience to safeguard our Nation.
Addie said:
A constituent and former intelligence officer from Santa Fe who wished to remain anonymous is concerned how Ms. Gabbard's background will impact operations critical to defending the United States from foreign threats.
This individual told me:
Katy from Tularosa is troubled by Ms. Gabbard's past association with dictators and tyrants.
Katy wrote to me:
Gary, also from Tularosa, is a retired intelligence officer. Gary is worried about Ms. Gabbard's lack of national security experience and how it will affect efforts to safeguard the United States.
Gary wrote:
Walter from Santa Fe is a veteran who served as an intelligence officer as well. He wrote to me to convey his disgust with President Trump in putting individual loyalty over national security with his nomination.
Walter said:
I agree with my constituents in New Mexico.
Ms. Gabbard's poor judgment and lack of national security experience make her wholly unqualified to serve as our next Director of National Intelligence. Confirming her to this role will make our Nation less safe. For all of these reasons, I will not be supporting Ms. Gabbard's confirmation.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. President, I am here to speak in opposition to the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as the Director of National Intelligence of the United States of America.
Setting aside her lack of qualifications and setting aside her rotten judgment, her nomination strikes me as being part of a pattern of unilateral disarmament by the Trump administration against Russia. One can hazard as to why this is happening, but the fact that it is happening seems hard to deny.
In November 2024, the Washington Post wrote this:
Russian state TV has called Ms. Gabbard ``our friend Tulsi.''
The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an op-ed, and it was titled ``The CIA and FBI are trembling: Why Trump protege Tulsi Gabbard will support Russia as head of National Intelligence.''
So the Russians are telling us pretty plain and simple: She is with us.
If you look at some of her behavior particularly relevant to the DNI position, she has constantly opposed section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a key source of foreign intelligence for our national security and which--I guess I would have to say in this location--presumably is useful at getting intelligence on Russia.
She is not alone. Over at the FBI, Trump's nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, we just found out was paid $25,000 by a Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties to participate in a documentary attacking the FBI, which is an adversary of Russia's, which spends a great deal of time and effort keeping an eye on Russia's adverse intelligence activity in the United States.
To make it worse, Kash Patel has said he wants to shut down what he calls the intel shops--the part of the FBI that would go after Russian intelligence operations and Russian criminal networks in the United States. He has even said he wants to shut down the FBI building and run everybody out into the field offices around the country. Well, guess what takes place at FBI Headquarters? Our intelligence and counterterrorism operations. If you empty that place out and you move everything out to the field where people are doing regular criminal work, it is another way of saying: We are going to shut down our intelligence operations.
Just in the past week, since she has been in, Attorney General Bondi has pulled down the DOJ Kleptocracy Asset
So a common theme here: Tulsi Gabbard wants to come in as ``our friend Tulsi,'' according to Russian state TV, to have the CIA and FBI trembling because she will support Russia. Kash Patel is coming into the FBI, who takes money from a Kremlin-associated filmmaker and promises to shut down or at least degrade our intelligence capabilities within the FBI. And Attorney General Bondi is busy over at the DOJ taking down the anti-kleptocracy initiatives that focus on Putin's little gang of oligarchs who prop him up. It is three for three in unilateral disarmament by the United States against Russia.
There is a little history here that is worth going back to in evaluating all of this, and it includes that Russia interfered in the 2016 election through a Kremlin-linked internet research agency. There has been a good deal of reporting on that, but since that reporting, there has been a persistent, rightwing Trump narrative to pretend that never existed, that there was no Trump-Russia thing, that Trump-Russia was a hoax.
In fact, it was not a hoax. Trump-Russia was a thing, as a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed out. That bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Russian President Putin had ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts that were affiliated with the Democratic Party and that were affiliated with the Democratic National Committee and that the purpose was to find and to leak information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton in that election.
Here is what the committee found. I quote the report, the bipartisan report:
That was the finding of the U.S. intelligence community as well as the finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It went on. You remember that famous meeting where Trump took the Russian Ambassador and the Russian Foreign Minister right into the Oval Office and divulged to them highly classified information--highly- classified information--which caused U.S. officials to warn that Trump's revelations jeopardized a key source of intelligence in the Islamic State. They had to ping out to other intelligence Agencies and to our officers in the field: Look out. Classified information has just been given to these Putin officials to try to shore up and defend our sources and methods.
The Mueller report went to exhaustive effort, with all of the support of grand jury and senior FBI and Department of Justice officials, and they concluded that the Trump campaign both knew of and welcomed the Russian interference and expected to benefit from it.
It even talked about obstruction of justice by President Trump. But what they concluded in talking about obstruction of justice by President Trump is that he could not be indicted as a sitting President and therefore it would not be fair to lay out the conclusion that he had committed this crime because he wouldn't have a process by which to acquit himself and to clear the accusation. But they certainly laid out plenty of evidence that was suggestive that had he been an ordinary individual, he would have been indicted, charged, and convicted for obstruction of justice relating to this whole Trump-Russia saga.
Later, when he was asked about all this in a conversation about Vladimir Putin, he said in November of 2017 about Putin--he said: Putin ``said he didn't meddle'' in the election. ``I asked him. . . . He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.''
Everybody in the intelligence community knew that he did, in fact, do what they are saying he did, but Trump, for some reason, some connection, some Trump-Russia connection, went with Putin rather than the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services.
The next year in Helsinki, Trump met privately with Putin for 2 hours. We don't know what happened because they just met with their interpreters. Then they went out for a news conference, and there again, standing right next to Putin, he sided with him over our own intelligence Agencies. But the meddling was real, the meddling was documented, and the Mueller report helped document the meddling.
