A Combative Nomination Hearing Raises More Questions About Gabbard’s Qualifications

President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the nation’s top spy chief faced a volley of combative questions from Democrats at her nomination hearing Thursday — while Republicans early on rushed to defend her character and integrity.

For her part, Tulsi Gabbard lost no time in going on the offensive.

She vowed to end what she described as political bias in the intel community, and called the attacks on her record “lies and smears.”

Gabbard is widely viewed as Trump’s most vulnerable Cabinet nominee remaining and her confirmation could hinge on her performance at the hearing. She is not expected to draw support from any Democrats on the spy panel and at least two Republicans on the committee are potential no’s.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in his opening statement that Gabbard may be so unqualified to be director of national intelligence that having her serve in the role would violate the very law establishing it.

He noted that the law creating the DNI position requires the nominee to have “extensive national security expertise.” As such, “I continue to have significant concerns about your judgment and your qualifications to meet the standard set by the law,” Warner said in his opening statement.

Gabbard has never held a formal role in the U.S. intelligence community, though she is an Iraq War veteran and has spent more than two decades in the military. If confirmed for the role, she would preside over more than a dozen U.S. spy agencies and oversee roughly $100 billion in intelligence programs.

Republicans inside the hearing room painted a starkly different picture of Gabbard.

They cast her as a patriot whose iconoclastic foreign policy views have been misrepresented by Democrats and the press as evidence she is a puppet of foreign powers. In the past, Gabbard has repeated inaccurate Kremlin talking points on the presence of U.S. bioweapons labs in Ukraine, blamed NATO for Russia’s invasion there, and questioned U.S. intelligence assessments about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.

Senate Intelligence Chair, Sen. Tom Cotton acknowledged Gabbard’s “unconventional views,” but characterized her as free thinker who can push back on the type of mainstream foreign policy thinking that has dragged the country into disastrous wars abroad

“Maybe Washington could use a little more unconventional thinking,” Cotton (R-Ark.) said in his opening statement.

Gabbard used her opening statement to blast a laundry list of alleged failures by the U.S. intelligence community, including the investigation of Trump’s collusion with Russia in the 2016 election, the intelligence assessments that led to the Iraq War, and the letter from 51 former U.S. intelligence officials that warned Hunter Biden’s laptop was part of a Kremlin disinformation plot.

“What truly unsettles my political opponents is I refuse to be their puppet,” she said.