Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show to discuss Tulsi Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, warning against her nomination.
Watch the full interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On Tulsi Gabbard’s Kremlin ties and unfitness for the role:
[…] Normally, if you’re talking about someone who’s going to head an agency, let alone, in this case, all the intelligence agencies, you would expect a nominee to have some experience. Maybe having worked for an intelligence agency. Maybe having led an intelligence agency. Or even at a minimum, served on a relevant committee, like the Intelligence Committee of Congress. Tulsi Gabbard has none of that experience — zero, nada, zilch o — that would normally in a normal world, be disqualifying. But she goes far beyond that.
She has echoed Kremlin talking points about the origin of the war against Ukraine. She’s pushed out Russian propaganda about U.S. bio labs in Ukraine. One of the pretexts that Russia wanted to use for its invasion, to the point where RT, Russia Today, this propaganda outfit is praising her to the degree that advisers close to Putin referred to her as “our girl,” an interesting diminutive for someone who might be leading U.S. intelligence agencies. This is someone who met with Bashar al-Assad, came back, had wonderful things to say about how he wanted to get across the impression that he wouldn’t engage in terrible things against his own people, when our own intelligence agencies were saying he has gassed his own people. So, hard to imagine someone more disqualified from running those agencies. But Republican opposition to all of these controversial, unqualified, disqualified nominees has collapsed, and maybe collapse is too strong a word, because that presupposes there was an infrastructure to stand up to these bad choices to begin with. But nevertheless, they all seem headed for confirmation, which is just terrible for the country.
On how Americans will be impacted by Trump’s unqualified nominees:
[…] I don’t think the concerns about her have dissolved, as you put it. I don’t think that she has satisfied their concerns. I think they’ve come to realize that if they stand up to Donald Trump, that the MAGA world will come after them, and they’re simply not willing to take that on. President Trump has very successfully demonstrated that whether it is marshaling primary challenges or just dialing up the sort of MAGA extreme world against you, he and his allies can turn it on in a heartbeat, and they just want to face that.
But we’re going to have to live with these nominees for a long time. There will be no hiding from what they do. Those who vote for these nominees are going to take ownership of everything they do, whether it’s Tulsi Gabbard or RFK or Kash Patel or Pam Bondi or any of these people. Those that support their confirmation, knowing the risk to our national security, are going to have to own those decisions. But what is even more tragic, I think, is the country will end up owning those decisions, and whether that’s in the form of allies not willing to share intelligence with us because they don’t trust Tulsi Gabbard any more than many members of Congress. Or whether that means that people leave the FBI because Kash Patel is driving them out and they don’t want to be part of a political Vendetta. It’s all going to undermine our national security, our homeland security, and it’s the American people who will suffer.
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