If you go into the details, you see the subplots. Paul Manafort was Trump's 2016 campaign chairman. He was meeting regularly, communicating regularly with a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik and with a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska through the campaign.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan report found that on numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal campaign information with Kilimnik. This did not end well for Paul Manafort; he was indicted by a Federal grand jury for the crime of conspiracy against the United States, convicted, and sentenced to more than 7 years in prison--oh, except that Trump pardoned Manafort in late 2020.
There was the infamous Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump, Jr., the same Paul Manafort, and son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Russian billionaire Emin Agalarov and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin right in Trump Tower. The meeting came about because Donald Trump, Jr., had been told by a contact that the Russian Government wanted to offer--and I am quoting here--``official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.'' Official documents and information from the Russian Government that would incriminate Hillary.
The response:
They went ahead to the meeting. Clearly, the Trump campaign's purpose for that meeting was to obtain from Russia incriminating information on Clinton to influence the election.
The special counsel decided not to prosecute the attendees in part because it couldn't determine that that information would actually have been determinative because it related to orphans, and what didn't connect with the Trump attendees at that meeting was that the interruption of the orphans being delivered to the United States for parents who wanted to adopt them was the response to sanctions against oligarchs and people around Putin, and this was an effort to get the sanctions lifted.
If you could crack the code, you would know that that is what the orphans conversation was about, because that is why the orphans blockade had been set up.
Ultimately, Russia did, in fact, hack emails--both from the DNC and from the Clinton campaign chair. Russian intelligence got their hands on those documents.
Here is what the Intelligence Committee wrote about that:
This wasn't just a one-off; this was information being channeled through Roger Stone to the Trump campaign. It didn't end well for Stone. He was indicted and convicted on charges of lying to Congress about what he and then-Candidate Donald Trump knew about Russian efforts to discredit Hillary Clinton's campaign and witness tampering and obstruction.
On we go to Carter Page, also associated with the campaign, who traveled to Moscow in that timeframe--July 2016--to deliver a commencement speech while working for the campaign. Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich there expressed ``strong support for Mr. Trump''--``strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together.''
Another campaign operative, George Papadopoulos--same year, May--was
So you have all these pieces coming together about the Russians seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton, getting it, leaking it through WikiLeaks, and constantly having a back channel through members of the Trump campaign.
It didn't end well for Papadopoulos either. He was arrested for lying to FBI investigators and pleaded guilty. And, of course, Trump pardoned him too. Trying to cover up his traces.
Michael Flynn in 2015 delivered remarks at a Moscow gala honoring Russia Today, RT, the same organization that Tulsi Gabbard was the darling of. He was seated at the gala next to Putin--next to Putin. He was paid $33,750 from RT--whose darling Tulsi Gabbard was--for this one speech. He didn't correctly report the payment. He ended up being paid more than $67,000 by Russian companies before the 2016 Presidential election.
It didn't end well for him either. He lied to Vice President Pence and to the FBI about communications he was having with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration while President Obama was in office. Yes, the sanctions related to the orphans conversation at Trump Tower. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about that conversation, and, of course, Trump pardoned him days before Flynn was due to be sentenced.
It is kind of an ongoing thing between Trump and Russia. A lot of us on both sides of the aisle are very concerned about what is going on in Ukraine--indeed, furious that Putin would launch his army into Ukraine and perform massive atrocities and war crimes: firing rockets into children's hospitals, having the soldiers murder through neighborhoods. It is a foul spectacle, and it started with Russia's invasion of Crimea, the so-called little green men.
Trump thought that was all a pretty good thing. You will remember that the way they started it was to foment riots by Russian-speaking people in Crimea to provide a justification for coming over the border--sort of 1930s Europe style tactics coming back to us here. So that kicked it off. There were these demonstrations. Putin said ``Oh, my people, my people; they are being abused by those terrible Ukrainians,'' and in went the little green men.
Here is how Trump praised Putin's invasion then of Crimea:
And of course there is the famous comment to Russia publicly, saying:
This was during the campaign--
Then there were the episodes that I mentioned earlier where he said ``No, Russia wasn't meddling in our elections'' despite the fact that everybody knew they were. But he took Putin's side in all of that.
Most recently, he refused to condemn Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny, who had been such a brave fighter, standing up against the corrupt Putin regime, and died in a penal colony at the age of 47.
For a long time, I have described the United States as being in a clash of civilizations with rule-of-law countries like ours on the one side and kleptocrats, autocrats, and governments run by criminal organizations like the narco-traffickers on the other side. Fairly simple clash--rule of law versus rule of thuggery.
There ought to be bipartisan support for making sure that the United States does not become a safe haven for kleptocrats and criminals. We should not be giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to park their funds here in our country.
We have made progress to combat the kleptocrats and the international criminals who are on the other side of this clash of civilizations. Ms. Gabbard is not on the right side of that clash, not when she is so chummy with Putin, not when she is so chummy with the murderer Bashar al-Assad, not when she is ``our darling Tulsi'' to Russian media channels, and not when she is lined up with Kash Patel, threatening to take down the FBI Offices that track Russia, taking money from a Russian filmmaker, and then stack that up with Attorney General Bondi taking down the kleptocracy and klepto-capture efforts at the DOJ that have been making the Russian oligarchs' lives miserable by going after their assets.
One, two, three--all unilaterally disarming against Russia in the wake of all that time in which the Trump-Russia connection appeared over and over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, still persists today.
