The apparent sympathy that Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic representative and Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national intelligence director, has expressed for now-deposed Syrian President Bashar Assad continues to trail her as she tries to round up support among senators for her confirmation.
“I’ve got a lot of questions,” Senator Mark Warner said on Monday at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit.
Warner said he wanted to know about Gabbard’s “interchange with Assad and seeming affinity for [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” as well as her support for intel whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
The Assad linkage is so widely discussed that Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to Mike Pence during his vice presidency, made a cutting joke on a Sunday morning political talk show, saying that the three people most worried by Assad’s recent downfall were “Putin, the ayatollah [of Iran] and Tulsi Gabbard.”
Gabbard, who was a member of Congress from 2013 to 2021, traveled to Syria in 2017 to meet with Assad in a trip that raised eyebrows.
After inheriting leadership of his country from his father, Assad was known for being a particularly brutal and corrupt dictator, even by Middle East standards. In 2013, his forces were accused of using sarin gas in an attack killing 1,400 people and of using barrel bombs — explosives that can be made from empty barrels and other scrap, along with gasoline and shrapnel — against civilians. His government’s expertise in torture led the US to outsource interrogations of some terrorism suspects there during President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”
In the wake of Assad’s fall, some of the costs of his rule have come to light, with journalists documenting his fancy car collection and the release of people kept in the brutal Saydnaya prison.
Freedom House, a democracy advocacy group, gave Syria a score of only 1 out of 100 in its 2024 ranking of countries by how free they are, ahead of only Tibet and Nagorno-Karabakh (which Freedom House includes as disputed territories).
After her 2017 trip, Gabbard defended herself, saying any peace deal amid Syria’s civil war would need Assad’s sign-off.
“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” she said then.
That changed over the weekend, when Assad fled the country and received asylum in Russia under the protection of fellow strongman Putin. His fall ended more than 50 years of family rule after a stunning 11-day rebel advance.
During her time in the House of Representatives, Gabbard often justified a light touch with Assad by citing the threat of victory by Islamic militants, who were among the rival factions challenging his governance in the civil war. That stance also seemed to conveniently diminish Assad’s culpability for likely war crimes.
“Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” she told CNN in 2017.
While the group that led the rebel coalition to take down Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government and has been affiliated with al Qaeda in the past, the opening days of post-Assad Syria have not seen the fundamentalist Islamic crackdown some had feared.
On Monday, Gabbard told reporters that her views now aligned with Trump’s, who’s commented on Assad’s fall by saying that the U.S. should not get involved — an option that virtually no one had suggested.
“I stand in full support and wholeheartedly agree with the statements that President Trump has made over these last few days with regards to the developments in Syria,” Gabbard stated.
Here are some of the things Gabbard had said on the floor of the House, or later inserted as written statements in the Congressional Record, on the need to keep Assad from being toppled and what would happen after his fall:
In advocating for removing language in an annual defense policy bill that approved developing a strategy to counter Iran, Gabbard said, “It’s clear that, if left unchecked, war hawks in the Trump administration will drag our country into more Middle East wars, leaving destruction in its wake around the world and here at home.”
She added: “So what’s the objective of this authorization for war? Is it regime change in Iran? Regime change in Syria? More war against Iran and Syria? Yemen?”
Talking about her bill to prohibit the government from supporting foreign terror groups, Gabbard said the U.S. had for years been “directly and indirectly supporting allies and partners of groups like al Qaeda and ISIS with money, weapons, intelligence and other support in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”
“The Wall Street Journal reports that rebel groups are, quote, ‘doubling down on their alliance’ with al Qaeda. This alliance has rendered the phrase ‘moderate rebels’ meaningless. We must stop this madness,” she said.
Speaking of a provision to equip and train rebel Syrian groups in a defense funding bill, Gabbard said the groups remained focused on overthrowing Assad, which would end up “creating an even worse humanitarian crisis and an even greater threat to the world.”
“We’re waging two wars in Syria, providing arms and support to groups that have opposing objectives,” she said. “The first war is a counterproductive one to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad, which must end. And the second is our war to defeat ISIS, al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, which we must win. By helping groups fighting to overthrow Assad, we’re essentially helping ISIS and al Qaeda achieve their objective of taking over all of Syria.”
In discussing one of two Syria-related resolutions, Gabbard called it “a thinly veiled attempt to use the rationale of humanitarianism as a justification for overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad.”
“If the U.S. is successful in its current effort to overthrow the Syrian government of Assad, allowing groups like ISIS and al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations to take over all of Syria, which is what will happen, including those Assad-controlled areas where Christians and other religious minorities remain protected, the United States will be morally culpable for the genocide that will occur as a result,” she said.
“This is exactly what happened when we overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It is what happened in Libya when we overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. To do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is the definition of insanity.”
In discussing another resolution, Gabbard said she objected specifically to language saying that “Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s violence against the Syrian people has attracted foreign fighters from around the world, who have supported and committed ISIL [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] atrocities.”
“I fully reject this amendment to the resolution which gives moral legitimacy to the actions of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and others who are committing genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in Syria,” she said.
In debating an annual defense policy bill, Gabbard said a provision to train what were described as “moderate” Syrian rebels “seriously polluted this critical piece of legislation.”
“I could not in good conscience vote to support the so-called moderate forces who often work hand in hand with al Qaeda or ISIS, and whose personnel and weapons often end up in the hands of those terrorists,” she said. “This bill continues the same failed practices of undeclared war, regime change and nation-building that have held us mired in the Middle East for over a decade.”
In debating an amendment to a stopgap spending bill to aid Syrian opposition, Gabbard said, “Voting to support this proposal is actually a vote to overthrow Assad because overthrowing Assad is the primary objective of the so-called Free Syrian Army.”
She added: “If we combine the missions of destroying ISIL and of overthrowing Assad, this is not a smart or effective strategy for a number of reasons. We must focus on one mission — to destroy ISIL and other Islamic extremists who’ve declared war on us. Our mission should not be to topple the Assad regime, which would make the situation in the region even worse and more unstable than it is today.”
