A Useful Idiot

 

     Now that Matt Gaetz is out, we're left with speculating who's the worst nominee of Donald Trump. One could make a case for the resident madman of Hyannisport, RFK, Jr for HHS Secretary. Or one could point the finger at Pete Hegseth, MAGAdonia's most beloved white supremacist and Christian nationalist. Or one could make a case for Pam Bondi, Gaetz's replacement and who dropped a fraud case against Trump University (that was later successfully prosecuted) after getting a $25,000 bribe from Trump.

     But today we're going to talk about my choice for the worst potential installment into Trump's Cabinet, Tulsi Gabbard, his inexplicable pick for Director of National Intelligence.

     Back in the day when Bush was needlessly transforming the intelligence community, he created the Office of the Director for National Intelligence. Prior to this time, the Director of the CIA was the de facto overseer of all 18 acknowledged federal intelligence agencies. It wasn't officially baked into the CIA Director's job description but it was generally acknowledged that as the head of the nation's most prominent intelligence agency, he would have loose oversight over the other 17.

     While the necessity of the ODNI has been far from established, the DNI nonetheless has complete and unrestricted access to all of our nation's most sensitive secrets, including the CIA's and that of our largest intelligence agency, the NSA. And Trump, true to form, has seen fit to give that access to someone who is widely acknowledged to be a Russian mole.

     The Kremlin has been nakedly fulsome of its praise and support for Gabbard, calling her "our girlfriend" on Russian state TV. 

     After a false ballistic missile scare in Hawaii six years ago, Gabbard has been curiously deferential toward Russia. She's said at the time that we needed to stop “escalating tensions with a nuclear-armed Russia. We need to work with Russia to prevent war, not provoke it,” which is exactly what Putin would've wanted her to say.

     She's also said that the war in Ukraine wouldn't have started if NATO hadn't "provoked" Russia, which is so patently and absurdly false, I'm surprised that Gabbard wasn't laughed out of the political arena forever.

     Then there's FISA's Section 702, which Gabbard (And Putin) would love nothing more than to see stricken from the law books. Section 702 empowered the federal government to spy on foreign actors. Section 702 accounts for roughly 60% of the information that the president gets in his PDB. Abolishing Section 702 would essentially blind Uncle Sam to the actions of hostile states such as Russia.

     When she was still in Congress, laughingly posing as a Democratic congresswoman, Gabbard introduced the "Protect Brave Whistleblower Act" that would have essentially removed Section 702 from the books.

     And let's not forget Gabbard's questionable visit to Syria to meet with Assad, who'd used chemical weapons against his own people. Gabbard called into question the very intelligence community's claims, the same community she'd be tasked with overseeing.

     In other words, as with Trump, all of Gabbard's plans and criticisms, every single one, would benefit Putin in some way, shape or form. And if the Senate is stupid enough to insert her into this role, one can easily imagine she'll have Putin's number in the Kremlin on speed dial.