WELCOME TO GESTAPO POLITICS – Part One

Matt Gaetz

 There is a theory, to which I tend to subscribe, that President-elect Donald Trump’s first cabinet pick—the  naming of former Representative Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general—was coldly calculated. A guy facing credible charges of paid sexual relationships with underaged girls—credible enough that he resigned from Congress in an attempt to ensure that an investigation into his antics was buried—and with possible vulnerability to accusations of human and drug trafficking ties, was going to be dead in the water from the outset. That was especially true considering that Gaetz was, arguably, the most hated personality in his own party, after he led a hostile takeover, with the backing of several other fanatical MAGA representatives, to oust former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy from office.

It seems pretty obvious  that Gaetz was supposed to be a lightning rod, a name that would explode on the political and media horizon like a gigantic Roman candle, and draw all attention to it. Meanwhile, Trump would flesh out the rest of his cabinet with other mostly controversial and inexperienced characters that would, nevertheless, pale by comparison to Gaetz, but who would pledge loyalty to Trump—a paramount requirement for joining the president-elect’s inner circle this time around—rather than to the Constitution.

The level of confidence (or lack thereof) that Trump has in the moral and ethical rectitude of members of what is virtually his “shadow cabinet” seems clear from his attempts to forego any sort of investigation of the candidates’ backgrounds. The question that seems to loom is, what might a thorough probe turn up in such a veritable clown car of nominations?

Fox "talent" Pete Hegseth

This is, then, a test of Senate Republicans and, fortunately, Trump is beginning to meet resistance, since the Gaetz lightning rod was insufficient to mask the glaring skeletons in at least one other cabinet candidate’s see-through closet. I’m referring, of course to Pete Hegseth, a Fox News anchor whom Trump has tapped for defense secretary. These vulnerabilities include reports of general misconduct (including often  being drunk on the job) and questionable financial practices in other organizations with which he has been associated. And then, more important still,  there are strong allegations of on-the-job sexual harassment, and at least one report of sexual assault—which was settled out of court in California with money and a non-disclosure agreement, but the long shadow of which persists.

Perhaps one man’s questionable moral and ethical standing might serve as an expendable distraction for controversial cabinet picks, but can two? That’s the question more than a handful of GOP senators are asking themselves right now. Moreover, it seems to become more obvious all the time that some Republican senators have finally caught on to the fact that Trump isn’t a man who works within any sort of rule structure, and, at least for now, a few of them are willing to push back. Perhaps their idea is to show Trump from the outset that they take their official advise-and-approve role seriously. In other words, some of them have no plans to let the president become a king.

The refusal of Trump to subject his cabinet picks to traditional background checks—if he indeed gets away with it completely—is so far proving to be a pyric victory over traditional norms. Such checks before the candidates were actually announced could have saved him the embarrassment of having Gaetz and Hegseth’s dirty laundry being aired in public. At least in the case of Gaetz, however, there are some compelling questions as to whether Trump would have wanted to avoid such public revelations, if the theory is correct about his using the former MAGA representative as a diversionary prop.

But was that also the case with Hegseth? Not likely. What happened, then, was that, even if Trump and the Senate were going to shirk their background check duties, the media weren’t. In other words, if a secret vetting was ruled out, then the cabinet candidates were pretty much bound to be vetted publicly by the press. This was a fact that caused Hegseth to lose his cool this week and shout at journalists waiting for him in the halls of Congress that he didn’t answer to the media, “not to that camera, and not to any of you.” Which seemed like a contradictory sentiment from a guy who has been making five million dollars a year as a Fox News “talent”. (Even they don’t call them journalists).

That said, however, after what the GOP has considered—erroneously—a “landslide victory”, it is doubtful that the party’s Senate leadership is going to want to give any more black eyes to their chief executive than they absolutely have to. And there’s the rub. While they stood their ground against Gaetz in Justice, and could very well do the same against Hegseth in Defense, it seems pretty likely that other questionable nominations might well get through the confirmation process unscathed.

