Gabbard's sympathetic views toward Russia cause alarm as Trump's pick to lead intelligence services

WASHINGTON (AP) — Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump's choice to lead the U.S. intelligence services, in 2022 endorsed one of Russia's main justifications for invading Ukraine: the existence of dozens of U.S.-funded biolabs working on some of the world's nastiest pathogens.

Moscow claimed Ukraine was using the labs to create deadly bioweapons similar to COVID-19 that could be used against Russia, and that Russian President Vladimir Putin had no choice but to invade neighboring Ukraine to protect his country.

In fact, the labs are public and part of an international effort to control outbreaks and stop bioweapons.

Gabbard, a military veteran and a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, later said she wasn't accusing the United States or Ukraine of anything nefarious and was just voicing concerns about protecting the labs.

But to critics in the U.S., including lawmakers in both parties, the comments showed a disturbing willingness to parrot Russian propaganda — a tendency that has earned Gabbard praise on Russian state TV.

Gabbard's past comments supportive of Russia — as well as secret meetings with Syria's president, a close ally of Russia and Iran — are attracting fresh scrutiny from Democrats and national security analysts who fear that as Trump's director of national intelligence she could give Russia a major win, undercut Ukraine, weaken U.S. national security and endanger intelligence ties with allies.

“Gabbard, like Gaetz, is like a hand grenade ready to explode,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said, speaking of Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman who is Trump's pick for attorney general. “Republicans who throw themselves on those grenades for Donald Trump are risking their own personal reputations and places in history.”

Gabbard says American assistance for Ukraine jeopardizes global security by antagonizing Russia. She has criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt and has expressed sympathy for Russia’s position, given Ukraine’s desire to join NATO, the Western military alliance.

“This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns,” she posted on Twitter at the start of Russia’s invasion in 2022.

Democrats say Gabbard’s comments signify a pro-Russian bent that poses a problem for U.S. national security if she is confirmed by the Senate.

“Do you really want her to have all of the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly been in Putin’s pocket?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said on MSNBC. “That just has to be a hard no.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to coordinate the nation's intelligence agencies and act as the president's main intelligence adviser.

Gabbard and the Trump transition team did not respond to questions seeking comment. She has in the past defended her actions and said her military service — she has served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades and deployed to Iraq and Kuwait — has made her skeptical about military interventions.

Gabbard also has defended Trump's relationship with autocrats such as Putin, saying it shows Trump has “the courage to meet with adversaries, dictators, allies and partners alike in the pursuit of peace, seeing war as a last resort.”

Gabbard's own meetings with Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2017 angered many of her then-fellow Democrats. They said her visit helped legitimize a leader accused of war crimes and who has served as a proxy and host for Russia and Iran in the Middle East.

Assad welcomed Russia’s military into Syria in 2015 to crush a popular uprising against him. Russian forces and Iranian-allied militias have remained, using Syria as a base for attacks on American troops and their allies. The U.S. has severed diplomatic relations with Syria and placed Assad under heavy sanctions over the brutality with which he, Russian warplanes and Iranian-allied forces crushed the uprising, leading to 500,000 deaths.

Gabbard ran for president in 2020 before dropping out and endorsing Democrat Joe Biden, who defeated Trump. Two years later, she left the Democratic Party to become an independent, criticizing her former colleagues as an “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologues.

She subsequently campaigned for several high-profile Republicans, became a contributor to Fox News and started a podcast.

Gabbard's remarks about Russia haven't gone unnoticed in Moscow, where state-run media have praised her and even jokingly referred to her as a Russian agent.

An article published Friday in RIA Novosti, a major Russian state-controlled news agency, called Gabbard “superwoman" and noted her past appearances on Russian TV, claiming that Ukrainian intelligence views her as “probably an agent of the Russian special services.”

Gabbard's stance on Russia and Syria is likely to come up during her Senate confirmation.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said that while he has questions about her comments and believes Gabbard should receive the traditional background check during her confirmation process, he doesn't second-guess her loyalties.

“I certainly would want to ask her about that,” Cornyn said of Gabbard’s Russia comments. “But I have no doubt that she’s a patriot. I mean, she served in the United States military and was deployed much of the time.”

America's allies are watching the nomination process closely, worried about how Trump's incoming administration could affect intelligence cooperation and sharing.

Trump's election raises “very difficult issues” for America's closest allies and members of the Five Eyes group, an intelligence-sharing coalition of the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, according to Thomas Juneau, a former strategic analyst with Canada's Department of National Defence.

“Will the U.S. be more selective in what it shares, to pressure allies? If yes, this will create mistrust between the U.S. and its closest partners,” Juneau said. “In the long term, this would negatively affect the Five Eyes, which is an extremely close partnership premised on an extraordinarily high level of trust.”

Some officials in allied governments declined to speak about Gabbard and other Trump picks. Since Biden’s dismal debate showing, which led to Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the Democratic nominee, some key European allies said they already were scrambling to build up a security strategy less reliant on the U.S.

French President Emmanuel Macron and other European officials underscored that publicly after the U.S. election.