Mr. President, today the Senate is deciding whether COL Tulsi Gabbard should be the person who, each day, makes the call on which intelligence gets in front of the President of the United States. That is what the Director of National Intelligence does. They sift through the intelligence collected and analyzed by all of our intelligence Agencies, from the CIA to the NSA, and decide what to brief the President on. This includes information about terrorists planning attacks here in the United States or on our servicemembers abroad. It includes evidence of adversaries backing cyber attacks.
Often, the intelligence is incomplete, or there are pieces that contradict one another. It is this person's job to cut through the noise and present the President with what he needs to know.
There can't be any spin. There can't be a finger on the scale to get him to do one thing or not do another. It requires impeccable judgment and sound decision making.
Everything we have learned about Colonel Gabbard during her confirmation process suggests that she is not the person for this job. It is that simple.
Now, I went into this process with an open mind. Colonel Gabbard and I, we had a long meeting in my office. She responded to a number of written follow-up questions that my colleagues and I had for her. And I was able to ask her questions in an open and closed hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
And after each of those steps, I became more and more concerned.
Colonel Gabbard is often dismissive and has been, at times, outright hostile towards our intelligence community and the tools that it uses to protect this country.
Now, I have a tremendous amount of respect for Colonel Gabbard's service to this Nation, and I do think that healthy skepticism is a good thing. It is something that I always valued in my crew members at NASA, and I value it today in the Senate.
But that is not what we have seen from Colonel Gabbard. She has a track record of embracing overblown, flimsy claims that confirm her own viewpoint while easily dismissing the thorough assessments and the methods of our own intelligence community. That is not the person that we should want in this job.
Now, let's start here with her record on Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden was a government contractor who stole and then leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013. Snowden could have used whistleblower protections to securely and legally share concerns that he had about the legality of certain surveillance programs, but he didn't do that. Instead, he stole millions of documents--most of which didn't pertain to the programs that he had raised concerns about--and then he leaked them, without caring about what would the lasting damage be to our national security.
After the Department of Justice revealed charges against him for committing espionage, Snowden fled to Russia, where he was welcomed with open arms.
Edward Snowden exposed our government's secrets to the world, including to our adversaries. He put intelligence operatives and servicemembers around the world at risk, at great risk. And he made all of us less safe, and that is true even today. He should be in prison for betraying our country.
COL Tulsi Gabbard wanted him to be pardoned. She introduced legislation calling on the Federal Government to
This was in September of 2020, after he had been in Russia for nearly 7 years, and after the House Intelligence Committee had released a bipartisan report to the public detailing about how he had broken the law and made our country less safe. This came after that.
And she publicly lobbied President Trump to pardon Snowden during his first term. He didn't.
And on October 6 of 2020, Gabbard called Snowden a brave whistleblower. Two weeks later, Vladimir Putin gave Snowden permanent residency in Russia.
This should, obviously, be a great concern to anyone considering her for this job, and it is clear that Colonel Gabbard knew it would be an issue in her confirmation hearing. She knew that. So she came prepared with a well-practiced answer, and she used it, word for word, over and over again.
Vice Chairman Warner's first question was whether she thinks Edward Snowden is brave. She said that Edward Snowden broke the law, but that he released information that led to reforms. She didn't mention the harm he did to our national security.
He followed up. She started with the same answer. And on and on it went. Next, with Senator King.
Then Senator Young asked if she agreed with the House Intelligence Committee report that Snowden caused damage to national security. She repeated the same answer she had given just before. At least eight times, by my count, as I sat there in the hearing room, she gave the same answer word for word.
But the real moment of truth came when Senator Lankford of Oklahoma asked her what he himself has publicly said was a softball question, and the question was: Is Edward Snowden a traitor?
It really should have been pretty easy. If you believe Edward Snowden broke the law and the law he broke is the Espionage Act, it is pretty clear that is exactly what he is. He is a traitor.
She wouldn't answer.
Senator Bennet gave her another opportunity. She didn't take it.
Now, Colonel Gabbard came into our confirmation hearing with a plan to give the same nonanswer over and over about Edward Snowden, and she was counting on that being enough to skate by. It wasn't for me.
And I still can't understand. To this day, I still can't figure it out, why she will not call this guy a traitor. Colonel Gabbard would be leading the men and women of our intelligence Agencies whose work and lives Edward Snowden put at risk.
I ask my Republican colleagues: How can we entrust this responsibility with someone who wanted to free Edward Snowden and still, to this day, cannot say whether or not he is a traitor?
For a lot of nominees, that would be a way big enough issue to prevent them from getting this job. That is pretty clear. But so, too, would her hostility toward FISA 702, one of the most important intelligence collection tools that we have. This is the program that enables us to monitor the communications of foreign actors outside of the United States. It has stopped terror attacks. It has protected American troops serving abroad. About 60 percent of the President's brief every single day is derived from intelligence that is gathered from this program, the very brief that Colonel Gabbard would be responsible for compiling every single day. Without it, we would be exposed. We would be less able to detect and prevent terror attacks or other attacks against the American people.
But that is exactly what Colonel Gabbard tried to do. She voted against reauthorizing this program in 2018. And in 2020, she introduced legislation to repeal it--all of it. Not just the piece--the piece of it that Congress was debating how to reform, she wanted to just get rid of the whole thing, all of it. And when she advocated for doing away with the program, she made false statements about how it works and how it impacts American citizens.
This should be a concern for anyone being considered for this job. Because while the Senate Intelligence Committee has a range of views on how this program should work, none of us on the committee, on either side of the aisle, has any interest in getting rid of it because we know how important it is, how critical it is to the safety of all of us. In fact, we came together with others in Congress to deliver reforms that further protect our civil liberties as Americans while retaining the tools our President needs to stay ahead of threats.
