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Floor Speech

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Mr. HEINRICH. Mr. President, every one of us remembers where we were when the first plane struck the World Trade Center the morning of September 11, 2001. On that day, we watched in horror as the North and South Towers fell, terrifying debris clouds flooding the ground beneath them. We witnessed the Pentagon, the heart of our national defense, engulfed in flames as a hijacked plane crashed into it head-on, taking the lives of all the people aboard that flight and over 125 employees in the building itself. Our hearts broke as we saw yet another plane go down in an open field in Pennsylvania, after brave Americans decided to fight back and regain control of the aircraft before it reached its intended target here in this very Capitol building.

From that day forward, we pledged to never forget the nearly 3,000 Americans who lost their lives that day and the thousands more who were first responders that have died since. That pledge led us to immediately establish a bipartisan commission devoted to understanding how our Nation's intelligence Agencies could have left us vulnerable to this attack.

And the 9/11 Commission discovered that our intelligence community had received warnings about the dangers posed by al-Qaida but that a systemic lack of communication and coordination between intelligence Agencies that were effectively stovepiped off from one another had left glaring blindspots at the highest levels of our government. And to fix this, the Commission recommended that our government establish a new Cabinet-level position called the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI.

The DNI is specifically dedicated to coordinating all of our intelligence-gathering operations that protect the safety and security of the American people. For the last two decades, the Director of National Intelligence has played a vital role in every administration as the leader of our intelligence community overseen in coordinating 18 of our intelligence Agencies.

The Director of National Intelligence is also one of the main voices that any President hears from, literally, each and every day. That is because the DNI serves not only as the coordinator of our intelligence community but as the compiler and presenter of the President's daily brief. This is the daily high-level, highly classified briefing on the most pressing and sensitive national security matters. This is where all of our Presidents have gathered critical information needed to make incredibly difficult military or foreign policy decisions. And it is where our Presidents learn about potential threats from our adversaries, from nonstate terrorist organizations, and to think through how to combat those.

Put simply: Our national security depends on the person that we entrust in that role.

In fact, we need to implicitly trust that this person is relying on and providing incredible and accurate information so that our country's Commander in Chief can make the decisions that will determine our security as a nation. As a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for the last 12 years, I do not say this lightly: I do not believe that Ms. Gabbard has demonstrated the judgment to merit our trust as Director of National Intelligence.

Ms. Gabbard's statements and actions leading up to and during the confirmation process should make all of us question her qualifications for this essential national security role, and they should make us seriously question her basic judgment.

Time and again, Ms. Gabbard has elevated conspiracy theories, parroted dictator's talking points, and repeatedly undermined our country's national security.

Let me give you some specific examples of her statements and her legislative track record. In 2017, while she was still serving in the House of Representatives, Ms. Gabbard exercised seriously questionable judgment in scheduling a foreign trip into Bashar al-Assad's pariah state of Syria. This was after Assad had committed well-documented crimes against his own people, including the use of chemical weapons, and plummeted his country into a bloody civil war and devastating humanitarian crisis.

Both before and after this trip, Ms. Gabbard undermined U.S. intelligence and echoed Russian and Syrian disinformation regarding Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people. She has made statements that appear to defend Assad.

For example, on February 6, 2019, Ms. Gabbard claimed in an interview that:

Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.

This is a shockingly narrow view of threats to U.S. national security. During the course of Syria's civil war, Assad used chemical weapons more than 300 times against his own people, killing and wounding thousands. To this day, Syria has still not accounted for this.

The U.S. has also described Syria as being in ``flagrant noncompliance'' with the Chemical Weapons Convention. And there is no question that Assad's regime posed a serious threat to international peace and security.

It is mystifying to me how Ms. Gabbard could not understand this then and still, apparently, doesn't understand it today.

Ms. Gabbard's 2020 Presidential campaign website stated that she remains ``skeptical'' about two particular chemical weapons attacks in Syria in 2017 and 2018. Her website wrongly stated that:

Both attacks occurred in towns under the control of al- Qaeda-linked opposition forces. Both attacks resulted in multiple civilian casualties, and both were immediately blamed on the Assad government. However, there is evidence to suggest that the attacks may have been staged by opposition forces for the purpose of drawing the United States and the West deeper into the war.

Of course, there never was such evidence.

Disturbingly, Ms. Gabbard decided to take the views of a discredited professor, who was himself taken in by a Syrian Australian YouTube influencer, that somehow the opposition forces had staged these chemical weapons attacks.

