US President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has been an avid reader of RT news and continued to follow the Russian site long after Washington censured the network, ABC News reported on Thursday.
The article claimed that reading RT makes Gabbard unsuitable for the role in Trump’s forthcoming administration.
The president-elect announced in mid-November that he wants Gabbard to take the top intelligence position, causing outrage among establishment officials, who branded the pick a major security threat.
Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz called Gabbard a “likely a Russian asset,” mirroring smears that the former Democratic Party member has endured for years. Hillary Clinton infamously claimed in 2019 that Moscow “groomed” Gabbard to run in the 2020 primary election, predicting that she would run as an independent later in that cycle. However, Gabbard endorsed Joe Biden, and dropped out of the race.
ABC News suggested that Gabbard’s foreign policy positions “have been shaped not by some covert intelligence recruitment… but instead by her unorthodox media consumption habits.”
Anonymous aides told the outlet that their former boss “regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT” and disregarded the fact that in 2017 the US branded it “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” ABC News added that “it was not clear to those former staffers whether or when she stopped frequenting the site.”
Gabbard, who served in the National Guard and is currently in the Army Reserve, has criticized the ‘forever wars’ that the US has been embroiled in over the years. She has argued that such conflicts do not serve American interests.
While initially supporting Joe Biden’s handling of the Ukraine conflict, she later grew skeptical of the policy. That shift “has most galvanized her critics in the national security sphere,” ABC News said.
The politician left the Democratic Party in 2022 and remained independent for two years. In October, she announced that she had joined the Republican Party, at a rally for Trump’s presidential campaign.