WASHINGTON (AP) — When Tulsi Gabbard returned to Washington from a clandestine sit-down with Syria’s then-president Bashar Assad eight years ago this month, she was greeted with a flurry of criticism.
Lawmakers and civil society groups chastised Gabbard, then a Hawaii congresswoman, for her meeting with an avowed U.S. adversary whose administration has been credibly accused of war crimes and major human rights abuses. A Republican congressman even called the meeting a “disgrace.â€
At the time, Gabbard defended the trip by saying she had gone to try to find a peaceful resolution to a long and bloody conflict. But the details of what the pair discussed remain a mystery — dogging Gabbard to this day and has taken on new salience as rebels and President Donald Trump has nominated her to be the nation’s spy chief.
Gabbard can afford to only lose votes from three Republican senators if all Democrats oppose her nomination. Several GOP lawmakers have refused to say how they will vote. Echoing other Republicans, Sen. Lindsey Graham told NBC's “Meet the Press" over the weekend that he needed to see how Gabbard handled her confirmation hearing, slated for Thursday, before making a decision. Among the top questions Graham wants answered: “Why did you go to Syria? What did you do regarding Assad?"
A key moment in Gabbard’s eight-year stint on Capitol Hill, the Assad sit-down also provides insights into the nominee’s worldview and is emblematic of an to politics that has fueled her rise from progressive favorite to one of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the 2024 campaign. Since arriving in Washington in 2013 as a Democratic legislator representing Hawaii, Gabbard has routinely staked out foreign policy and national security positions that put her on the opposite side of every presidential administration, including Trump’s.
Bipartisan questions about Gabbard and trip
Lawmakers of both parties have said Gabbard's meeting with Assad raises questions about the judgment and worldview of someone tapped to be Trump’s director of national intelligence. Trump and his allies have brushed off criticism of Gabbard’s face-to-face with Assad. “I met with Putin. I met with President Xi of China. I met with Kim Jong-un twice. Does that mean that I can’t be president?†Trump said on NBC in December, adding that Gabbard is a “highly respected person.â€
Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, said the trip was approved by the House ethics panel at the time, included debriefings with top U.S. officials and congressional leaders upon her return, and has generated very little interest from senators in the nominee’s private meetings on Capitol Hill.
But those who study national security issues say there has never been as for the post as Gabbard.
And it’s not just about her trip to Syria. Among her most controversial positions: She’s called for pardoning intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked numerous highly classified programs in 2013, and she has advocated unwinding key intelligence programs that spy agencies have come to rely on. (A transition spokeswoman says she’s changed her position on the intelligence law.)
Critics over the years have accused her of . And she has advocated against the prosecution of Wikileaks founder , a bête noir of the U.S. spy agencies for more than a decade who ran an organization that Trump's former CIA director Mike Pompeo called a “hostile intelligence service.†Assange pleaded guilty last year to publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with federal prosecutors that secured his release, ended his high-profile case, and allowed him to avoid prison time in the U.S.
“She’s a highly unusual choice to be director of national intelligence,†Jamil N. Jaffer, executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University and a former senior Capitol Hill staffer and Bush administration official.
“President Trump has nominated a bunch of people that are mainstream and will get through because nobody’s going to object to them,†Jaffer said. “Then there’s a few that leave you scratching your head.â€
Gabbard’s rise
A combat veteran and a one-time rising star in the Democratic Party and a progressive darling, Gabbard has drifted rightward and found common cause with Trump and other populist figures in his political orbit.
One of the throughlines in Gabbard’s career is her skepticism about the wisdom of using U.S. power abroad. That view has won her plaudits in certain circles on both the progressive left and Trump’s MAGA base, amid a roiling debate in both political parties over whether the U.S. should play a leadership role in global affairs or look more inward.
Gabbard came to Congress in 2013, just as the Syria conflict took center-stage in U.S. foreign policy. The conflict grew out of the regional Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 but unlike some of the other authoritarian governments in the region, the Assad regime clung to power with assistance from Iran and Russia.
Over time, Gabbard would transition from questioning the wisdom or legality of certain aspects of U.S.-Syria policy to questioning the facts being presented to the public.
In 2015, Gabbard was part of a congressional trip led by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., to the Turkish-Syrian border to see the impact of the war. As part of that trip, they visited Gaziantep, where civilians from Syria were receiving medical treatment across the border in Turkey.
