Trump’s pick for intel chief has deeply rooted distrust of agencies she would oversee

In 2020, the woman who has become Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top spymaster met with one of the most infamous leakers of all time.

In 2020, the woman who has become Donald Trump’s pick to be the nation’s top spymaster met with one of the most infamous leakers of all time. Tulsi Gabbard, then in the midst of a failed bid for the Democratic nomination for president, met with Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post in the 1970s and was charged with violations of the Espionage Act. He argued to her that it should be unconstitutional to charge officials who leak classified information to media outlets with espionage. Gabbard agreed, declaring the practice “insanity.” Later that year, she introduced a bill in the House called the “Protect Brave Whistleblowers Act,” designed to shield people like Ellsberg. She wrote two more bills that same week supporting Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, who were behind two of the biggest US national security leaks of the 21st Century. Trump’s selection of Gabbard to run the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has quickly drawn scrutiny because of her relative inexperience in the intelligence community and her public adoption of positions on Syria and the war in Ukraine that many national security officials see as Russian propaganda. But where she is perhaps most at odds with the agencies she may soon be tasked with leading is her distrust of broad government surveillance authorities and her support for those willing to expose some of the intelligence community’s most sensitive secrets. It’s also where she may come into conflict with Trump’s own past record — even as she appears to represent an evolution of the MAGA movement toward a more youthful, techno-libertarian vision of the anti-surveillance faction of the Republican Party. It was the first Trump administration, after all, that in 2019 took the unprecedented step of charging Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, with Espionage Act violations for soliciting and publishing classified information.