Lederer reported from the United Nations. Associated Press writers Lynn Berry and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

FILE - Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard waves as she arrives to speak before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump during a campaign rally at Thomas & Mack Center, Oct. 24, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

FILE - Tulsi Gabbard speaks before Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, Oct. 27, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

The 2024 presidential election featured sky-high turnout, approaching the historic levels of the 2020 contest and contradicting long-held conventional political wisdom that Republicans struggle to win races in which many people vote.

According to Associated Press elections data, more than 152 million ballots were cast in this year's race between Republican Donald Trump, now the president-elect, and Democrat Kamala Harris, the vice president, with hundreds of thousands of more still being tallied in slower-counting states such as California. When those ballots are fully tabulated, the number of votes will come even closer to the 158 million in the 2020 presidential contest, which was the highest turnout election since women were given the right to vote more than a century ago.

“Trump is great for voter turnout in both parties,” said Eitan Hersh, a political scientist at Tufts University.

The former president's victory in both the Electoral College and popular vote — Trump currently leads Harris by nearly 3 million votes nationwide — also contradicts the belief in politics that Democrats, not Republicans, benefit from high-turnout elections.

Trump himself voiced it in 2020 when he warned that a Democratic bill to expand mail balloting would lead to “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” That warning came as Trump began to sow conspiracy theories about using mail voting during the coronavirus pandemic, which he then used to falsely claim his 2020 loss was due to fraud.

That claim led to a wave of new laws adding regulations and rolling back forms of voting in GOP-controlled states and an expansion of mail voting in Democratic-led ones, as the battle over turnout became a central part of political debate. Such laws usually have a miniscule impact on voting but inspired allegations of voter suppression from Democrats and cheating from Republicans.

“It's such an embarrassing story for proponents on both sides, because it's so obviously wrong,” Hersh said.

Though both sides are likely to continue to battle over how elections are run, Trump's high-turnout victory may take some of the urgency out of that confrontation.

“Now I think, you just won the popular vote, I think it'll quiet down,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican data analyst and pollster who has long argued his party can succeed in a high-turnout election with a diverse electorate.

Experts note that turnout in the seven swing states at the heart of the election was even higher than in the rest of the country.

“This was a campaign in seven states much more so than previous elections have felt like,” Ruffini said.

While the rest the country shifted significantly from 2020, when Democrat Joe Biden won the popular vote by 7 million, or 4.5 percentage points, the outcome in the swing states was closer. The turnout story also was different. Turnout dropped from 2020 in noncompetitive states such as Illinois, which recorded more than 500,000 fewer votes than in the last presidential election, and Ohio, which reported more than 300,000 less.

Meanwhile, the number of votes cast topped those in 2020 in the battleground states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all of which Trump won. Arizona's turnout was nearly even with four years ago, as the state continued to count ballots.

Harris even met or topped Biden's vote totals in Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin, and turnout has far eclipsed that of the 2016 presidential election, when 135.6 million voters cast ballots in a race won by Trump over Democrat Hillary Clinton. The problem for Democrats is that Trump did better in the battlegrounds than four years ago.

“The Harris campaign did a pretty good job getting voters out who wouldn't have come out,” said Tom Bonier, a Democratic data analyst. “She did get her voters out. Trump got more.”

Those Trump turnout victories included first-time voter Jasmine Perez, 26, who voted for Trump at the Las Vegas Raiders stadium.

"I’m a Christian and he really aligns with a lot of my values as a Christian in America, and I like that he openly promotes Christianity in America,” Perez said.

Voting alongside her was Diego Zubek, 27, who voted for Trump in 2016 but didn’t vote in 2020 because he figured Trump would win easily. He voted for Trump this year.

“I wasn’t going to let that happen again,” Zubek said.

A key part of the GOP strategy was reaching out to voters such as Perez and Zubek, encouraging early and mail voting after Republicans had largely abandoned them in the past two elections due to Trump's lies about vote fraud. Conservatives mounted extensive voter registration and get-out-the-vote operations targeting infrequent voters, a demographic that many operatives have long believed would not vote for the GOP.

More than half the votes were cast before Election Day this year, according to AP tracking of the advanced vote.

During the campaign, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point Action, a conservative group that ran a get-out-the-vote campaign with more than 1,000 workers in multiple battleground states, cited Stacey Abrams, a onetime Democratic candidate for Georgia governor, as an inspiration in his group's effort. Abrams' success mobilizing Black voters and other groups in her home state that were less likely to vote helped pave the way for Biden's 2020 win there.

“We saw that Trump has this amazing reservoir of low-propensity conservatives who needed a little coaxing,” Kolvet said in an interview Friday. “They didn't think their vote mattered, and their No. 1 pushback was they didn't understand, really, how to vote.”

Kolvet acknowledged that conservatives long believed large turnout didn't help them but contended that's changed in the Trump era: “Our ideas are more popular,” he said.

Whether it continues is up to what happens next in Washington.

“It's going to be up to conservatives to make good on those campaign promises,” Kolvet said.

Voters fill out ballots at voting booths inside the Bismarck Event Center during Election Day Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Bismarck, N.D. (Tanner Ecker/The Bismarck Tribune via AP)

Voters line up outside the Gallatin County Courthouse on Election Day in Bozeman, Mont., on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Tommy Martino)

Voters wait in line to cast their ballots outside a polling station on the Navajo Nation in Chinle, Ariz., on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton)

Voters wait in a long line at a polling place at the Michelle and Barack Obama Sports Complex on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)