Once again, Colonel Gabbard knew that this would be an issue with her confirmation. And, again, she bet that she could just say as little as possible to just get by. That is why, in a written response to the committee, she said:
Sounds reasonable. Well, here is the problem. Just last year, she was on a podcast trashing those very reforms she is now saying back up her position on FISA. She said:
So which is it? Did these reforms fix the issues she had with FISA, as she said in her written response? Or did they make the problem worse, as she said on the podcast? It can't be both.
Colonel Gabbard was asked about this inconsistency during her confirmation hearing, and she couldn't answer for it. In fact, she couldn't answer for what these reforms are and how they address her concerns or don't.
And, folks, this is not trivial. The Director of National Intelligence works with the Attorney General to assess compliance with the law and improve internal procedures that decide how the intelligence community will collect, use, and store foreign intelligence to combat threats like terrorism while ensuring Americans' constitutional rights are protected. That means Colonel Gabbard would be responsible for implementing these reforms and advising Congress on their effectiveness.
Finally, as we are all aware--well, all of us in the Senate, we are aware--this program is up for reauthorization in just over a year. President Trump has been all over the map on this program, but as recently as last year, he told Congress to kill FISA. The next Director of National Intelligence is going to play a critical role in advising the President and making recommendations to Congress about this program, FISA. Do we really trust that Colonel Gabbard will fight to protect this program, given her track record on this?
I know I don't. That, too, should be disqualifying for this job.
But the last example of Colonel Gabbard's hostility toward the intelligence community is the one that should give everyone the most concern. It is for me. As I said earlier, the primary responsibility of this job is to coordinate across 18 intelligence organizations and sift through intelligence, make some sense of it, and decide what to take to the President of the United States. In her confirmation hearing, I asked Colonel Gabbard: What does a good process look like?
And her answer to this question--it was fine. She said: Build a strong team, welcome dissenting voices, and make sure the truth is reported.
That is great. But then we got into a real-life example when she had sought out the intel, claimed to be reporting the truth, and then got it wrong. That is where, for me, it was obvious she is not the right fit for this job.
Colonel Gabbard accepts the conclusion that former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, except for two incidents. She has publicly disputed the confident conclusion of our intelligence community and international experts that Assad used chemical weapons in Khan Shaykhun in 2017 and in Douma, both in Syria, in 2018. She authored a report--this was put on her campaign website-- questioning whether these attacks were staged by anti-Assad groups, despite the repeated determinations that this was yet another incident of him murdering his own citizens.
You might be asking yourself: Why? Why did Colonel Gabbard go to such great lengths to sow doubt about these two attacks, knowing that it would have to be useful to Assad's goals? Why
Well, I asked her, and here is how that answer began. This is a quote from Colonel Gabbard:
Setting aside that Obama didn't deploy a half million soldiers to Syria, here is the problem. By her own admission, Colonel Gabbard's doubts about U.S. intelligence in these two situations began with her disagreements about how the intelligence was going to be used. She didn't want the United States and our allies to strike Syria as punishment for these chemical weapons attacks. So instead of making a strong argument on the policy, she tried to question whether the attacks happened in the first place.
Colonel Gabbard also invoked the Iraq war. She is right. We needed to learn important lessons from the lead-up to the invasion. The biggest lesson was to carefully follow the intelligence where it actually leads, rather than bending it to fit the outcome that you want, which is exactly what Colonel Gabbard did in this case.
It is that simple, folks, and it is also that dangerous, especially for someone in this job. If she has already disputed intelligence because of how it would be used, would she do it again in this position--the position of the Director of National Intelligence? She is the person deciding what the President would see.
Would she withhold information or would she seek out confirmation without regard for whom it came from or that her viewpoint was correct? Because that is what she did in this case--the report she authored questioning whether these attacks were staged relied on a professor without expertise in chemical weapons. His theories in this case were deeply flawed and have been widely debunked by experts.
I asked Colonel Gabbard if she was aware that this professor had appeared on Russian propaganda news stations. She said she had no idea.
To produce his findings, this professor relied on an Australian chemistry student with a history of defending the Assad regime. I asked her if she was aware of that. She said she was not--not at the time-- but since she has been made aware.
Here is what that tells me: Colonel Gabbard was unwilling to even examine, let alone weigh, the biases and shortcomings of the sources she was seeking out and elevating. She embraced these people and their half-baked theories because they confirmed what she wanted to be true-- that Assad didn't gas his own people in these two cases. She wanted it to be true so badly that, 5 years later, she says that she was still unaware of the facts of their background--facts that me and my staff found with some rather routine searching of public information. It was not hard.
And she trusted and further publicized their claims without verification, despite our government making clear that Assad and Russia would attempt to raise these sorts of questions and theories to distract America and our allies.
Mr. President, if that is not a redflag, I don't know what is. Still, 5 years later, Colonel Gabbard came before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and repeated all of this as if it weren't in contention. She continues to apply less skepticism toward these sources and narratives than the assessments of American intelligence operatives, professionals who have a ton of experience at this and whom she is nominated to lead--all because they support her point of view: The United States should not have struck Syria in retaliation for their use of chemical weapons. That is why she believed the people online.
Now, that kind of reverse engineering to try to steer a policy outcome is dangerous in a job like this.
Mr. President, the next couple of years are going to be challenging for our national security. I think we all agree upon that. We face threats that grow more complicated each and every day. And our intelligence community, they are the best in the world. They are really good at gathering intelligence of all kinds. The hardest part is sifting through that information and making some sense of what it all means, making determinations. That is what this job is all about. And everything we have seen from Colonel Gabbard throughout this process suggests that she is the wrong person for this job.
