The Senate voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard to serve as director of national intelligence on Wednesday, with Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky the only member of his party to vote against President Donald Trump’s nominee.
The vote was 52 to 48. No Democrats voted in support for the former lawmaker.
Gabbard has been one of Trump’s most contentious nominees because of her past remarks on foreign adversaries and concerns about whether she has the experience to do the job. But Republican senators — many of whom had expressed reservations about Gabbard as DNI — overwhelmingly backed her nomination.
Gabbard will now oversee the work of the country’s 18 spy agencies — the same intelligence community that she has expressed skepticism of in the past. As DNI, she will also serve as President Trump’s primary intelligence adviser.
Once seen as a rising star in the Democratic Party, Gabbard has traversed from the left flank of her former party, nominating Bernie Sanders to run for President in 2016 to endorsing Trump eight years later. Now the country’s top spy chief, her foreign policy views have defied easy categorization and have caused alarm among lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
She has been criticized for a 2017 meeting with Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad who had been isolated by the international community for his use of chemical weapons against his own citizens. She also has echoed Russian talking points over the wars in Ukraine and Syria. And while in Congress she introduced a resolution calling for the federal government to drop all charges against former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked a trove of classified documents to the press.