That, in the view of no few observers, could be a real problem. There are a couple of cases in point that it makes sense to look at in studying this Era of Trump phenomenon. One is Kashyap Patel (for FBI chief) and the other is Tulsi Gabbard. Let’s leave “Kash” for later and, today, start with Gabbard, Trump’s pick to head national intelligence.

Tulsi Gabbard with Trump and Fox conspiracy theorist
and Putin supporter Tucker Carlson

The forty-three-year-old Gabbard has an honorable seventeen-year career record in the military. As an enlisted woman, she reached the rank of Spec-4 in the Hawaii National Guard. She was attached to the Twenty-Ninth Medical Brigade, in which her MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) was as a medical instrument repairer. During that time (2004-2005) she was deployed to Iraq in that MOS.  In 2005, she was awarded a Combat Medical Badge for “participation in combat operations under enemy hostile fire.”

When she returned to the US, she entered Officer Candidate School, accelerated out at the top of her class, and was granted a commission as a second lieutenant. As she moved through the officer ranks, Gabbard did a variety of jobs, including serving as a military police platoon leader. That was while she was stationed in Kuwait in 2008 and 2009. By 2015, Gabbard had risen to the rank of major in the Hawaii National Guard. She transferred five years later to the Army Reserve, and, the following year (2021) was promoted to lieutenant colonel while serving in Africa.

Lt. Colonel Tulsi Gabbard

Parallel to her military career, in 2013, Gabbard won a seat in the US Congress as the representative for Hawaii’s Second District, becoming the first Samoan-American ever to serve in Congress. Gabbard ran as a Democrat. She held that seat from 2013 to 2021 and served from 2013 to 2016 as vice-chair of the Democratic National Convention. In 2022, Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party to become an Independent. In 2024, she took a further step to the right and joined the Republican Party.

Clearly, hers is a straightforward and transparent record that is far removed from the shadowy pasts of a Gaetz or a Hegseth. However, Trump’s nominating her to head the nation’s intelligence apparatus is fraught with controversy.  For one thing, she has no background to speak of in intelligence operations. For another, like Hegseth, she is a Fox News alumna, often appearing as a consultant on the Murdoch infotainment network, a major contributor to  the propagation of myriad debunked conspiracy theories that it continues to champion despite numerous lawsuits and a 787-million-dollar loss to a voting machine manufacturer that it slandered in falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

Acting as a mere stringer on the dominant mock-news far-right propaganda channel (sometimes referred to by its detractors as “Faux News”) wouldn’t be such a big deal. But Gabbard has even occasionally stood in as a replacement host for top primetime Fox anchor Tucker Carlson—arguably the most nefarious conspiracy theorist on cable, and a staunch supporter of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

But of much greater concern, in this case, are Gabbard’s own links to Russia. The most glaring of these was laid out in a 2017 memo she penned while serving in the House of Representatives. The wording was so extreme that it put her at odds with her own (then-Democratic) party. According to ABC News, which obtained a copy of the memo, Gabbard blamed the West and NATO for Putin’s invasion of Ukrainian territories. It wasn’t a new conspiracy theory, especially not among the far-right and far-left fringes of European politics. But it was certainly an uncommon stance in the US and especially in the Democratic Party.

Gabbard using Tucker Carlson's primetime slot on
Fox News to push her pro-Russia arguments

Had this always been her position, it would not have been nearly as curious or shocking as it was—though clearly just as controversial. But earlier, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea, Gabbard had supported sanctions against the Russian government, saying specifically that the US should not be “standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine.” The one-eighty that she executed without a hitch three years later couldn’t have come in sharper contrast to her apparent thinking in 2014. In the 2017 memo, according to ABC, she  wrote that the “Russian people are a proud people, and they don't want the US and our allies trying to control them and their government.” (This flies in the face of the inescapable fact that, in Russia, nobody’s position matters but Putin’s, since he is as powerful as Stalin or the Russian czars once were; therefore, what’s happening in Ukraine has precious little to do with the “pride of the Russian people”).