She lifted up Edward Snowden as a hero and is unwilling to call him a traitor. She tried to get rid of one of the most important intelligence collection tools that we have and has contradicted herself when answering for it. And most central to this role, she has displayed poor judgment and poor decision making when assessing intelligence, especially when it comes to chemical weapons use in Syria.
Each of these--each one of them on their own--should be disqualifying for holding this job. Taken together, they paint a picture of someone who is especially ill-suited and unprepared to take on this responsibility.
I know that these concerns are shared by my Republican colleagues. So let's be honest about it. Let's say no to the political pressure. And let's put our national security first, and let's vote no on this nominee.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate be in a period of morning business for debate only, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Madam President, the Committee on Armed Services has adopted rules governing its procedures for the 119th Congress. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 2, of the Standing Rules of the Senate, on behalf of myself and Ranking Member Reed, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the committee rules be printed in the Congressional Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Madam President, the Committee on Veterans' Affairs has adopted rules governing its procedures for the 119th Congress. Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 2, of the Standing Rules of the Senate, on behalf of myself and Ranking Member Blumenthal, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the committee rules be printed in the Congressional Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the text of the bill be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the text of the bill was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:
S. 530. A bill to repeal a rule of the Bureau of Land Management relating to conservation and landscape health; to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Mr. President, I have three requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.
Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:
The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 10 a.m., to conduct a hearing.
The Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 10 a.m., to consider an original resolution and adopt subcommittee assignments.
The Select Committee on Intelligence is authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 2:30 p.m., to conduct a closed business meeting and closed briefing.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding the order of January 24, 1901, the traditional reading of Washington's Farewell Address take place on Tuesday, February 18, 2025, following the prayer and pledge of the flag.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand adjourned until 10 a.m. on Wednesday, February 12; that following the prayer and pledge, the Journal of proceedings be approved to date, the morning hour be deemed expired, the time for the two leaders be reserved for their use later in the day, morning business be closed, and the Senate proceed to executive session and resume Executive Calendar No. 18 under the previous order; finally, that if any nominations are confirmed during Wednesday's session, the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's action.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, if there is no further business to come before the Senate, I ask that it stand adjourned under the previous order following the remarks of Senators Blumenthal, Warren, and Schumer.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. President, I am here to ask my colleagues to join me in a very simple truth: Tulsi Gabbard should not be the next Director of National Intelligence.
It is a simple, unequivocal truth, and it should be so clear to everyone because she is unprepared and unqualified for this role. She lacks the confidence and character, and that has been made crystal clear in the proceedings so far during her confirmation.
I urge my colleagues to consider not just her lack of preparedness but the existential threat her confirmation would pose within the intelligence community that she would have.
Since the Revolutionary War, our Nation's intelligence professionals have served out of the spotlight, never expecting recognition or adulation or award. They serve in some of the most demanding, dangerous posts, in harm's way and hostile environments, far from their families--in many cases, unable to speak to their friends and loved ones for long periods of time and unable to tell them where they are or what they are doing. Others serve in the Nation's most sensitive facilities here in Washington, DC, or elsewhere in this country. Many of them constitute the best mathematicians, the best linguists, the best analysts, and cryptographic minds in the world.
These silent sentinels choose to serve because they believe in the values and institutions that we should cherish and protect: democracy, integrity, the truth. We expect our intelligence professionals to live to the standards personified by one of Connecticut's greatest sons, Nathan Hale, whose dying regret was that he had but one life to give to his country. He served ably and instrumentally during the Revolutionary War. He came to be admired and adulated for his patriotism, his dedication, his willingness to give his life for his country.
That is the tradition of our Nation's intelligence community. They know they are going into some of the riskiest places on the planet. They do it for their country, and they keep it secret. I can't support Tulsi Gabbard to be in charge of them. I can't countenance allowing someone who is this risky to them and to our country having responsibility over their lives and their capacity to contribute to the intelligence that is critical to this country avoiding disasters.
What I have learned in this body is that, very often, the most important work of the intelligence community is to avoid disaster--a terrorist attack or other kinds of catastrophes--and the country never knows about it because it has been avoided. The history of these last 2\1/2\ decades, since 9/11, is we have avoided some of the greatest disasters that might have befallen us because of that intelligence community--their competence and their dedication.
Ms. Gabbard has given a part of her life to the Nation through uniformed service, and I respect her service in that role, but she has given another part of her life to our adversaries--in service to those who would see us become supplicants of ruthless, ruinous powers. Her integrity is, at best, suspect. Her judgment is flawed. Her moral compass is capricious. That is a nice way of putting it. For the last several years, she has made a career of antagonizing the very patriots who serve in the community she now wants to lead. Her disdain for the intelligence community undermines the public's trust in those very Agencies that often serve as our first line of defense and avoid those catastrophic attacks on this country or on our allies and partners and friends around the world. Those Agencies are not just our first line of defense; they are sometimes the line of defense against attacks.
Make no mistake, we are in an age of strife and conflict that demands leaders of principle and determination, leaders who are willing to counter the efforts of anyone who would seek to end all of our democratic and free people. A revanchist Russia is waging an illegal, murderous war against Ukraine. It is hell-bent on establishing itself as a disruptor in Europe for the foreseeable future--a disruptor of democracies. It is using disinformation through social media and tech for spreading lies and dividing democracy, bolstering far-right movements that threaten the fabric of our allies.
Democracy: It isn't just our Nation that is at risk; it is democracies around the world that are at risk from Russia. In the Indo- Pacific, the People's Republic of China is determined to defy the international norms that have maintained security in the region for 60 years. Iranian temerity in the Middle East throws the region potentially into an uncontained religious war, stained by sectarian zeal, and a potential use of nuclear weapons.
