[Pages S810-S811]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Nomination of Tulsi Gabbard

  Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I rise this afternoon in opposition to 
the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be Director of National Intelligence 
because nothing less than our national security is currently on the 
line.
  I am going to start by saying that I have nothing but respect for Ms. 
Gabbard's many years of service to our Nation, both in uniform and as a 
Representative for Hawaii. I don't question Ms. Gabbard's patriotism. I 
oppose her nomination because I question her judgment.
  Now, many may not understand the important role that the Director of 
National Intelligence plays. If confirmed, Ms. Gabbard will lead the 18 
Agencies of the intelligence community. She will also serve as the 
principal adviser to the President, the National Security Council, and 
the Homeland Security Council for all intelligence matters related to 
national security; and in this role as well, she will be responsible 
for over $100 billion between the national intelligence program and the 
military intelligence program.
  Now, the stakes here have become all the more critical in recent 
days. Just in the past couple of weeks, President Trump has issued 
several directives that could irreparably harm our intelligence efforts 
and our Nation's ability to defend itself against the many threats we 
face.
  At the FBI, some of our most experienced agents who have protected us 
for decades from terrorists, drug traffickers, spies, and violent 
criminals have all been unceremoniously fired. Thousands more may have 
reason to fear they may be next based on the vindictive list apparently 
being assembled of every FBI official who was involved in the 
investigations into the Capitol riot on January 6.
  It is not just the FBI. Across the IC, including the CIA, DIA, NSA, 
NRO, and NGA--an alphabet of Agencies that most folks don't fully 
appreciate or understand--in every one of these Agencies, I am hearing 
that intelligence officers and analysts with irreplaceable skills are 
unfortunately being indiscriminately pressured to resign or retire.
  Reportedly, senior law enforcement and national security officials 
are being asked to take political litmus tests, such as whether the 
2020 Presidential election was stolen and whether the January 6, 2021, 
attack on the U.S. Capitol was an inside job.
  Across the government, whole Agencies are being eliminated and 
funding impounded in flagrant defiance of the Constitution and the law, 
while unvetted, unqualified DOGE bros--one who formally worked for a 
Russia hacker group and was fired for leaking sensitive company secrets 
to a competitor and yet another who proudly declared himself a 
``racist'' and said he would not mind if ``Gaza and Israel were both 
wiped off the face of the Earth''--that individual, I understand, has 
actually been rehired after he initially quit--these DOGE bros are 
illegally burrowing into classified and other sensitive information, 
jeopardizing our national security and violating Americans' privacy.
  To take just one recent example of what is at stake here, just last 
week, the CIA sent an email, using an unclassified system--an 
unclassified system--to the White House listing the names of all 
recently hired employees. This is, again, from the CIA.
  It takes months to get a CIA employee security clearance and then a 
year to train. Suddenly, all of their names are out. This happened 
evidently in an attempt to comply with an Executive order to reduce the 
size of the workforce no matter how badly their skills might be needed.
  These 200-plus individuals--and I can assure you, with a name or the 
last letter of a name and appropriate AI tools, based on where these 
folks are working, you can find out their identities, and these agents 
may be burned before they even start their careers.
  I know that many of my Republican colleagues profess to take the 
issue of unclassified servers very seriously indeed. There was a whole 
litany of attack on this earlier. But the fact is, beyond the 
counterintelligence risk of foolishly exposing these officers' names 
using channels known to be targeted by foreign hackers, this careless 
effort to identify and potentially dismiss recently recruited and 
trained CIA officers also imperils the longstanding bipartisan efforts 
by the Senate Intelligence Committee to actually modernize and 
streamline the Agency's hiring process, because we need to make sure 
that we continue to recruit and retain talented young officers when it 
comes to confronting the growing national security threat posed by the 
PRC.
  We need leaders in the intelligence community and throughout 
government who are prepared to stand up to those shortsighted attempts 
to attack our workforce at the expense of our national security. 
Unfortunately, I don't believe Ms. Gabbard is such a leader, nor is she 
well-suited by dint of experience or judgment to serve as Director of 
National Intelligence.
  The DNI is a position of great importance and significance to our 
national security, created, candidly, after one of our worst security 
failures in our Nation's history--9/11. For that reason, when Congress 
established this position--in many ways due to the efforts of my good 
friend Susan Collins--it mandated in law that any individual nominated 
for the position must have ``extensive national security expertise.''
  As I noted previously, the DNI was created to fill this gap after 9/
11. Its mission is to share intelligence not only between the 18 
entities that make up the American IC but also to work with our allies. 
This sharing of information, sharing of intelligence with our allies, 
is predicated on trust--there is no agreement--trust that we and our 
allies will protect each other's secrets. Yet, repeatedly, Ms. Gabbard 
has excused our adversaries' worst actions and instead often blamed the 
United States and our allies for them.
  For example, she blamed NATO for Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 
And