She also blamed the US and NATO directly for the annexation of Crimea, saying that is was Western hostility toward Putin that had forced him to invade Ukrainian territory. “There certainly isn't any guarantee to Putin that we won't try to overthrow Russia's government,” she wrote. “In fact, I'm pretty sure there are American politicians who would love to do that.”

Both positions were not only contrary to her stance of a few years before, but smacked of the style and wording of Putin’s propaganda playbook, as espoused by RT (formerly Russia Today), an international publication widely believed to front for the Kremlin and Putin’s disinformation mill. According to allegations by staffers in  Congress, it is also a publication that Gabbard has frequently cited and mentioned as a source.

Since then, Gabbard has doubled down repeatedly on pro-Russian stances. On Fox News she has gone as far as to posit that US leaders are “knowingly provoking Putin,” a notion that echoes Putin’s self-justification for threatening any country in the West that aids Ukraine in its use of long-range missiles to drive back advancing Russian forces with possible nuclear attack. Despite this kind of saber-rattling by the Putin regime, Gabbard has more than once suggested that instead of remaining at odds with the Russian strongman, the US should extend a hand of friendship to him.  

Gabbard has made her enthusiastic support for Putin and Russia extensive to Putin’s now freshly embattled ally, Bashar Al-Assad, the Syrian dictator who has slaughtered an estimated five to seven hundred thousand of his own people (often by the cruelest of means including aerial barrel bombs stuffed with nails and poison gasses banned by Western rules of engagement, to say nothing of the fifteen thousand people he is estimated to have tortured to death and the one hundred fifty thousand held without charges or trial in his prisons). Nor does that take into account the more than ten million Syrians now either internally displaced or living in foreign exile as a result of the grinding civil war.

Rebels drive into Homs after retaking the city from
Assad's Russian-backed troops in Syria

The only “crime” of the Syrian people—even more distinct from Assad than the Russian people from Putin—has been to rise up since the Arab Spring of 2011, and demand a democratic opening and an end to the fifty years of tyranny imposed by Bashar Al-Assad and his father before him. That long and costly war in human sacrifice is now apparently paying off. The rebels, taking advantage of the fact that Russia is throwing all of its resources at its war with Ukraine, have, in the last few days, turned the tables on Assad and recaptured major Syrian cities, including the crucial Homs and Aleppo.

Children were among the most highly affected victims
of  Al-Assad's chlorine gas attacks on his own people.

Tulsi Gabbard’s sympathies have not been with the noble cause of a coalition of democracy-prone rebels seeking to shrug off the chains of tyranny. The fact is that she visited Syria just days before a horrific  chemical attack, one of Assad’s worst atrocities of the war, in which he gassed an entire town in the early hours of the morning causing scores of people, including children, to immediately fall to the ground gasping for breath and foaming at the mouth before dying. After her naïvely amiable talks with the Assad regime, the then-US representative declared the dictator “not an enemy of the United States.”

Even then-President Trump, the man who has now tapped her to head up US intelligence, disagreed, and ordered retaliatory airstrikes against sites deemed to be the ones from which Assad had launched the fratricidal attack. But Gabbard, at the time, pushed back against Trump, calling his decision to retaliate  “dangerous, rash and unconstitutional.”

It is important to note that Gabbard’s trip to Damascus, in which she met face-to-face with Al-Assad, was sponsored by none other than the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The SSNP is a fanatically pro-Assad organization that is virulently antisemitic. It basically represents Syrian Nazism. Even its party symbol, the zawbaa, is reminiscent of the Nazi swastika.