We must stop a nuclear-armed Iran at every potential cost, and we should be siding with our ally there--our great friend and partner, Israel--to stop a nuclear-armed Iran. We should support their effort to eradicate terrorism--Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis--proxies of Iran.
The axis of evil that we are seeing now--Russia, China, Iran--is moving against us. They are working together, and they are developing new methods to threaten the United States and our allies around the globe. They are potentially disastrous to our security and
The credibility of this Nation will crater if Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed. Ms. Gabbard's confirmation would be a self-inflicted wound.
I don't believe that conflict is unavoidable or inevitable, but we should not do our adversaries' work for them. Confirming Tulsi Gabbard puts in place someone who has been proven untrustworthy throughout her career, potentially an aide to Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and others. They are waiting for this body to give her control of the intelligence community.
Putin's minions call Ms. Gabbard ``dyevuchka nasha''--``our little girl.'' I am probably mispronouncing the Russian, but I have got the English right--``our little girl.'' She has routinely parroted the Kremlin's talking points on the war in Ukraine, castigated NATO, and painted Vladimir Putin as a victim. That is exactly how Vladimir Putin wants to be depicted--and Mother Russia--to seek the reestablishment of the Russian Empire, including Ukraine, potentially Poland, and other Eastern European countries. That is his agenda, and Ms. Tulsi Gabbard, apparently, is sympathetic.
As my colleagues in the intelligence community noted, she went as far as meeting with President Bashar al-Assad and upending the Obama administration's efforts to isolate a vicious dictator. For years, she has been one of the most effective apologists for autocracy--exactly what we should be eschewing at this moment when autocracy poses such a threat around the world. Her comments on podcasts were shared millions of times by the Kremlin's media arm in Africa, South America, and Asia. She is a star but not in a good way. She is a star for our adversaries, our enemies, and others who mean us harm.
She is either complicit in Putin's machinations or completely unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Either one makes her unqualified for this highly sensitive and critically important role. We can't let her-- the proverbial fox--into the henhouse. We can't let her into a position that demands character, integrity, and sound judgment.
We can't let her be confirmed. I ask my colleagues to join with me in saying no to Tulsi Gabbard.
There are other confirmations that we have opposed. There are other individuals whom I have said are unqualified for positions of high trust in the President's Cabinet.
There is a general deference that should be paid to the President in choosing his team, but this position is one of the most critical in sensitivity and importance, demanding the highest trust and credibility. It should not be occupied by Tulsi Gabbard.
I ask my colleagues to join me in saying and voting no.
I yield the floor to my great colleague from the State of Massachusetts, Senator Warren.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Massachusetts.
Madam President, I thank Senator Blumenthal for his unrelenting work to help protect our Nation and in raising this issue around Tulsi Gabbard as a nominee to be the Director of National Intelligence. I appreciate his work here, and I am proud to be able to follow him in this effort.
I am here today because Tulsi Gabbard's nomination is a national security threat. We are being confronted with a vote that could put all of us at risk.
Look, everybody in the Senate understands the threat that Tulsi Gabbard poses, but I want to make sure that everyone understands the job she would have.
Why do we even have a Director of National Intelligence? The short answer is to prevent another 9/11. The Director of National Intelligence position was born in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on New York that caused the Twin Towers to crash to the ground, that collapsed part of the Pentagon, that led to the deaths of 40 brave passengers on Flight 93. These terrorist attacks together killed almost 3,000 people, and they affected millions of family members, coworkers, neighbors, and people in every State in our country and around the world.
Soon after the attacks, we asked the most obvious questions: How did this happen? Why didn't we see this coming? Why weren't we able to head it off?
It rapidly became clear that our Nation had major intelligence failures. We were gathering intelligence abroad and here at home, but we were not effectively integrating and coordinating foreign, military, and domestic intelligence, and the result of that failure was catastrophic.
That is where the DNI Director comes in. The Director of National Intelligence is the keystone that holds together our intelligence community. This is the person who coordinates across Agencies to make sure that each component of our intelligence system is talking with every other, to make sure that what happened on 9/11 doesn't happen again. This person is the principal adviser to the President on any national security-related intelligence.
The Director of National Intelligence is central to how we make decisions about where our military should be deployed, is central to how we identify our greatest national security threats, and is central to knowing what our enemy is going to do next--all of that.
Tulsi Gabbard is aggressively unqualified for this job, and making her the Director of National Intelligence will increase the risk of a national security crisis. For starters, she has no experience in the intelligence community, and she has never served as a national security official in the executive branch.
Tulsi Gabbard is also disqualified to be Director of National Intelligence--not just unqualified but actually disqualified. Her disqualifications mean she should be kept far, far away from any part of our government intelligence system.
The problems with Tulsi Gabbard are many. She is an apologist for Vladimir Putin, routinely spreading Russian misinformation and Russian talking points about both Ukraine and Syria. She rejected our own U.S. intelligence that Assad used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, and she went to Syria to meet with Assad and with a Syrian cleric who had threatened to activate a network of suicide bombers within the United States and Europe.
So let me say this as clearly as I can: Tulsi Gabbard would be the No. 1 person in charge of all of our Nation's secrets--all of them: all of our intelligence, every piece of secret information that we gather from around the world and every secret that our allies around the world might share with us. She would know all of it, and she would have access to all of it, and she would be the one who would fit it all together. Then she would be one of the people responsible for advising the President on when and where to use our military.
