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| 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?
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
