Tulsi Gabbard’s team scrambled to minimize the appearance of her 2017 meeting with former Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Donald Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence has repeatedly come under fire for her defense of violent authoritarians, including Assad, the brutal dictator who fled Syria for Russia after opposition forces overtook Damascus in December.
Gabbard’s two meetings with Assad during her three-day trip to Syria in January 2017 were not originally on her itinerary delivered to the Ethics Committee. In fact, her schedule included no meetings with any Syrian politician or official.
Apparently, Gabbard’s team was also kept in the dark about her meeting, according to correspondence and files reviewed by the Post. Four staffers involved in discussions about the meeting told the Post that they were surprised to learn that Gabbard had met with the Syrian president at all. One of the staffers, who opposed the meeting, said that they had a difficult time getting Gabbard to provide answers about the details of her schedule.
Gabbard has claimed that while her meeting with Assad was not originally planned, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity once it arose.
One of Gabbard’s meetings with Assad on January 16, 2017, was scheduled to begin at 12:15 p.m. Her next appointment was with Assad’s wife at 3 p.m., according to a timeline reviewed by the Post. This differs from the report delivered to Congress, which detailed that her meeting with Assad had lasted only 90 minutes and her face time with Assad’s wife began at 2 p.m.
Once her staff learned about her meeting, they knew that it looked bad. Gabbard’s deputy chief of staff had warned that her meeting with the dictator seemed “rather long” and urged that “formalities” be skipped to “cut down on the time that it appears you two sat and talked.” Gabbard’s press secretary pitched grouping her meeting with others so it could “appear more like” one of many “protocol meetings.”
One of Gabbard’s former staffers recalled that the ex-representative’s first meeting with Assad was listed as “somewhere around three hours.”
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s insane,’” the staffer told the Post. “What do you talk about for three hours in a supposed unplanned meeting?”
Gabbard’s confirmation hearing is still forthcoming, but this report draws into sharp relief the efforts of nearly 100 former U.S. diplomats and intelligence and national security officials who urged Senate leadership to review the government’s files on Gabbard behind closed doors.
Officials said in December that her past actions “call into question her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the President, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus.”