I am deeply concerned about Tulsi Gabbard's track record and whether she can be trusted with our secrets, but I am not the only one who is worried. With the history that Tulsi Gabbard has, can we reasonably expect other nations to trust us with the secret information they gather?
Even if Gabbard behaved admirably as DNI, the United States would likely have less access to sensitive information because our allies just wouldn't want to take a chance on her, just wouldn't want to take a chance that information they gathered and passed along--information that could put their own operatives at risk, for example--would not want to take the chance that they would pass that information along to the United States, that Tulsi Gabbard would see it, and then who knows where it goes.
I am concerned that other countries would say, because they don't want to take a chance on her, that it would further undercut national security if Tulsi Gabbard were confirmed as DNI.
What I am saying tonight is not breaking news. There is nothing here that hasn't been said before. Concerns about Tulsi Gabbard have been circulating on Capitol Hill for years. Every single Senator--Democrat, Republican, or Independent--knows that they are putting our national security at risk if they support Tulsi Gabbard's confirmation to head our Nation's intelligence
The risks our Nation faces are rising by the hour. Tulsi Gabbard at DNI. Pete Hegseth at DOD. And it isn't just confirmed Cabinet appointees who are putting our Nation at risk; just look at what is going on with Elon Musk and his team of DOGE minions at Treasury. In order for this handful of programmers to gain access to our over $6 trillion payment system, we don't know what safeguards those hackers pulled down. We don't know what gates they opened. And they have apparently tried to get access to sensitive information at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they have gained access to Medicare and Medicaid records--which, by the way, is another $1.5 trillion in payments every year. They seem to be rushing to access more large datasets across the U.S. Government every day.
When Musk's team got into our Federal databases, were the gates opened for hackers from China, from North Korea, from Iran, from Russia? What criminal gangs and black hat hackers now have access to our personal data?
I never thought we would get to this moment. My colleagues in the Senate, despite our differences, have always taken national security seriously, but at a moment when they are faced with a choice between endangering our country or bending a knee to Donald Trump, too many Republican Senators are too afraid of billionaires and Trump in their own party to do what they know is right.
I want to take some time to underscore just how dangerous Tulsi Gabbard will be to our national security. Let's start with Tulsi Gabbard's ties to Russia. These connections are laid out nicely in the New York Times article ``How Tulsi Gabbard Became a Favorite of Russia's State Media.''
Let me just say that again.
Back to the story.
``The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are trembling'' . . . Pravda, a Russian newspaper, wrote on Friday in a glowing profile of Ms. Gabbard, noting, positively, that Ukrainians consider her ``an agent of the Russian state.'' Rossiya-1, a state television channel, called her a Russian ``comrade'' in Mr. Trump's emerging cabinet.
In other words, Tulsi Gabbard is Russia's dream come true.
Let me say that again: ``And so we would have a national security official who would potentially compromise our national security.''
That is the end of the article.
Ah, Tulsi Gabbard--beloved by Russian press, touted in Russian press, an attacker of American's military.
Or take key sections from this letter that William Webster--the only person to lead both the FBI and the CIA--sent to me. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, remained Director under President Ronald Reagan, and Reagan tapped him to be the head of the CIA.
I will quote directly from the letter:
That is the end of his letter. I just want to say how grateful I am both for William Webster's outstanding public service and commitment to our Nation and for his willingness to stand up now and call out the threats posed by Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to DNI.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists echoes these concerns in a piece they published this week entitled ``Tulsi Gabbard as U.S. intelligence chief would undermine efforts against the spread of chemical and biological weapons.''
And yet she continues it.
And that is the end of the piece.
I am looking to see who else is going to be here.
Just finish up? OK. Just wanted to make sure, because I know what is happening here.
In a relay race, it is always important to know if you have to hand off the baton.
Look, I will conclude with this: National security officials and experts in intelligence are begging the Senate to exercise their constitutional duty and vote no on Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. We are being asked to vote for someone whose loyalty to this country has been questioned repeatedly and has raised alarms for our allies across the globe. It would be a dangerous mistake to give Tulsi Gabbard access to all of our secrets, and an even greater mistake to trust Tulsi Gabbard to protect this country.
Madam President, this week, Senate Republicans will force a pair of nominees through the Senate they know perfectly well do not merit confirmation. But Republicans will confirm them anyway because Donald Trump is strong-arming them into submission.
Today, Senate Democrats are here on the floor to oppose one of those two nominees, Tulsi Gabbard. She has been nominated by the President to serve as Director of National Intelligence, the No. 1 intelligence officer of the entire Federal Government.
By now, there is no question about whether or not Ms. Gabbard is qualified to lead America's intelligence Agencies because by any objective measure and by every objective measure as well, she is not qualified.
From the moment she was nominated, both Democrats and Republicans were puzzled by this choice. Of all people Donald Trump could have picked to oversee national intelligence, he picked someone known for repeating Russian propaganda and getting duped by conspiracy theories. Do Republicans honestly think this is the best person for the job of all the other so many qualified people?
Fifty-two Republicans voted last night to advance her, but I know both sides of the aisle still remain troubled by this nominee. I hope-- I pray--for the sake of our country, of our security, Republican colleagues think very carefully before casting their vote. I hope they think about the safety of our people, the concerns of our allies, and the threats--the threats--posed by the likes of Putin and Xi and others before casting their vote.
Every single Democrat, I am proud to say, will oppose the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard because we simply cannot in good conscience trust our most classified secrets to someone who echoes Russian propaganda and falls for conspiracy theories. It is alarmingly dangerous--dangerous-- not just bad but dangerous--to trust someone like that. The job of national intelligence is a matter of life and death. The job is to oversee all 18 of the Nation's intelligence Agencies.
