Tulsi Gabbard changes tone on surveillance powers she once sought to dismantle

By Zachary Cohen and Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is voicing support for a key government surveillance authority she once sought to dismantle.

The shift comes amid lingering uncertainty about Gabbard’s path to confirmation despite her having spent the last several weeks meeting with senators on both sides of the aisle in an effort to win their support.

In a new statement to CNN on Friday, Gabbard said she will support FISA Section 702 — an intelligence gathering tool passed by Congress after September 11, 2001 — if confirmed as Trump’s spy chief, marking a dramatic shift from her previous attempts to repeal the same authority and comments raising deep concerns about domestic surveillance.

“Section 702, unlike other FISA authorities, is crucial for gathering foreign intelligence on non-U.S. persons abroad. This unique capability cannot be replicated and must be safeguarded to protect our nation while ensuring the civil liberties of Americans,” Gabbard said in the statement to CNN.

“My prior concerns about FISA were based on insufficient protections for civil liberties, particularly regarding the FBI’s misuse of warrantless search powers on American citizens. Significant FISA reforms have been enacted since my time in Congress to address these issues. If confirmed as DNI, I will uphold Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights while maintaining vital national security tools like Section 702 to ensure the safety and freedom of the American people,” she added.

Gabbard also met Friday with the current director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, according to a source familiar with the matter, who declined to provide additional details about what was discussed.

The meeting comes as Senate Republicans have been pushing to hold a confirmation hearing for Gabbard before Trump’s inauguration, but Democrats are resisting setting a date for next week as the Intelligence Committee has not yet received key paperwork on the nomination, including an FBI background check, two sources familiar with the matter previously told CNN.

Trump’s selection of Gabbard to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence quickly drew scrutiny because of her relative inexperience in the intelligence community and her public adoption of positions on Syria and the war in Ukraine that many national security officials see as Russian propaganda.

But where she is perhaps most at odds with the agencies she may soon be tasked with leading is her distrust of broad government surveillance authorities and her support for those willing to expose some of the intelligence community’s most sensitive secrets.

Gabbard’s confirmation would make her the most markedly anti-surveillance official to lead the intelligence community in the post-9/11 era. Her previous animus toward what she has described as the “national security state and its warmongering friends,” hell-bent on using the Espionage Act and other tools to punish its enemies, has raised questions about whether she might seek to reshape the rules by which American intelligence agencies have been collecting, searching and using intelligence for decades.

In December 2020, shortly before she left Congress, Gabbard introduced legislation that would repeal the Patriot Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Like her other legislative attempts on spying issues, it went nowhere.

But Gabbard’s disdain for government surveillance powers —  and her aggrieved sense that Americans have been lied to about those authorities — are among her most coherent and consistent national security positions, even as Gabbard has transformed from a Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate to a potential Cabinet member in the new Trump administration.

In 2017, when Trump was challenging the credibility of the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned him: “You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Gabbard, then a Democrat, heard a “chilling message,” she wrote in her memoir: “The intelligence community and national security state are so supremely powerful and accountable to no one that even the president of the United States better not dare criticize them.”

Punchbowl was first to report Gabbard’s statement regarding FISA Section 702.

The-CNN-Wire
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