As a Member of Congress, she could have taken the time to read the summary of a declassified U.S. intelligence report released the week after the 2017 attack, warning that claims shifting blame to rebel groups reflected the ``false narratives'' spread by Syria and its patron state, Russia.

Instead of looking to the intelligence community for answers, Gabbard sought out fake intelligence, demonstrating her distrust in the very intelligence Agencies that she could soon coordinate and oversee.

Her trip to Syria and her visit with Assad himself should be alarming to all of us. Normally, if any Member of Congress goes on a foreign fact-finding trip like this, we take precautions to not jeopardize our vital national security interests. We coordinate with the State Department. We coordinate with the Pentagon. We carefully account for our schedules. And we sure as hell make sure we are not giving a platform to state-sponsors of terrorism or terrorist leaders.

Ms. Gabbard did none of these things on this rogue trip into Assad's Syria. In fact, she sat down for an unscheduled meeting with Assad himself, not once but twice. She also met with the Grand Mufti of Syria. The Grand Mufti was appointed in 2005 to be Syria's most senior Sunni Muslim cleric. In 2011, he threatened Western countries, including the United States, against taking military actions in Syria. And he said in his speech:

I say to all of Europe, I say to America, we will set up suicide bombers who are now in your countries.

During her confirmation hearing last month, I asked Ms. Gabbard directly about this meeting with the Grand Mufti, Mr. Hassoun. She claimed that this was the first she had ever heard about Mr. Hassoun's threats to set up some suicide bombers to target America and our European allies. However, records from her congressional office suggest that almost immediately after returning from her controversial trip, she was fully aware that she had met with a leader with direct ties to terrorism.

According to recent reporting in the Washington Post that helped to unearth these records right after she returned from Syria, Ms. Gabbard and her congressional staff worked feverishly to account for her meetings and official paperwork and to contain the political fallout. In the documents that the Post reviewed, Ms. Gabbard's staff asked her:

Did you know you were meeting with people with direct ties to terrorist organizations?

And her response in those documents:

Is this question re the Mufti?

I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that Ms. Gabbard endorsed or endorses the despicable views or actions of this particular Syrian terrorist leader. What I am suggesting is that Ms. Gabbard's false denial to me in her confirmation hearing of any prior knowledge of this terrorist leader whom she personally met with should be evidence enough that we cannot trust her. And in the position that we are being asked to confirm her for, telling the whole truth accurately is the whole point.

On top of this, Ms. Gabbard has repeatedly made public statements that echo Russian justification for Putin's unjustified, unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. She has blamed our NATO allies for failing to recognize Russia's ``legitimate security concerns.''

Those are literally her words. And she has amplified Russia and Putin's disinformation campaigns alleging Ukraine's development of bioweapons.

On February 23, 2022, Ms. Gabbard echoed Russian talking points blaming Putin's invasion of Ukraine on the Biden administration. Specifically, she tweeted:

This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia's legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine's becoming a member of NATO, which would mean U.S./NATO forces right on Russia's border.

As my colleague Senator Bennet said so powerfully as he pointed out at Ms. Gabbard's confirmation hearing, she sent this tweet at the very moment that Russian tanks were rolling over Ukraine's border, essentially saying that Vladimir Putin was justified invading the free nation of Ukraine.

Then-Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair and now Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted in response saying, this is ``simply not true,'' noting that the week before the invasion, Putin once again demanded NATO leave every country that joined after 1997, including Bulgaria, Romania, and 12 others.

Ms. Gabbard chose not to listen to the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee or the intelligence community itself, which had issued a declassified threat assessment two weeks prior. Ms. Gabbard decided, instead, to give the benefit of the doubt to Vladimir Putin. How can we trust that she won't do that again?

Ms. Gabbard has also repeatedly praised Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who fled to China and then to Russia after he was charged in 2013 with illegally exposing government surveillance methods and classified information.

Ms. Gabbard has called him a ``brave whistleblower'' and even went so far as to introduce legislation in the House of Representatives to pardon Edward Snowden.

In 2016, the House Intelligence Committee issued a declassified, scathing report that found Snowden leaked secrets that caused tremendous damage to U.S. national security. This included leaking secrets that protect American troops and American personnel overseas. As that report made clear, Snowden was not a whistleblower; he was and is a traitor to this Nation.

Ms. Gabbard and anyone who is interested in understanding the impact of the leaked secrets has access to the declassified House Intelligence Committee report and many other public sources of information explaining the damage that Snowden caused to our national security. Yet she continues to believe her own sources of information instead and to this day will not say that Snowden betrayed this country.

