Former staff members of Tulsi Gabbard, President Trump’s nominee for director of intelligence, say they were shocked to learn she met with the then president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad.
In Jan. 2017, Gabbard infamously went on an unannounced three-day trip to Damascus to meet with Assad, amidst the backdrop of Syria’s bloody civil war, which had been raging for 5 years at the time. She was also the first U.S. Congress member to visit the country since 2011, when the Assad regime massacred peaceful protesters part of the “Arab Spring” movement, and imprisoned dissidents in abhorrent conditions, per AlterNet and Washington Post.
On Feb. 5. 2017, Gabbard made a timeline of her activities during her trip to Syria to help her staff with a report for the House Ethics Committee, according to documents acquired by The Post. Post-trip accounts of official travel are required by the committee, and her’s was due the following day.
In the original itinerary, Gabbard was scheduled to meet with Assad at 12:15 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2017, and then meet with his wife at 3:00 p.m. However, the itinerary submitted by Gabbard reported that her meeting with Assad lasted 90 minutes, and her meeting with Assad’s wife began at 2:00 p.m.
According to records obtained by The Post, Gabbard’s team was completely unaware of her trip schedule, and the original itinerary approved by the Ethics Committee listed zero meetings with Syrian officials. Her team also rushed to write an explanation to use in mandatory ethics filings, and to limit the political fallout.
Four former staffers anonymously told The Post that they were shocked to find out that Gabbard met with Assad twice in three days.
One of the aids told The Post that they condemned the idea of meeting Assad, and when they asked Gabbard about who she met with and how long for, they struggled to get a direct answer.
“I remember thinking, ‘That’s insane.’ What do you talk about for three hours in a supposed unplanned meeting?”, said one of the former staffers to The Post.
“Looking back, I will go to the grave believing that she lied to us.”, said another staffer. “Her claim is that it just sort of happened. How did you just happen to meet with the leader of [a police state] not once, but twice?”
Gabbard was initially invited on an all-expenses-paid trip to Syria and Lebanon in Nov. 2016 by Cleveland-based activist Bassam Khawam, who reportedly has ties to pro-Assad groups. According to the invitation, the trip gave her the chance to meet Syria’s foreign minister “other prominent political dignitaries.”.
After the post-trip report was publicized, it was revealed that Gabbard had repaid $9,000, with $1,350 for “transportation within Syria/Lebanon” according to The Post. She also told a staffer that because of her reimbursements she didn’t have to disclose “the travel paid by the Syrian and Lebanese governments,”
As mentioned by The New Republic, a coalition of nearly 100 U.S. diplomats and national security officials demanded the Senate privately review Gabbard’s government files, due to her previous track record.
In December, Assad was ousted from his position when rebels retook Damascus, but was granted asylum in Russia by its president, Vladimir Putin.
The Syrian Civil War has displaced 11 million Syrians, and has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, included in regime-conducted chemical weapons attacks. One chemical weapons attack, which killed an estimated 89 civilians in rebel-held territory, was launched two months after Gabbard’s trip. While the U.S. government attributed the attacks to the Assad regime, Gabbard said that she was “skeptical” of the statements, per The Post.
As director of national intelligence, Gabbard would be overseeing all U.S. spy and intelligence agencies, including the FBI, CIA, and NSA.
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