[[Page S811]]

despite the unanimous assessment of the Trump administration's DOD, 
State Department, and IC, she rejected the conclusion that Syrian 
dictator Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.
  Now, I don't know if her intent in making those statements was to 
defend those dictators or if she was simply unaware of the intelligence 
and how her statements would be perceived. In either case, it calls 
into question her judgment and if she has what it takes to build and 
develop the trust relationships necessary to give not only our IC 
workforce but, equally important, give our allies confidence that they 
can share their most sensitive intelligence with us.
  Make no mistake about it, if our allies stop sharing that 
intelligence, we will be less safe. To offer just one example, last 
summer, intelligence sharing between the United States and Austria 
saved countless lives by disrupting a terrorist attack at a Taylor 
Swift concert, underscoring the importance of these relationships.
  Ms. Gabbard has also been publicly outspoken in her praise and 
defense of Edward Snowden--someone who betrayed the trust and 
jeopardized the security of our Nation. The vast majority of the 
information he stole and leaked--before, I would remind you, he ran off 
and hightailed it to both China and Russia--most of this information, I 
can assure you, had nothing to do with America's privacy but did 
compromise our Nation's most sensitive collection sources and methods. 
In many ways, we are still paying a price for Snowden's betrayal, and 
it is beyond dispute that his actions put our men and women in uniform 
in places like Iraq and Afghanistan at risk. Yet Ms. Gabbard has 
celebrated Snowden as a ``brave whistleblower'' and advocated for his 
pardon. This is someone that my friend Tom Cotton, who is the chairman 
of the Intelligence Committee, called a ``traitor'' who should ``rot in 
jail for the rest of his life.''

  A week ago, at the hearing, member after member--particularly my 
Republican friends--gave her chance after chance to just be willing to 
call out Snowden as a traitor. She repeatedly declined. Instead, she 
said:

       The DNI has no role in determining whether or not Edward 
     Snowden is a lawful whistleblower.

  Not only does she seem to believe that someone who divulged sensitive 
national secrets to Russia and China should be celebrated as ``brave'' 
and not denounced as a ``traitor,'' she also does not seem to 
understand the DNI's role in whistleblower determinations, because, in 
fact, the DNI has a significant role in transmitting lawful 
whistleblower complaints to the Intelligence Committees. It would be 
irresponsible to confirm someone who cannot distinguish between 
complaints that are made lawfully and those that are not.
  Further, it is the statutory responsibility of the DNI to ``protect 
intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.'' What 
message would it send to an intelligence workforce to have a DNI who 
would celebrate staff and contractors deciding to leak our Nation's 
most sensitive secrets as they see fit?
  Now, let me move to another issue of pressing relevance to this 
nomination, and that is section 702 of FISA. This bill, this tool--it 
is really hard to overstate the importance. The information we derive 
from this tool is responsible for about 60 percent of the intelligence 
in the President's Daily Brief, and it has been instrumental in 
disrupting everything from terrorists attacks, to fentanyl trafficking, 
to foreign cyber attacks.
  Many in Congress have at various points supported reforms to 702 to 
better balance security and civil liberties, but, again, Ms. Gabbard 
has gone so much further. Not only did she vote against reauthorizing 
702, she introduced legislation to repeal the whole thing and called 
its very existence a ``blatant disregard for our Fourth Amendment 
constitutional rights.''
  I do understand that after she was nominated to be DNI, she had a 
conversion--a confirmation conversion--and expressed a change of heart. 
Now, that is welcome, but it is just not credible. Just last May, she 
criticized the reforms put into 702. Just last May, she criticized 
those very reforms she now credits with changing her mind. Again, the 
reforms, she claimed, ``made the law many, many times worse.''
  The DNI is responsible for making annual certifications under section 
702, without which all collection under the law will cease, and the law 
itself is up for reauthorization in just over a year--a process 
typically led by the DNI. I have no confidence in Ms. Gabbard's 
commitment to either task.
  Nor is it the only issue where she has demonstrated poor judgment 
that should be disqualifying for the role. During an ill-advised trip 
to Syria and Lebanon in 2017, Ms. Gabbard exercised terrible judgment 
and elected to meet with Bashar al-Assad amid a conflict in which Assad 
was using gas and other chemical weapons against his own people. On 
that same trip, she also met with Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun. Many 
Americans may not be familiar with Mr. Hassoun, but in 2011, he 
threatened to commit suicide bomb attacks against the United States.
  At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Gabbard claimed not to know about 
Hassoun's past, but reporting following the hearing makes it clear that 
her staff made her aware of that at the time of her trip in 2017, to 
say nothing of the fact that if she had simply googled this guy, that 
would have revealed his past.
  What does it say about her judgment and experience that she would 
willingly meet with someone who has very publicly issued threats 
against the United States of America?
  Nor is this an isolated lapse. Just last summer, she accepted a trip 
to Italy that was paid for by the foundation of Pierre Louvrier--a man 
with deep connections to sanctioned Russian oligarchs.
  At her confirmation hearing, she seemed unable to recognize why the 
national security interests of the United States might be better 
protected if TikTok--a social media app that reaches into the homes of 
millions of Americans--was actually under American ownership rather 
than being subject to the controls of the PRC and ultimately the 
Communist Party of China.
  The world today is more complex and more dangerous than ever before, 
and we need serious people with the experience, expertise, and judgment 
to navigate that complexity. Unfortunately, Ms. Gabbard is not such a 
nominee.
  A vote in favor of her confirmation is an endorsement of President 
Trump's lawless efforts to hollow out our national security workforce, 
and her confirmation will further strain the alliances that have kept 
our country safe for decades; therefore, I urge my colleagues to oppose 
Ms. Gabbard's nomination.
  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 called the roll.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
  Mr. MORENO. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the 
mandatory quorum call with respect to the Gabbard nomination be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.