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A former CIA counterterrorism chief is the latest to back President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
“She has the right experience, temperament, and professional integrity to restore faith in America’s intelligence community,” Bernard Hudson, a Harvard fellow and 28-year CIA veteran who oversaw the agency’s war on terrorism, wrote in a National Review editorial published Friday.
Gabbard, a former congresswoman and military veteran, was tapped as Trump’s designee in November to oversee America’s 17 intelligence agencies after switching to the Republican Party in late October and endorsing him.
Gabbard’s bipartisanship — she was former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee — “could go long way toward reestablishing credibility with Americans,” Hudson wrote.
Restoring faith in the intelligence community is an “urgent task,” he said, following “spectacularly wrong calls” by the the US intelligence community in recent years and “flimsy accusations” that a sitting US president was also a Russian agent.
Gabbard, 43, quickly became the target of a smear campaign that also accused her of being an agent of Russia — and focused on her meeting with Syria’s dictator Bashar Al-Assad in 2017.
But the recent collapse of Assad’s regime to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a designated terrorist group, is “just the sort of outcome that concerned [Gabbard] in 2017,” Hudson said.
She has long argued that involvement in the Syrian civil war was is not in the United States’ interest, a policy Trump has recently reiterated.
“I know Tulsi will bring the fearless spirit that has defined her illustrious career to our Intelligence Community, championing our Constitutional Rights, and securing Peace through Strength,” Trump previously said of Gabbard.
Gabbard has asked hard questions of an “often-flawed elite foreign policy consensus” and remained an outspoken critic of Democratic terrorism policy, Hudson said. She first made waves in 2015 when she blasted the Obama administration for banishing terms like “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“As a soldier, she knows both the importance of patriotism and the cost that all military interventions inevitably require,” he added.
An open letter signed by more than 250 veterans — including current members of Congress and former federal officials — was published Monday, giving Gabbard a boost toward securing the necessary votes for confirmation.
“While most Americans know Tulsi as a fearless and principled Congresswoman who stood up to entrenched political systems, we know her as a fellow veteran — one whose worldview was forged through the crucible of serving in combat zones and a lifelong devotion to service,” the vets wrote.
GOP senators have praised Gabbard as a “strong and proven leader” and an aide told The Post that she is expected to have the necessary votes for confirmation.
