Today, President Trump’s nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, and for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, will face the Senate as they vie to get confirmed. Neither of them should be there, as both are patently unqualified. They must be rejected.
Already, we’ve been disappointed by the body’s willingness to sign off on unfit nominees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but here is where there must be a bipartisan drawing of the line. These two are preposterous, dangerous choices for their respective positions, and senators should do well to remember that this isn’t a game or a campaign ad. What is at stake is the security of the United States itself.
This much more than political squabbling. The reason Democrats and Republicans, government watchdogs, civil libertarians and current and former law enforcement oppose the nominations of Patel and Gabbard isn’t merely because they are the selections of Donald Trump. It is because they are both threats to the American constitutional order, the integrity of law enforcement and intelligence and have been picked not due to adherence to the undergirding principles of due process or rule of law but due to loyalty to one man.
We’ve come so fully through the looking glass now that there’s the chance for confirmation of nominees that in plain terms would have seemed not just unusual but absurd, insulting even, just a few years ago.
Here we have an FBI director nominee who has been at the forefront of defending an effort to overturn American democracy, not just rhetorically but promising to go after the law enforcement personnel who investigated these insurrectionists and launch criminal investigations into political opponents in Congress. This is a man with a literal enemies list, a practical caricature of an out-of-control authoritarian or sinister secret-police leader.
Then there’s the director of national intelligence nominee that has spent significant time cozying up to the most callous despots in the world, seeking out Bashar Assad and Vladimir Putin to the point that intelligence officials have worried about revealing sensitive information to her. This person would now be an overseer of intelligence coming through the government’s various channels, with access to practically every scrap of the nation’s most sensitive information.
Trump and his allies, including the nominees themselves, will likely take the stance that the opposition stems from these people’s status as disruptors — that they have fresh ideas that will shake up the calcified Washington elite, an idea that tends to be popular with voters absent any context.
There may even be discrete ideas of theirs worth discussing seriously, for example Gabbard’s past concerns around the breadth of warrantless wiretapping under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is a real issue worth unpacking.
Yet even a broken clock can be right twice a day, and senators should keep in mind that, on balance, these are not serious people. This will surely come across in these hearings if senators take seriously their responsibility to advise and consent on the president’s cabinet-level selections.
Disruption is an ambiguous term; to reform something is to disrupt, but so is to break or to sabotage, and we can expect these nominees to do lasting damage to their respective sectors of the federal government. Take a stand.