Since then she has continued to offer an impassioned defense of Assad, echoing the Kremlin’s argument justifying the actions taken against the Syrian dictator’s  people as being part of an effort to wipe out terrorist organizations that are a threat to the world. Well, speaking of terrorist organizations, it should be noted that a staunch ally of both Assad and Russia in the Syrian Civil War has been the rabidly anti-American, pro-Iranian terror group Hezbollah.  Hezbollah has long been an ally of the Al-Assad family’s Ba'ath regime. In providing anti-rebel fighters to the Syrian dictatorship, Hezbollah has framed its participation as vital to its own position, since, in the terrorist organization’s eyes, the rebellion against Assad is part of "a plot to destroy Hezbollah’s alliance with al-Assad against Israel" (its sworn enemy and America’s staunchest ally in the region).

Gabbard met twice with Bashar Al-Assad during a 
controversial trip she made to Syria while she was a 
US representative. She returned home insisting he was 
"not an enemy of the US," despite his close ties to Putin and
his reputation as one of the world's most ruthless dictators.

But none of that leads to the conclusion that Gabbard has been fronting for Assad. No. She has been fronting for Putin. Or at least that can be conjectured from her open backing of the actions of the Putin regime and Putin’s intimate relationship with Assad.

The truth is that Assad could not have been as successful as he has been until right now in crushing the rebellion against him without enormous Russian aid. And Putin has given that to him, both financially and materially, with Russian fighter pilots and Russian planes running hundreds of bombing missions against the pro-democracy rebels. At the height of the war, there were also Russian troops on the ground in Syria. And still today, Putin has been supplying Assad with military advisers and trainers, as well as military police units to help the dictator try and keep his country locked down.

So, is this all just a love affair between Putin and Al-Assad—with Tulsi Gabbard, possibly the next chief intelligence officer of the United States, as their cheerleader? Of course not. Assad and the permanence of his regime are key to Russian  military and geopolitical interests in the Middle East.

In the post-World War II era known as the Cold War (1947–1991)—a period of bipolar global power in which the world was pretty neatly divided between East and West, with Soviet Russia heading the East and the US the West—Syria sided with Russia. Between 1955 and 1958, Russia provided two hundred ninety-four million dollars in military aid to Syria, equivalent to about 3.2 billion dollars today. Russia was instrumental in aiding Syria during the Suez War (1955-1958) and those relations only deepened as the Syrian Ba’ath Party gained strength. The Ba’ath movement was the big winner in the Syrian Revolution in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and it was in this period that Bashar Al-Assad’s father, Hafez Al-Assad came to power.

The material and financial support lent to the regime by Russia led to an agreement with the elder Al-Assad to permit the Russians to open a powerful naval military base in Syria at the port of Tartus. In exchange, the Assads continued to receive military and financial aid from Russia, and thousands of Syrian military officers have received professional education and training in Russia from the seventies into the twenty-first century.

Syria has since become the Kremlin’s closest strategic ally in the Middle East, providing it with rapid naval response capabilities by perceived threats from the US and Western allies in the region. And as mentioned before, Assad’s Syria—and hence Russia—is a major threat to US regional allies including Israel.

When we have a president-elect who, in the past, has shown himself to be a sort of dictator groupie, who has spoken admiringly of Putin, it may be hard for some of his most fanatical supporters to keep track of who the bad guys are in Western relations. But let’s keep it simple. Like it or not, as long as Russia is being ruled by Vladimir Putin, it is not America’s friend or ally. On the contrary, Putin’s ultimate plan is to take back everything the former Soviet Union lost with the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989. And, make no mistake, Ukraine is where he’s kicking off that campaign. How far he gets will depend on how much appeasement the US and the West afford him.

Some detractors have gone as far as to suggest that Tulsi Gabbard might actually be an agent of Russia. Perhaps, perhaps not, at least in any official sense. But if she is not a double agent, then, she is at least a “useful idiot” for the Putin regime, and as such, far too naïve about who Putin is to head up American intelligence operations, which in large measure, should be targeted squarely on the threat that Russia and Putin pose to the US and to the West as a whole.