Mouaz Mustafa, who is the executive director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force and who was serving as a translator for Gabbard and other members of Congress on that visit to the border, recalled a conversation between the congresswoman and several young girls who were getting treatment from injuries sustained in airstrikes by regime forces. When the girls recounted being injured by Syrian airplanes, Gabbard questioned their story, Mustafa claimed.
“Her response was, ‘How do you know it was Assad and Russia and not ISIS?’†Mustafa recalled of the exchange. “Ludicrous question: ISIS doesn’t have airplanes.†Henning, the spokeswoman for the Trump transition, denied the exchange occurred.
Two years later, she echoed similar doubts about the Trump administration’s assessment that the Assad regime used sarin gas to attack civilians. A United Nationals panel and numerous other foreign governments came to the same conclusion. The Trump administration conducted airstrikes in response to the attack, an attack Gabbard opposed.
The Syria Trip
She departed on her 2017 trip to Syria just before Trump took office. It was arranged by two Arab-American brothers, Bassam and Elias Khawam. According to people who know the Khawams but did not want to speak publicly against fellow members of the tight-knit Arab-American community, they are Lebanese-Americans with a history of activism in Arab American political circles particularly on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Bassam has also long been active in U.S. politics. Since 2005, he’s donated more than $40,000 to mostly Democratic political candidates according to federal campaign finance records — though he’s occasionally crossed party lines, supporting Ralph Nader’s 2008 Green Party presidential bid, Republican Justin Amash for Congress and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The Khawams also have ties to a foreign political movement: the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a right-wing nationalist movement that advocates the integration of Lebanon into an enlarged Syria state. The party was allied for a time with the Assad regime — and the brothers were part of a broader split inside the Arab-American community over how to respond to the Syrian civil war.
Some Arab Americans saw Assad as a bulwark against terrorism — seeing the anti-Assad forces as tied to Islamic terrorists while many others were appalled by decades of authoritarian rule and human rights violations and supported any effort to oust the Assads.
“In the U.S., there are segments of the Syrian diaspora that support the Assad regime.
This includes Syrian Christians and some Syrian Muslims. That community has mobilized in various ways to support the regime,†said Steven Heydemann, a Middle East expert who is a professor at Smith College and a fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution. “Seeing Gabbard as someone who could further their cause, (the Khawams) brought her to Syria to emphasize their narrative and attempt to temper U.S. opposition.â€
Democratic U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who received campaign donations over the years from the Khawams, joined Gabbard on the trip. Kucinich, like Gabbard, is a Democrat-turned-independent and a longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy. The two are political allies, having endorsed each other’s various runs for office. He did not respond to calls seeking comment — but the trip was a major controversy during his unsuccessful
Gabbard did not publicize her trip before she left, and upon her return, she described it as a “fact-finding†mission. Even her own staff was unaware of her plans and struggled to reconstruct the trip when she began filing required congressional disclosure forms, according . She did not disclose many details about what she discussed in her meetings in Lebanon and Syria. Under questioning from reporters upon her return, she admitted she sat down with Assad.
“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,†Gabbard . In 2019, she went further, saying in an interview on MSNBC: “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.â€
Gabbard’s official itinerary filed three weeks after she returned in a disclosure report to Congress showed two meetings with Assad that lasted a total of two hours — plus an additional meeting with the first lady of Syria, the Syrian foreign minister and the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. In Lebanon, she also met with a wide variety of civil society figures.
To Gabbard’s supporters and allies, she was merely expressing a realpolitik critique of the U.S. rush to push out Assad — a conflict that she feared might lead to another protracted war. “In no way was she defending Assad. She has called him a brutal dictator,†said Henning, the Trump transition spokeswoman.
But others saw her rhetoric as echoing talking points and policy positions held by America’s adversaries, particularly Russia. The Kremlin was among Assad’s strongest backers in terms of political and military support. Hillary Clinton called her a “Russian asset†in 2019 — a charge that led Gabbard to file a libel lawsuit against the former secretary of state that was later dropped.
More recently, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley a “Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.â€
Senate Republicans have been more muted in their criticism since her nomination was announced. But they nevertheless hope to glean some answers about her discussions with Assad, who fled to Russia after his regime was toppled.
Sen James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma who sits on the intelligence panel that will consider her nomination, said on CNN: “We’ll have lots of questions. She met with Bashar Assad. We’ll want to know what the purpose and what the direction for that was.â€
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Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington, Julie Carr Smyth in Cleveland and Bassem Mroue in Lebanon contributed to this report.