Let me be clear. Edward Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a traitor. Ms. Gabbard should know this full well.

If we confirm her as our next Director of National Intelligence, Ms. Gabbard will be responsible for transmitting lawful whistleblower complaints to Congress. Her past statements on Snowden reveal a deficient understanding of our Nation's whistleblower laws that should be patently disqualifying for any Director of National Intelligence, much less any national security appointee.

When my colleagues on the Intelligence Committee pressed Ms. Gabbard during her confirmation hearing about whether her views had changed and if she would acknowledge that Mr. Snowden were a traitor, she refused. This is who we want to lead our intelligence community--someone who outright refuses to condemn the actions of someone who jeopardized our national security and put the lives of many members of our intelligence community and national security community at risk? It is hard to believe that we could be so reckless.

Finally, Ms. Gabbard has also advocated for a full repeal of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Section 702 is one of our intelligence community's most important tools to effectively fight terrorism, disrupt foreign cyber attacks, impede drug trafficking, and protect U.S. troops serving abroad. Ms. Gabbard introduced a bill in the House that would have completely repealed section 702.

I will be the first to say that there are reforms to section 702 that we should make to ensure that this law always focuses on the communications of foreign targets abroad and is never inadvertently used in a way that threatens the privacy of innocent Americans. In the past, including just last year, I worked closely with my colleagues to advance some of these reforms. A wholesale repeal of section 702, however, is a wildly out-of-step and dangerous proposal.

Do we really want to confirm a Director of National Intelligence who has advocated for the dismantling of such a foundational source of foreign intelligence to protect our national security?

Any number of Ms. Gabbard's statements or actions would be disqualifying for a nominee to lead our intelligence community and keep our President accurately informed on pressing national security matters. But I am not alone in raising concerns about this nomination. As with many of President Trump's unqualified nominees, I have heard from many New Mexicans--from many constituents in my own State--in opposition to Ms. Gabbard's nomination, and I want to take a moment to read to you from some of these letters that I have received.

Addie from Mountainair wrote to me to share her concern about Ms. Gabbard's lack of experience to safeguard our Nation.

Addie said:

Running the DNI requires an unwavering commitment to evidence-based decisionmaking, national security, and independence from political or foreign influence. Tulsi Gabbard has none of that. She is completely unfit for this position.

A constituent and former intelligence officer from Santa Fe who wished to remain anonymous is concerned how Ms. Gabbard's background will impact operations critical to defending the United States from foreign threats.

This individual told me:

As a retired intelligence officer, I urge you to do everything you can to keep Tulsi Gabbard from becoming the next [DNI]. Our allies will be reluctant to share intelligence with her, as will our own intelligence professionals, given her past support for Putin and for other dictators. This is a job that needs to be filled by a serious expert in intelligence and national security policy.

Katy from Tularosa is troubled by Ms. Gabbard's past association with dictators and tyrants.

Katy wrote to me:

Tulsi Gabbard is known to have had sympathies for Russia and has met with Bashar al-Assad, the unrepentant dictator and war criminal. Her appointment threatens U.S. national security.

Gary, also from Tularosa, is a retired intelligence officer. Gary is worried about Ms. Gabbard's lack of national security experience and how it will affect efforts to safeguard the United States.

Gary wrote:

As a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, I urge you to use all [of] your influence to block Tulsi Gabbard as the next Director of National Intelligence. She is absolutely unqualified to assume this key position in the Intelligence Community. To serve our nation, the DNI must have a deep understanding of the strengths and limitations of the broad array of civilian and military intelligence agencies. Only then can the DNI lead effectively and offer unbiased counsel to the President. Tulsi Gabbard has none of these qualifications or experience.

Walter from Santa Fe is a veteran who served as an intelligence officer as well. He wrote to me to convey his disgust with President Trump in putting individual loyalty over national security with his nomination.

Walter said:

I am appalled at President Trump putting individual loyalty above competency in his appointments. While Ms. Gabbard is a veteran, she lacks experience in the field of national security, and her playing with conspiracy theories lacking valid documentation raises serious questions about her judgment.

I agree with my constituents in New Mexico.

Ms. Gabbard's poor judgment and lack of national security experience make her wholly unqualified to serve as our next Director of National Intelligence. Confirming her to this role will make our Nation less safe. For all of these reasons, I will not be supporting Ms. Gabbard's confirmation.

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