Since Donald Trump was elected president Director of National IntelligenceTulsi Gabbard’s rosy attitude toward Moscow has prompted some Democratic critics to suggest she may be a “compromise,” or perhaps even an “active Russian” — claims the former Hawaii representative and Navy officer vehemently deny.
But Gabbard’s former advisers suggest Views on Russia and its polarizing leader, Vladimir Putin, has been shaped not by what a covert intelligence recruit knows, but by his unorthodox media consumption habits.
Three former assistants, Gabbard said, who He left the Democratic Party In 2022, he regularly read and shared articles from the Russian news site RT — formerly known as Russia Today — which the US intelligence community in 2017 called “the Kremlin’s main international propaganda outlet.”
While it was unclear whether or when those former employees stopped frequenting the site, a former aide said Gabbard had continued to circulate RT articles “for a long time” after they warned the outlet was not a credible source of information.
Doug London, a 34-year veteran intelligence officer, said Gabbard’s alleged tendency to rely at least in part on outlets like RT to shape her world view reflects poorly on her suitability to handle the responsibilities of a director of national intelligence.
“Gabbard’s comments that she has mirrored the Russia narrative and disinformation issues may suggest naivety, reciprocity, or political opportunism to echo whatever Trump wants to hear,” London said, “none of which bode well for the president’s chief intelligence adviser. (U.S. intelligence community) for allowing informed decision-making, telling it like it is.”
Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition team, said in a statement to ABC News that “this is false and is nothing more than a few disgruntled, relatively anonymous former employees.”
“Lt. Col. Gabbard’s perspective on foreign policy is informed by his military service and multiple deployments to war zones, where he has seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” Henning said.
‘Russian Playbook’
Former congressional and campaign advisers said it was unclear to what extent Gabbard’s views were shaped by what she read on RT — and noted that she would consume news from a variety of media outlets, including left-wing and right-wing blogs.
But over the past decade, Gabbard’s view of Russian aggression in Europe has evolved in particularly dramatic ways.
In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard — then a first-term Democratic US representative from Hawaii — released a statement calling for “significant American military support for Ukrainian forces” and a “tighter, more painful” US economy. Sanctions for Russia.”
“The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to undermine Ukraine’s territorial integrity are clear,” he wrote at the time. “We must act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful and sovereign neighbor.”
Former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump hugs former Republican candidate Tulsi Gabbard during a campaign rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on October 22, 2024.
Erik S Lesser/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
By 2017, however, his tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, he accused the US and NATO of orchestrating the Russian attack and lamented US “hostility towards Putin.”
“Putin certainly has no guarantees that we won’t try to take down Russia’s government,” he wrote in a memo from May 2017 titled “fundraising emails/social media fodder.”
“In fact, I’m sure there are American politicians who would love to do that,” he wrote.
He also condemned the sanctions he previously supported, saying, “Historically, the United States has always wanted Russia to be a poor country.”
“It’s about respect,” he wrote. “The Russian people are proud and don’t want the US and our allies trying to control them and their government.”
Gabbard’s sentiment in the 2017 memo is “basically the Russian playbook,” said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO in the Obama administration.
“It’s dangerous,” said Daalder. “That strain of thinking isn’t unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it’s certainly not where you’d think a senior figure in any administration would want to be intellectually.”
By 2022, at the start of the latest Russia-Ukraine conflict, Gabbard suggested in X that Russia’s invasion was justified by Ukraine’s potential bid to join NATO, a narrative perpetuated by “that would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border.” Russian propaganda channels, including RT, and the US and NATO denounced them as “fake”.
Gabbard’s message has at times so closely aligned with Kremlin rhetoric that at least one commentator on the Kremlin’s state media has referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.”
“Evil Effort”
The US government first called RT a mouthpiece for Kremlin propaganda in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, three years after Gabbard was elected to Congress.
Last September, the State Department wrote that it had evidence that “RT has gone beyond being a simple media outlet and has become a cyber-capable entity.” The U.S. also imposed new sanctions on RT executives, including its editor-in-chief, as the U.S. accused them of “malign efforts” to “covertly recruit unwitting American operatives in support of their malign influence campaign.”
So does the Department of Justice He accused two RT employees in September the DOJ called a scheme to pay right-wing social media operators nearly $10 million to “disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”
In the decade since Gabbard arrived in Washington, experts say she has regularly promoted viewpoints aligned with RT and other Russian propaganda outlets.
In a 2017 assessment, for example, the US intelligence community wrote that RT has “actively collaborated with WikiLeaks” and “generally provides sympathetic coverage to (WikiLeaks founder Julian) Assange and a platform to denounce the US.”
Gabbard has long been a supporter of Assange, arguing on “Real Time with Bill Maher” in June 2024 that “(Assange’s) indictment, the charges against him, is one of the biggest attacks on freedom of the press, that we’ve seen, and freedom of speech.”
In Congress, Gabbard too supported a resolution He called on the federal government to “drop all charges against Edward Snowden,” the former National Security Agency contractor who provided secret documents to WikiLeaks to expose what he called the “tremendous” surveillance powers of the US government.
RT reports frequently shining on Snowdenwho has lived in asylum in Russia for more than a decade.
“Undeniable Facts”
But it has been Gabbard’s framing of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has drawn the most criticism in the national security arena.
In March 2022, Gabbard posted a video on Twitter — now X — about U.S.-funded biolabs in what she said were “undeniable facts” in the “event-ravaged country,” saying that even in the “best-case scenario” they “could” easily compromised” — a debunked theory regularly promoted by RT and other Kremlin propaganda outlets.
Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news outlets have frequently used Gabbard’s public comments to support biolab conspiracy theories and other disinformation, recirculating clips of her repeating Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing up false claims — effectively engineering a backlash. chamber to increase their propaganda machine.
Still, Brian O’Neill, a former intelligence official who helped prepare the president’s daily briefing, expressed confidence that career intelligence officials can help Gabbard with a “constant barrage of new information” that will help shape his understanding of emerging world events.
“New appointees to such roles always come with biases, but like his predecessors, he will have full information based on solid evidence provided by people of great integrity and skill,” O’Neill said.
“That said,” O’Neill warned, “Trump’s hostility and skepticism (toward the intelligence community) will shape the environment. If he takes a similar stance, he risks prioritizing or dismissing the input of the intelligence community. inconvenient truths they presented them to him.”
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston contributed to this report.
