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Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I am grateful to be on the floor here tonight with my colleague from California, Senator Schiff, and others to talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard--now the successful nomination, I guess, of Tulsi Gabbard--to be the Director of National Intelligence.

To say the least, I never thought that we would see a moment in the history of the United States, in the history of our attempt as a Congress to ensure that the American people and that the President get the intelligence they need. In all of these years and over all of these decades, I never imagined we would see someone like Tulsi Gabbard approved on the floor of the U.S. Senate for that job, and I wanted to speak tonight, just briefly, to say why I think that was the wrong direction for the Trump administration and, more importantly, the wrong direction for the American people.

Let me say, first of all, intelligence--and being a member of the Intelligence Committee, I know this is unlike anything else we do around here, because a lot of what happens--my colleague Senator King from Maine is here--is done in secret. One of the great privileges of being on the Intelligence Committee is that--I think, in part--because it is in secret, there isn't the kind of partisanship that you see on a lot of the other committees. There isn't the jockeying for position or for political notoriety; that people on that committee are very serious about our work. In part, it is because we all have a responsibility, on behalf of all of the Senators who are not on the committee, to be able to transmit, as well as we can, the intelligence needs of our country, the intelligence findings of the intelligence community, and to play a very important role in oversight, because if we didn't provide that role, the intelligence Agencies could run amuck without the American people ever knowing about it or their Representatives knowing about it.

In fact, the whole reason we have the Intelligence Committee in the Senate is because so many terrible decisions were made by the intelligence Agencies in the postwar period, in the 1950s and 1960s-- some of it well-intentioned, you know, during the Cold War, but a lot of it were really bad judgments--that included things like, you know, the attempt to assassinate foreign leaders and to plot revolutions around the globe. This Congress, this Senate, decided that we needed to have oversight for the American people, and we created the Intelligence Committee to do that. It means that we have an institutional structure that ensures that the American people get the best service out of the intelligence community and that the President gets the best intelligence. And that structure was put in place by people who thought it was important for intelligence Agencies not to run amuck and for the President to get the best intelligence possible.

Now we are putting somebody in the job of Director of all of the intelligence Agencies, in a sense, the ODNI, so-called--that is sort of the clearinghouse and the coordinator for all of the intel that the President gets--Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Now, look, she has had a record of public service in the Congress and in the military. I don't dispute that, and I am not calling into question whether or not she is serving the interests of other countries. But I do want to say--and I will be brief--that I think her judgment has been extraordinarily--I would say, exceptionally--bad.

I share her view that there were profound intelligence errors in the lead-up to the Gulf war and in the lead-up to the war in Afghanistan. In the Gulf, in particular, you will remember, you know, the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein was supposed to have had. He didn't have them. It was a terrible, terrible failure of our Intelligence Committee and a terrible failure of oversight from this Congress, and she is right about that.

The problem is she has, I think, learned the wrong lesson from that, and over and over and over again, when she has the opportunity to support the interests of the United States--I hate to say it--versus those of our adversaries', time and time again, she picks our adversaries or even our allies.

I have heard her say how worried she is about what she describes as the remilitarization of Japan, which, of course, Japan is doing because of the threat from China, with our very, very close cooperation. That is of concern to Tulsi Gabbard.

She went to Syria and famously came back disputing our own intelligence Agencies' findings about Assad's gassing of his own people. To this day, she hasn't really taken that back, and it makes no sense at all.

But the thing that drives me the craziest is that she has been an apologist for what Vladimir Putin has done since the day Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was a peaceful country with a peaceful border, and Vladimir Putin was the first tyrant since World War II ended. We had set up all of these multilateral institutions across Europe and across the world to prevent the kind of hostility that we had seen break out in World War II, and Vladimir Putin decided he would invade a peaceful country next-door to him. In his mind, he had a right to do that because Ukraine has been viewed by czars--going back hundreds and hundreds of years--as Russian territory.

That is not the way the Ukrainian people look at this. They think of themselves as an independent country. They think of themselves as living in a place where history actually has moved on over the last 500 years or 1,000 years, and they were sitting there, peacefully, when Vladimir Putin invaded them with no provocation at all.

On the evening that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted out at 11:30 at night--her local time--referring to the war, Putin's invasion of Ukraine: This war and suffering could easily have been avoided if the Biden administration and NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's ``legitimate security concerns'' regarding Ukraine becoming a member of NATO, which would mean U.S.-NATO forces right on Russia's border.

Now, she gets mad when people read that stuff. That is what she said, and she says: Well, don't tell people that I am carrying propaganda for the Russian Government or for Putin. That is not fair.

I don't have to say that, but the Russian television put on TV, in the days after the aftermath of Putin's invasion, the very thing that Congresswoman Gabbard had said about his invasion because they saw it as something that ratified what they had done. And it was so consistent, so aligned with his position--and it continues to be his position today--that he thought it would muddy the waters with people around the world about what they were doing in Ukraine.

I believe Ukraine's battle, from the very beginning, has not been a battle for Ukraine. I think it is a battle for democracy. I think they are on the tip of the spear, you know, in a way that nobody has been since World War II. The Ukrainian people have been unbelievable, and the Ukrainian soldiers have fought magnificently. There was a view, when Putin invaded Ukraine, that, in 3 days, they were going to be in Kyiv--the Russians-- and because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people, because of the bravery of the soldiers, many of whom have given up their lives, they have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of anybody on this floor, of any of the Monday-morning quarterbacking that has happened in this Capitol and in other capitols around the world. And our allies all around Europe--but also in the Pacific area, as well--all have seen what the Ukrainian people have accomplished.

When she had an opportunity to say something about the Ukrainians and when she had the opportunity to stand with the United States and stand with our allies, she made another choice. She is entitled to that choice. She is entitled to that choice, just as she is entitled to her views about the intelligence failures during the Gulf war. But the fact that she has the idiosyncratic views that she has, whether it is Putin's invasion of Ukraine or her writing a bill in the House to give Edward Snowden a pardon, doesn't qualify her to be the lead intelligence official for the United States of America.

As I said--and I will finish here--we work well in a bipartisan way on these issues. The American people need the President to get intelligence in a way that is trustworthy, that is not shaded in one direction or another, and we all need to be able to trust each other in the delivery of that intelligence.

I will say that I think the President, in nominating Congresswoman Gabbard for this position, has fallen short. I voted for the CIA Director. This is not an issue of his appointments to the intelligence Agencies. But in the case of Congresswoman Gabbard, I think he missed the mark.

I apologize to my colleague from California for going on for so long.

I will yield the floor to him.

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