-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to speak in opposition to the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to serve as the Director of National Intelligence of the United States of America.

Setting aside her lack of qualifications and setting aside her rotten judgment, her nomination strikes me as being part of a pattern of unilateral disarmament by the Trump administration against Russia. One can hazard as to why this is happening, but the fact that it is happening seems hard to deny.

In November 2024, the Washington Post wrote this:

Gabbard's planned appointment as the head of national intelligence elicited the most excitement in Russia because she has been long regarded as a darling of the propagandist Russian RT network, which amplified her sympathetic takes on Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Putin.

Russian state TV has called Ms. Gabbard ``our friend Tulsi.''

The Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an op-ed, and it was titled ``The CIA and FBI are trembling: Why Trump protege Tulsi Gabbard will support Russia as head of National Intelligence.''

So the Russians are telling us pretty plain and simple: She is with us.

If you look at some of her behavior particularly relevant to the DNI position, she has constantly opposed section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a key source of foreign intelligence for our national security and which--I guess I would have to say in this location--presumably is useful at getting intelligence on Russia.

She is not alone. Over at the FBI, Trump's nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel, we just found out was paid $25,000 by a Russian filmmaker with Kremlin ties to participate in a documentary attacking the FBI, which is an adversary of Russia's, which spends a great deal of time and effort keeping an eye on Russia's adverse intelligence activity in the United States.

To make it worse, Kash Patel has said he wants to shut down what he calls the intel shops--the part of the FBI that would go after Russian intelligence operations and Russian criminal networks in the United States. He has even said he wants to shut down the FBI building and run everybody out into the field offices around the country. Well, guess what takes place at FBI Headquarters? Our intelligence and counterterrorism operations. If you empty that place out and you move everything out to the field where people are doing regular criminal work, it is another way of saying: We are going to shut down our intelligence operations.

Just in the past week, since she has been in, Attorney General Bondi has pulled down the DOJ Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, which has recovered billions of dollars in ill- gotten gains from foreign kleptocrats--many Russian, many close to Vladimir Putin. She shut down DOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture, which is the entity that has been working to target the Russian oligarchs around Putin, seize their assets that have been used to support Putin in his illegal, brutal invasion of Ukraine, and take those assets and provide them to the Ukrainians for their rebuilding and defense.

So a common theme here: Tulsi Gabbard wants to come in as ``our friend Tulsi,'' according to Russian state TV, to have the CIA and FBI trembling because she will support Russia. Kash Patel is coming into the FBI, who takes money from a Kremlin-associated filmmaker and promises to shut down or at least degrade our intelligence capabilities within the FBI. And Attorney General Bondi is busy over at the DOJ taking down the anti-kleptocracy initiatives that focus on Putin's little gang of oligarchs who prop him up. It is three for three in unilateral disarmament by the United States against Russia.

There is a little history here that is worth going back to in evaluating all of this, and it includes that Russia interfered in the 2016 election through a Kremlin-linked internet research agency. There has been a good deal of reporting on that, but since that reporting, there has been a persistent, rightwing Trump narrative to pretend that never existed, that there was no Trump-Russia thing, that Trump-Russia was a hoax.

In fact, it was not a hoax. Trump-Russia was a thing, as a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee pointed out. That bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Russian President Putin had ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts that were affiliated with the Democratic Party and that were affiliated with the Democratic National Committee and that the purpose was to find and to leak information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton in that election.

Here is what the committee found. I quote the report, the bipartisan report:

Moscow's intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the US democratic process.

That was the finding of the U.S. intelligence community as well as the finding of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It went on. You remember that famous meeting where Trump took the Russian Ambassador and the Russian Foreign Minister right into the Oval Office and divulged to them highly classified information--highly- classified information--which caused U.S. officials to warn that Trump's revelations jeopardized a key source of intelligence in the Islamic State. They had to ping out to other intelligence Agencies and to our officers in the field: Look out. Classified information has just been given to these Putin officials to try to shore up and defend our sources and methods.

The Mueller report went to exhaustive effort, with all of the support of grand jury and senior FBI and Department of Justice officials, and they concluded that the Trump campaign both knew of and welcomed the Russian interference and expected to benefit from it.

It even talked about obstruction of justice by President Trump. But what they concluded in talking about obstruction of justice by President Trump is that he could not be indicted as a sitting President and therefore it would not be fair to lay out the conclusion that he had committed this crime because he wouldn't have a process by which to acquit himself and to clear the accusation. But they certainly laid out plenty of evidence that was suggestive that had he been an ordinary individual, he would have been indicted, charged, and convicted for obstruction of justice relating to this whole Trump-Russia saga.

Later, when he was asked about all this in a conversation about Vladimir Putin, he said in November of 2017 about Putin--he said: Putin ``said he didn't meddle'' in the election. ``I asked him. . . . He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did.''

Everybody in the intelligence community knew that he did, in fact, do what they are saying he did, but Trump, for some reason, some connection, some Trump-Russia connection, went with Putin rather than the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence services.

The next year in Helsinki, Trump met privately with Putin for 2 hours. We don't know what happened because they just met with their interpreters. Then they went out for a news conference, and there again, standing right next to Putin, he sided with him over our own intelligence Agencies. But the meddling was real, the meddling was documented, and the Mueller report helped document the meddling.

If you go into the details, you see the subplots. Paul Manafort was Trump's 2016 campaign chairman. He was meeting regularly, communicating regularly with a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik and with a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska through the campaign.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan report found that on numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal campaign information with Kilimnik. This did not end well for Paul Manafort; he was indicted by a Federal grand jury for the crime of conspiracy against the United States, convicted, and sentenced to more than 7 years in prison--oh, except that Trump pardoned Manafort in late 2020.

