The Free Press
President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next director of national intelligence is in trouble. In the hours-long public session of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Thursday, Tulsi Gabbard could not bring herself to agree with senators from both parties that the notorious leaker, Edward Snowden, betrayed his country.
Before the hearing, Gabbard had won the support of the committee’s chairman, Senator Tom Cotton, and most Senate Republicans. But as the hearing dragged on, senators grew visibly uneasy. The usually mild-mannered Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado, raised his voice in frustration at Gabbard’s equivocations about Snowden.
“This is not a moment for social media. It’s not a moment to propagate conspiracy theories,” he said. “This is when you need to answer the questions of the people whose votes you’re asking for to be confirmed as the chief intelligence officer of this nation.”
Oklahoma Republican James Lankford asked: “Was he a traitor at the time when he took America’s secrets, released them in public, and then ran to China and became a Russian citizen?” Gabbard declined to answer him directly and said only that Snowden “broke the law” and that she is “focused on the future.”
This may sound like much ado over ancient history—to mix a metaphor. But to many intelligence pros, there’s no forgetting—or forgiving—how Snowden allegedly used his security clearances to gather digital secrets from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor, and gave them to the press way back in 2013. The leaks detailed some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive surveillance methods, including its infiltration of popular web platforms, and according to both Congressional and intelligence community investigations, did grave damage to U.S. national security.
Gabbard’s past praise for Snowden—“a brave whistleblower,” she called him in 2019—who has since taken asylum in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, marks her as not just a critic of the U.S. intelligence community but a radical one. In 2020 she even publicly urged Trump to pardon Snowden, who faces multiple criminal charges under the Espionage Act.
It’s almost as if someone had picked the late atheist writer Christopher Hitchens to be Pope. The closest historical parallel to Gabbard’s nomination might be President Jimmy Carter’s choice of Ted Sorensen, a CIA critic and former speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, to run the agency in 1977. The Sorensen nomination failed in the face of bipartisan opposition.
What a difference 50 years have made. Back in Carter’s day, it was the Democratic Party that sought to expose America’s national security state. Now it is Trump’s Republican Party that has cooled on this bureaucracy. In the eyes of Trump and his GOP supporters, the intelligence agencies have been warped into a weapon against American citizens.
And it’s true: The FBI ignored its own procedures in pursuit of a flimsy case that Trump’s 2016 campaign had colluded with Russia. Agents misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign aide, Carter Page. Toward the end of the presidential campaign in 2020, 51 former senior U.S. intelligence officials signed a public letter that implied the laptop abandoned by former president Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and later passed to the New York Post, was a Russian disinformation operation. In truth, the FBI had already authenticated the laptop. This was the essence of Gabbard’s testimony, her pledge to reform a discredited intelligence community.
The Gabbard nomination fits the broader theme of Trump’s appointments. At the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and now Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), he has picked some of those institutions’ most trenchant critics to run them. The question before the Senate today—as it heard testimony both from Gabbard and from FBI director pick Kash Patel—is how far the critics can go. Can a person who praised Snowden—the most notorious intelligence leaker in U.S. history—oversee 18 spy agencies?
All of which explains why—though other questionable aspects of Gabbard’s past came up—Snowden was by far the hottest topic on Thursday.
When senators of both parties pressed on her past sympathy for him, Gabbard offered a carefully prepared response. “Edward Snowden broke the law,” she said. “I do not agree with or support all of the information and intelligence that he released, nor the way in which he did it.” But Gabbard did herself no favors when she said that Snowden “released information that exposed egregious, illegal, and unconstitutional programs that are happening within our government.”
That is partly true. The first story that broke based on Snowden’s leaks did show U.S. telecom providers were sending all of their customers’ call records (though not phone call contents) to a government database. The authority for this massive transfer of telephone metadata, as it is known, was through a secret surveillance warrant that was initially designed to allow the FBI to spy on individual Americans, not millions of them with a cell phone plan. Making matters worse, when the director of national intelligence at the time, James Clapper, was asked at an open congressional hearing about this very program, he insisted the government was not collecting the metadata.
Other Snowden-related scoops, however, seemed merely to expose the sordid but necessary stuff of intelligence gathering in the real world. For example, one Snowden-based story revealed that the National Security Agency had tapped the personal cell phone of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. It was embarrassing and disruptive to the U.S.-German alliance, but, in the scheme of things, not a scandal.
Snowden’s least justifiable leak was provided to the South China Morning Post for a story that revealed the IP addresses of computers the NSA had hacked in Hong Kong and mainland China. That scoop served only to blind America against its most potent geopolitical foe by alerting Beijing to the computer systems American hackers had compromised.
Gabbard received an enthusiastic endorsement at the outset of her hearing Thursday from Cotton, the Republican chairman of the committee, who seemed won over by assurances that she would reduce bloat at the DNI.
Whether that will be enough to persuade one prominent holdout on the panel, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, is less clear. She voted against now–Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week and has not said how she will vote on Gabbard. But since the Republicans have only a single-vote majority on Intelligence, Gabbard’s nomination will not make it out of the committee if Collins votes no and the committee’s Democrats vote against Gabbard as they are expected to do. If that happens, it’s unclear what parliamentary moves could allow a floor vote on her nomination.
At Thursday’s hearing, Collins did not tip her hand. She calmly asked Gabbard if she would support a pardon for Snowden if confirmed. The nominee pledged that if she was confirmed, “I would not take actions to advocate for any actions related to Snowden.”
There has been a long tradition in Congress of legislators who demand transparency from the intelligence agencies. That said, Gabbard, the erstwhile Hawaii representative in the House, would be the first such legislator—or former legislator—to actually run such an agency.
Sorensen withdrew his name from nomination after then–Democratic senator Joe Biden brought up a formerly unknown affidavit Sorensen had provided on behalf of the Edward Snowden of his day—Daniel Ellsberg, the former Pentagon analyst who leaked a secret history of the Vietnam War to The New York Times.
In the late 1970s, the Senate would not entrust power over the intelligence community to one of its critics, even after disclosures of CIA plots to assassinate hostile foreign leaders, and FBI political and psychological warfare against Martin Luther King Jr. had justifiably damaged the reputation of both agencies.
Now, we are about to learn whether the Trump-era Republican Party will empower Gabbard, a woman who, though she has served faithfully in the military, also has praised someone many senators consider a traitor and has trashed the intelligence community his leaks helped expose. In other words, we are about to learn just how big this vibe shift surging through U.S. political institutions really is.
Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball to the Beltway elites. And while this populist moment feels unprecedented, Eli Lake, host of our new show “Breaking History,” says it’s not—the rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. Listen to the first episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.