DNI would be the top intelligence adviser to the President of the United States. It would be their job to decide what intelligence reaches the President's desk and what does not. Few positions in government carry the burden that DNI will carry every single day.
The person who serves as DNI, therefore, cannot be someone controversial; they cannot be someone who has to literally convince Senators to ignore their checkered past, to ignore their conspiratorial views, and, essentially, ask Senators to hold their nose while they support her. And that is what Tulsi Gabbard has had to do with so many Senate Republicans.
Who is kidding who? Who are our Republican colleagues kidding when they talk about that she is a good choice? It is incredible. It is incredible given her long list of frailties and dishonesty and conspiracies. There should never--never--be a shred of doubt that the DNI is qualified, informed, and shows sound judgment. Tulsi fails to meet--she wouldn't meet a low bar, but this job has a very high bar because it is so important to our security.
The Director of National Intelligence must be fluent in the truth-- fluent in the truth. But Ms. Gabbard speaks the language of falsities and conspiracy theories.
Shortly after--listen to this, America. This is who they want to put in. This is who Donald Trump wants to put in, someone who, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Gabbard infamously spread a false conspiracy theory. She suggested that the U.S. was supporting bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine without a shred of evidence.
You know where this myth came from, Donald Trump? From Russia. It was spread to justify Putin's invasion. That alone is more than enough to be disqualified for anyone seeking to become the top intelligent adviser to the President of the United States.
But the world is inside-out, turned topsy-turvy, upside down by Donald Trump. And it is confounding that America is at this point and even more confounding that our Republican colleagues at this point are going along with someone they know is so patently bad for this Agency. They should be ashamed of themselves. There are certain times when you have to buck up. And with Ms. Gabbard, this is one of them.
The Director of National Intelligence must be strong against America's adversaries. But Ms. Gabbard has spent years sympathizing not with America's allies--oh, no--but with the likes of Putin and Bashar al-Assad. Nobody who plans a secret face-to-face meeting with Bashar al-Assad while in the middle of slaughtering his own people should be in this job. You can't possibly claim to be strong against America's adversaries after Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. This list goes on and on. It is almost fictional, it is so bad.
After Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in 2017 and 2018, Tulsi Gabbard turned against U.S. intelligence and sided with fringe conspiracy theorists to cast doubt on these two specific incidents.
I want to be clear on how strange and troubling this episode was. On the one side, you had the entire U.S. intelligence ecosystem and the intelligence of the French Government and the organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons all saying the same thing: Assad used chemical weapons against his own people in both 2017 and 2018. These findings were not just conjecture; they were based on satellite imaginary, witness accounts, medical experts. In other words, the kind of intelligence data that Ms. Gabbard would be responsible for evaluating on this important job.
And then on the other side, on the other side of all these intelligence experts and all this evidence, you have Tulsi Gabbard relying on the judgment of an individual who had appeared on Russian- funded propaganda outlets. That is who she relied on, someone who appears on Russian-funded propaganda outlets, puts out this crazy theory against all evidence of every intelligence Agency in the U.S. and other countries. And Gabbard goes for it.
She was trying to shield Assad for his inhumane conduct because she met with him. She supported Assad.
I have to say, I have never heard--never heard--of a nominee for any intelligence Agency who was so ready and willing to question the findings of America's own intelligence operations, yet accepts Russian disinformation so easily without the same kind of skepticism.
And, of course, I am deeply troubled by Ms. Gabbard's long record showing weakness against Russia when it comes to Putin's invasion of Ukraine.
On the night Russia invaded Ukraine--a horrible night--and launched the first full-scale invasion of a sovereign nation in Europe since World War II, what was Ms. Gabbard doing? She was on Twitter at 11:30 blaming NATO and the U.S. for starting the war.
This is the head of national intelligence? Give me a break.
She was saying that the war could have been avoided had NATO and the U.S. just accommodated Putin. That is who we are going to have as the head of DNI when we deal with our adversary Vladimir Putin. Russian TV, of course, aired Tulsi Gabbard's comments shortly thereafter.
And now--and now--with all this evidence, Republicans want to make this person the top U.S. intel chief. Who could believe it? Where is all our rightwing friends in the hawkish community? Where are the editorial pages of these rightwing newspapers?
When Ms. Gabbard had the opportunity to repair her image before the Senate Intel Committee and ease the deep worries Senators from both sides of the aisle had about her, she only exacerbated the worries. She refused to state the very obvious truth about Edward Snowden: that he is a traitor--a traitor--who stole sensitive intelligence and now lives in Russia under the watchful eye of Russian security services. We had so many of our Republican colleagues denounce Snowden, and now they vote for Ms. Gabbard. Incredible.
I can't imagine what our allies were thinking, watching Tulsi Gabbard testifying, refusing to do something as simple as condemning Edward Snowden. I fear the great erosion of trust between the United States and our allies, whose intelligence we rely on to keep America safe. We have a good sharing arrangement with them. I fear that erosion should Gabbard be confirmed.
Senate Republicans know very well that Gabbard has no business advising the President on matters of classified intelligence. They know her judgment is way off the mark--way off the mark. They know her troubling history of pushing conspiracy theories and repeating Russian propaganda.
So deep down, this nominee is about one very simple question: What do Senate Republicans care more about? Doing the right thing for national security, making sure a known conspiracy theorist, a believer in false information, someone who has no fact-based analysis of anything--do they care more about doing the right thing for national security? Do Republicans care more about doing the right thing for national security? Or doing whatever is necessary to keep Donald Trump happy? The American people will know the answer tomorrow.
