Donald Trump’s picks to lead the US intelligence community and top law enforcement agency were set to be grilled on Capitol Hill Thursday as the Republican president’s most contentious cabinet nominees face potentially showstopping Senate hearings.
Tulsi Gabbard, tapped for director of national intelligence, will sit before the Senate Intelligence Committee for the most consequential confirmation hearing to date, while Kash Patel will be questioned on his ambitions to head the FBI.
Gabbard, a Hawaiian former congresswoman who ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, is considered Trump’s most vulnerable cabinet-level nominee, and the hearing will be the biggest test of his sway over Senate Republicans since he took office.
Although no Republican has publicly criticized her, Gabbard is regarded with bipartisan suspicion over her past support for NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who is regarded on both sides of Congress as having imperiled national security.
She is also facing questions over her lack of national security experience, her 2017 meeting with now-deposed Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad and her peddling of Russian propaganda, particularly false conspiracy theories about the Ukraine war.
Just one Republican “no” vote would stop Gabbard’s nomination from making it to the Senate floor with a favorable report — and the Republican leadership has indicated that she wouldn’t get a vote without committee support.
“I support Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination… and I look forward to working with her to overhaul and reform America’s intelligence agencies,” Tom Cotton, the panel’s chairman, posted on X.
But Mark Warner, the top Democrat, was expected to argue that foreign allies may not be able to trust Washington with their secrets if Gabbard is put in charge of intelligence.
‘Weaponization’
His opening statement will assert that the US intelligence mission “is predicated on trust — trust that we and our allies will protect each other’s secrets,” according to congressional media outlet Punchbowl News.
“Yet repeatedly, you have excused our adversaries’ worst actions, and instead blamed the United States and our allies for them,” he is expected to say.
But Gabbard is going to fire back, Punchbowl reported, arguing that her critics are upset by her “refusal to be anyone’s puppet” and saying that Trump won a clear mandate to end the “weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.
On what is expected to be a day of drama on Capitol Hill, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hear from FBI director-designate Kash Patel, who appears to be on a surer footing than Gabbard.
Democrats have argued that he is an unrepentant conspiracy theorist and will bring up a list of 60 supposed “deep state” actors — all critics of Trump — he included in a 2022 book, whom he said should be investigated or “otherwise reviled.”
Patel will also likely be asked about the Kash Foundation, a charity that raised $1.4 million in its first two years but, according to its 2023 tax filings, has given less than 20 percent of that sum in grants.
He has been waging a charm offensive in one-on-one meetings with senators, vowing to take politics out of the FBI. He denied that he has an “enemies list.”
Patel wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal — the paper of the Republican establishment — on Wednesday pledging to “rebuild public trust in the FBI” by letting “good cops be cops” and by promoting transparency and congressional oversight.
The same paper questioned Gabbard’s judgment in an editorial on Tuesday, saying she “doesn’t really seem to believe in protecting national intelligence.”
At the same time Robert F Kennedy Jr appears for a second grilling after coming under withering attack from Democrats on Wednesday over his history of promoting vaccine misinformation, and his sudden embrace of anti-abortion policies.
