Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Inside” that former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the intelligence community, “combines inexperience with bad judgment.”
When asked about Gabbard, Schiff said, “I think she combines inexperience with bad judgment, which is not particularly the kind of combination you are looking for in the head of the intelligence agencies. Looking at inexperience, she has not even served on the Intelligence Committee in the House. She has no experience in the military with intelligence mattering. She is completely inexperienced in an area where the programs are deeply complicated.”
He continued, “When you look at her judgment, defending Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, echoing kremlin talking points, taking meetings and going all the way to Syria to take a meeting with Bashar al-Assad, a murderous dictator who gases his own people, claiming that this is not someone who is an enemy of the United States, at a minimum, shows terrible judgment . And the problem is, our allies are not going to share intelligence with us if they don’t trust the person running the intelligence agencies.”
Schiff added, “We just can’t have someone that has poor judgment advising the president. This is the other job of the Director of National Intelligence. They oversee all the intelligence agencies. You have to manage competition between the agencies and priorities for the agencies but they also advise the president. You want that person giving the president advice, to have good judgment. The president-elect already has this very unhealthy, dangerous way. We don’t need someone whispering in his ear that Vladimir Putin is his friend or Bashar al-Assad is his friend. That too is a real concern.”
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN