Senate is correct to confirm Tulsi Gabard as director of the National Secret Service

Washington
Cnn
–

The Senate agreed on Wednesday to confirm the former Democratic MP Tulsi Gabbard as director of the National Secret Service.

The vote was 52-48 mainly according to party borders, although the Republican Senator Mitch McConnell von Kentucky opposed the Democrat against confirmation.

Bombard, one of the more controversial selection of President Donald Trump, was obtained by several Republican senators for their lack of support for Ukraine. Your changing position on Section 702 of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an important instrument for surveillance and security; Your meeting 2017 with the former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; And their earlier support for Edward Snowden.

Key Swing Republican Senatorers, including Sensan Collins from Maine, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska and Todd Young from Indiana, decided to support their confirmation.

On Monday evening, Murkowski admitted in an explanation that she was still “concerned about certain positions (giftbard) that had previously taken,” added that Bagard “brings an independent thinking and the necessary supervision into her new role”.

The majority leader of the Senate, John Thune, defended Gabard’s nomination in a speech on Monday afternoon in the Senate, in which he emphasized her military service, and focused on her promise, the office of the director of the National Secret Service “right”. “I am happy that Ms. Gabard plans to concentrate on the identification and elimination of layoffs and inefficiencies in order to restore the office on what it was originally designed, “he said.

He also said that he was “happy to hear”, Gabard to describe Fisa Section 702 after Gabard seemed to go back and forth on her position on this topic.

Gabard is Trumps 14^TH More nominated, which has been confirmed since January 20.

Their confirmation was a dramatic turnaround for a nomination, which was part of Trump’s split from the start. Bombard, a former Democratic Congressman from Hawaii, put the legislators of the Senate Committee on their views on surveillance and a number of controversial sessions, which she held in Lebanon and Syria in 2017.

In a controversial hearing, under the persistent survey of the Republican and Democratic Legislators, she rejected the Senate’s intelligence agency to say whether she now believed that Snowden’s actions are treacherous.

These repeated dodges seemed to endanger their already aligned nomination in the committee, where they could afford not even to lose a single republican coordination-also as she had confirmed by the confirmation Chairman of the Committee, Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican in Arkansas. Although no Republicans publicly opposed them, there were several doubts.

“I am worried about what I hear from some of my Republican colleagues. I am worried that your nomination could be in danger, ”Gop Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri told Fox News'” Jesse Watter’s Primetime “at that time.

After a number of sessions in closed doors, Gabard seemed to calm strange members, and their nomination went off the committee for a party line.

This obvious reversal came to an important state surveillance authority in the middle of a apparently apparently gabbard to her position, which she had once broken down. Her views of Fisa Section 702 – largely by members of the intelligence agency – were an important flashpoint in their nomination.

In December 2020, shortly before she left the congress, Gabard introduced laws that would overturn the Patriot Act and Section 702.

When it became clear that her attitude to Section 702 could endanger her nomination, Gabard tried repeatedly to reassure the legislators that she was now supporting the law.

Gabard said during her hearing for confirmation that since her time in the congress that she had prompted to support the law, reforms had been made the law; The deputy chairman of the Mark Warner Committee, a democrat in Virginia, urged her: “What reforms?”

“There are a number of reforms,” ​​she said. Warner pointed out that according to the law of reforms Podcaster Joe Rogan said that the reforms had the law too “worse”.

Republican Senator John Cornyn from Texas seemed to be questioned publicly at a time about her fundamental understanding of § 702. Several sources that are familiar with their meetings with the closed doors with legislators who understood one of the most important surveillance authorities in the government.

But in meetings with closed doors after the hearing, she was ultimately able to satisfy GOP members who had all voted for them. The Republican Senator James Lankford from Oklahoma expressly cited follow-up answers, which she had gained to her for her position in section 702 with his voice.

Gabard’s confirmation would make it the clearest anti-monitoring officer to lead the secret service group in the period after September 11th. Her earlier animus in relation to what she described as the “national security state and its Warmongering friends”, which contested the spy law and other tools to punish their enemies, has raised questions about whether she could try the rules new To form, according to which which rules are new to collect American intelligence agencies for decades.