Smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard is un-American

Tulsi Gabbard, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be director of national intelligence, walks through Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., Dec.17, 2024. / / Reuters/Elizabeth Frantz

As the date of Tulsi Gabbard’s Senate confirmation hearings as the Director of National Intelligence approaches, so does the smear campaign against her. On the eve of the confirmation, it reached the crescendo with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, one of the most influential media outlets, writing against her nomination.

The U.S. security establishment, a combination of left-progressive and neocon warmongers, is determined to sink Gabbard’s cabinet nomination. Gabbard, a former U.S. presidential candidate and U.S. House representative from Hawaii, has been nominated by President Donald Trump as the executive head of the United States Intelligence Community (IC). The IC comprises 18 federal agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). Upon confirmation, Gabbard will direct and oversee the nation’s National Intelligence Program. 

Resistance to Gabbard’s nomination to be the Director of National Intelligence, the DNI, rests on the grounds that Gabbard, they claim, opposes America’s unnecessary forever wars and criticizes the abuses of the U.S. security state against American citizens. 

Gabbard has been a consistent anti-war campaigner. She understands war as a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Her “fact finding” visit to Syria to meet with the now-deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad earned her the title “Assad toady.” 

Gabbard was called a “Russian Asset” by no less than the immensely powerful and hugely influential former Secretary of State and the First Lady of the United States, Hillary Clinton. Clinton alleged that Russia was “grooming” a female Democrat, an apparent mention to Gabbard, to run as a third-party candidate in the 2020 presidential election. “I’m not making any predictions, but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” Clinton had said. 

The relationship between Gabbard and Clinton had soured when Gabbard endorsed Clinton’s opponent, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, during the 2016 presidential primaries. Since then, the First Lady has been gunning for Tulsi Gabbard, assisted by her surrogates. Gabbard responded to Clinton’s accusation by calling her “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”

Questions have also been raised about Gabbard’s qualifications and character to serve the DNI owing to her opposition to the U.S. security state’s power overreach. Gabbard has previously opposed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). 702 allows the U.S. government to conduct targeted surveillance of foreign nationals living outside the U.S. without a warrant. 

Embarrassing reports of U.S. agencies surveilling leaders of Germany and other European allies have surfaced. A court opinion revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also searched surveillance databases to illegally query information about U.S. citizens, including U.S. and state senators and a state judge, among others. Such searches violate the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the U.S. Constitution.

However, leftwing totalitarians and neocon proxies of the U.S. security establishment oppose Gabbard’s nomination for fear of losing their unchecked powers. One of the members of that establishment, President Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan, went on the Democrat Party’s proxy corporate mouthpiece, MSNBC, to cast doubt on Gabbard’s character and her integrity to serve as the DNI. Brennan claimed that Gabbard could “skew” information and only “give to President Trump what he wanted to hear.” 

Brennan was one of the 51 intelligence community experts who interfered in the 2020 election when they signed a letter dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story as “the classic earmarks of Russian information operation.” No apology has since been forthcoming for this and other falsehoods made by them.

Attacks on Gabbard’s Hindu faith have also picked up steam as her Senate confirmation hearings approach. Smears about Gabbard belonging to a “cult” have also resurfaced. Media outlets have targeted Gabbard’s association with the Science of Identity, a Gaudiya Vaishnava Sampradaya. Some media outlets have picked up some disgruntled former member’s accusations about Gabbard being “under the complete influence of Butler [the head of Science of Identity]” without any effort at fact-checking. 

Some of the attacks on Gabbard accuse her of being not just a “cultist” but a “Hindu nationalist” with links to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Knowing the Head of Government of the world’s largest democracy is clearly not permitted if such a line of attack is to be taken seriously. 

Some congressional Democrat ex-colleagues, including those belonging to the Indian American “Samosa Caucus,” accused her of aligning with Hindu nationalists and the Hindu right. Being nationalist and aligning with the right is clearly off base for the Samosa Caucus progressives. 

When Gabbard appeared on the National Public Radio (NPR) show “Here & Now” in 2019, host Robin Young asked Gabbard questions such as about “growing up in a home with shrines to a man who is considered a cult leader.” Gabbard called questions about her Vaishnava Hindu faith a “misinformation smear” and “bigoted attacks” that have no place in a country that has freedom of worship. 

Hindu organizations have condemned these smear campaigns against Gabbard for her Hindu faith. Over 50 Hindu faith organizations signed a public letter of support for the Science of Identity Foundation. “Rather than relying on dubious sources, for any serious covering of the subject matter of Vaishnava Hinduism or any Hindu organization,” the letter reads. To get at the truth, “a legitimate publication should direct its inquiries towards Hindu scholars and practitioners, as well as authoritative Hindu scriptures.”

The open letter by the Hindu faith community must be seen as an attempt to reclaim the practitioners’ agency in representing and defining their Hindu faith, forming part of the tapestry of faiths that define America, the land of the Free and the Brave. On the other hand, professing tenets of freedom and democracy should not disqualify one from holding a job in the U.S.

 

The author is a Chicago-based award-winning columnist.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad.)