The establishment media on Monday seemed to reorient its focus on Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation fight for director of national intelligence after they failed last week to derail Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense.
The media, working with its establishment allies in Congress, published several articles last week, which failed to cause Hegseth to drop out.
Politico Playbook was one of the first to negatively report on Gabbard’s nomination fight:
— She’s prepared to add context to some of her more controversial moments. Expect Gabbard to argue that meeting with Assad isn’t the same as sympathizing with him, and she can point to instances where she called him a “brutal dictator” and made other frank assessments of his atrocities.
— She’s ready to make a broader case for her noninterventionist views and argue to senators that meetings like the one she had with Assad are critical to stopping “endless wars.” She’ll argue that it’s her military service — not Russian propaganda — that shaped her worldview.
NBC News also took a swing at her, using the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria as the pretext:
In the spring of 2018, congressional staffers were anxious ahead of a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting. A Syrian defector who had risked his life to expose atrocities committed by the Assad regime was due to appear behind closed doors at a private briefing for lawmakers.
No cameras would be present, but congressional aides worried about one committee member, Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who had repeatedly defended the Syrian regime and even met its leader, Bashar al-Assad, in an unannounced trip in 2017.
The aides were concerned Gabbard might leak information about the defector, who had hidden his identity out of fear of reprisals from the Assad regime. Some worried that she might even reveal his identity to someone associated with the Syrian government, which at that point had killed hundreds of thousands of its own citizens, according to human rights groups.
Newsweek published an article about Nikki Haley and John Bolton’s opinion of Gabbard. Bolton, a member of the establishment, foreign policy gatekeeper, and Trump-hater, is opposed to Gabbard’s confirmation.
Newsweek reported:
Trump’s choice of Gabbard to lead America’s intelligence agencies has raised some eyebrows given her foreign policy stances in the Middle East and elsewhere. While Gabbard has been outspoken about the ongoing conflict in Syria, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) during Trump’s first administration and then unsuccessfully ran against him in the 2024 Republican primary, raised concerns last month about Gabbard regarding her ties to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
…
In an interview on CNN on Saturday, Bolton spoke about Gabbard’s nomination for DNI in which he condemned her positions regarding Syria and claimed that the Assad regime may have files “about a number of Americans” suggesting the files include Gabbard, adding that it will be “very interesting to see.”
“I think she’s totally unqualified to be DNI and I think her positions put her beyond the outermost fringe of American politics. When she visited Assad in Syria, he was effectively a Russian-Iranian ally. And what she said about Syria not being a direct threat to the United States, that was her justification for going, it’s completely false. The Syrians and their combination with Iran and Hezbollah have posed direct threats to Americans across the region. They certainly pose a direct threat to key American allies, Israel and Jordan, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what the files that may be uncovered in the Syrian government, if the rebels succeed in capturing Damascus, what they show about a number of Americans,” Bolton said:
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.