Tulsi Gabbard, whom Donald Trump plans to nominate as his director of national intelligence, was a faithful consumer of Kremlin-controlled propaganda network RT, three of her former aides told ABC News.
The former Hawaii congresswoman’s foreign policy views, which critics say have increasingly grown soft on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, have led some Democratic lawmakers to question her commitment to the United States.
Rep. Jason Crow said there are “deep questions about where her loyalties lie,” and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, without offering evidence, claimed Gabbard is “likely a Russian asset.” Gabbard has repeatedly denied such claims.
Gabbard’s former aides, however, told ABC that the more plausible explanation for her outlook is her media diet. They said the former Democrat continued regularly reading and sharing articles from RT well after she was advised that it was an unreliable source of information.
The aides emphasized Gabbard also “would consume news from a wide range of outlets, including left-wing and right-wing blogs.”
The State Department has, for nearly a decade, deemed RT a Kremlin mouthpiece and has heightened its scrutiny of the outlet in recent years. In September, officials warned the American public that the outlet’s activities have stretched beyond mere news.
“We now know that RT moved beyond being simply a media outlet and has been an entity with cyber capabilities,” the State Department wrote. “It is also engaged in information operations, covert influence, and military procurement.”
Earlier that month, the Justice Department indicted two former RT employees for allegedly laundering nearly $10 million to a plot that paid right-wing influencers to “disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”
Gabbard quit the Democratic Party in 2022 and drifted into the Trump orbit over the next two years, finally going full MAGA by joining the Republican Party in October.
Her views on Russia’s incursions and attacks on Ukraine have notably changed from 2014—when she called for “meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces” in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea—to recent years, when she has laid the blame for Russian aggression at the feet of NATO and the United States.
ABC obtained a 2017 memo from Gabbard to campaign staff that the outlet said lamented the United States’ “hostility toward Putin.”
In 2014, when Russian troops annexed Crimea, Gabbard—then a first-term representative—released a statement advocating for “meaningful American military assistance for Ukrainian forces” and for the U.S. to invoke “stiffer, more painful economic sanctions for Russia.”
“The consequences of standing idly by while Russia continues to degrade the territorial integrity of Ukraine are clear,” she wrote at the time. “We have to act in a way that takes seriously the threat of Russian aggression against its peaceful, sovereign neighbor.”
By 2017, however, her tune had changed. In a lengthy memo to campaign staff laying out her views on foreign policy, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News, Gabbard blamed the U.S. and NATO for provoking Russian aggression and bemoaned the United States’ “hostility toward Putin.”
“There certainly isn’t any guarantee to Putin that we won’t try to overthrow Russia’s government,” she wrote.
Trump transition team spokesperson Alexa Henning told ABC News that “Lt. Col. Gabbard’s views on foreign policy have been shaped by her military service and multiple deployments to war zones where she’s seen the cost of war and who ultimately pays the price,” calling the former aides’ take on Gabbard’s media influences “false and nothing but a few former, conveniently anonymous, disgruntled staffers.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Trump transition team for comment.
“That Gabbard’s views mirror Russia’s narrative and disinformation themes can but suggest naïveté, collusion, or politically opportunistic sycophancy to echo whatever she believes Trump wants to hear,” Doug London, a retired intelligence officer, told ABC.