There was the infamous Trump Tower meeting in which Donald Trump, Jr., the same Paul Manafort, and son-in-law Jared Kushner met with Russian billionaire Emin Agalarov and a Russian lawyer connected to the Kremlin right in Trump Tower. The meeting came about because Donald Trump, Jr., had been told by a contact that the Russian Government wanted to offer--and I am quoting here--``official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary.'' Official documents and information from the Russian Government that would incriminate Hillary.

The response:

If it's what you say I love it.

They went ahead to the meeting. Clearly, the Trump campaign's purpose for that meeting was to obtain from Russia incriminating information on Clinton to influence the election.

The special counsel decided not to prosecute the attendees in part because it couldn't determine that that information would actually have been determinative because it related to orphans, and what didn't connect with the Trump attendees at that meeting was that the interruption of the orphans being delivered to the United States for parents who wanted to adopt them was the response to sanctions against oligarchs and people around Putin, and this was an effort to get the sanctions lifted.

If you could crack the code, you would know that that is what the orphans conversation was about, because that is why the orphans blockade had been set up.

Ultimately, Russia did, in fact, hack emails--both from the DNC and from the Clinton campaign chair. Russian intelligence got their hands on those documents.

Here is what the Intelligence Committee wrote about that:

Trump and senior Campaign officials sought to obtain advanced information about WikiLeaks' planned releases through Roger Stone. At their direction, Stone took action to gain inside knowledge for the Campaign and shared his purported knowledge directly with Trump and senior Campaign officials on multiple occasions.

This wasn't just a one-off; this was information being channeled through Roger Stone to the Trump campaign. It didn't end well for Stone. He was indicted and convicted on charges of lying to Congress about what he and then-Candidate Donald Trump knew about Russian efforts to discredit Hillary Clinton's campaign and witness tampering and obstruction.

On we go to Carter Page, also associated with the campaign, who traveled to Moscow in that timeframe--July 2016--to deliver a commencement speech while working for the campaign. Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich there expressed ``strong support for Mr. Trump''--``strong support for Mr. Trump and a desire to work together.''

Another campaign operative, George Papadopoulos--same year, May--was traveling and told the Greek Foreign Minister that the Russians have ``dirt'' on Hillary Clinton.

So you have all these pieces coming together about the Russians seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton, getting it, leaking it through WikiLeaks, and constantly having a back channel through members of the Trump campaign.

It didn't end well for Papadopoulos either. He was arrested for lying to FBI investigators and pleaded guilty. And, of course, Trump pardoned him too. Trying to cover up his traces.

Michael Flynn in 2015 delivered remarks at a Moscow gala honoring Russia Today, RT, the same organization that Tulsi Gabbard was the darling of. He was seated at the gala next to Putin--next to Putin. He was paid $33,750 from RT--whose darling Tulsi Gabbard was--for this one speech. He didn't correctly report the payment. He ended up being paid more than $67,000 by Russian companies before the 2016 Presidential election.

It didn't end well for him either. He lied to Vice President Pence and to the FBI about communications he was having with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions imposed by the Obama administration while President Obama was in office. Yes, the sanctions related to the orphans conversation at Trump Tower. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about that conversation, and, of course, Trump pardoned him days before Flynn was due to be sentenced.

It is kind of an ongoing thing between Trump and Russia. A lot of us on both sides of the aisle are very concerned about what is going on in Ukraine--indeed, furious that Putin would launch his army into Ukraine and perform massive atrocities and war crimes: firing rockets into children's hospitals, having the soldiers murder through neighborhoods. It is a foul spectacle, and it started with Russia's invasion of Crimea, the so-called little green men.

Trump thought that was all a pretty good thing. You will remember that the way they started it was to foment riots by Russian-speaking people in Crimea to provide a justification for coming over the border--sort of 1930s Europe style tactics coming back to us here. So that kicked it off. There were these demonstrations. Putin said ``Oh, my people, my people; they are being abused by those terrible Ukrainians,'' and in went the little green men.

Here is how Trump praised Putin's invasion then of Crimea:

When you see the riots in a country because they're hurting the Russians, OK, `we'll go and take it over.' And he really goes step by step, and you have to give him a lot of credit.

And of course there is the famous comment to Russia publicly, saying:

Russia, if you're listening--

This was during the campaign--

I hope you're able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.

Then there were the episodes that I mentioned earlier where he said ``No, Russia wasn't meddling in our elections'' despite the fact that everybody knew they were. But he took Putin's side in all of that.

Most recently, he refused to condemn Putin for the death of Alexei Navalny, who had been such a brave fighter, standing up against the corrupt Putin regime, and died in a penal colony at the age of 47.

For a long time, I have described the United States as being in a clash of civilizations with rule-of-law countries like ours on the one side and kleptocrats, autocrats, and governments run by criminal organizations like the narco-traffickers on the other side. Fairly simple clash--rule of law versus rule of thuggery.

There ought to be bipartisan support for making sure that the United States does not become a safe haven for kleptocrats and criminals. We should not be giving aid and comfort to our enemies by allowing them to park their funds here in our country.

We have made progress to combat the kleptocrats and the international criminals who are on the other side of this clash of civilizations. Ms. Gabbard is not on the right side of that clash, not when she is so chummy with Putin, not when she is so chummy with the murderer Bashar al-Assad, not when she is ``our darling Tulsi'' to Russian media channels, and not when she is lined up with Kash Patel, threatening to take down the FBI Offices that track Russia, taking money from a Russian filmmaker, and then stack that up with Attorney General Bondi taking down the kleptocracy and klepto-capture efforts at the DOJ that have been making the Russian oligarchs' lives miserable by going after their assets.

One, two, three--all unilaterally disarming against Russia in the wake of all that time in which the Trump-Russia connection appeared over and over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, still persists today.

I see my colleague here on the Senate floor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source