Tulsi Gabbard defends good judgment on Bashar al-Assad meeting, refuses to call Edward Snowden traitor during hearing before skeptical GOPers

Aspiring spy boss Tulsi Gabbard defended most of her controversial foreign policy takes during a lively Senate hearing Thursday, including her meeting with former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and her prior doubts about the legitimacy of US intelligence on his use of chemical weapons against his own people.Despite the Hawaiian’s efforts to put jittery Republican senators at ease, it quickly became apparent that some of them were struggling to get past their hesitation to confirm her.“Yes,” Gabbard, 43, replied when asked by Sen.Martin Heinrich (D-NM) whether her now-infamous 2017 trip to Syria and Lebanon, during which she met the since-deposed Assad, was “good judgment.”“I believe that leaders, whether you be in Congress or the president of the United States, can benefit greatly by going and engaging, boots on the ground, learning and listening and meeting directly with people, whether they be adversaries or friends.”Gabbard, then a Democratic congresswoman, claimed that she grilled Assad “about his own regime’s actions, the use of chemical weapons, and the brutal tactics that were being used against his own people.”She said Thursday that while “I shed no tears for the fall of the Assad regime … today we have an Islamist extremist who is now in charge of Syria … who danced on the streets to celebrate the 9/11 attack.”Gabbard had also openly questioned assessments from the US intelligence community that the Damascus regime was behind a series of chemical attacks beginning in the fall of 2012.“My fear was a repeat of the deployment of another half a million soldiers, like we saw in Iraq, towards what was the Obama administration’s goal, which was regime change in Syria,” Gabbard contended, going on to raise concerns that some of the intel cited by the West may have come from regions of Syria that had been under the control of Al Qaeda.

“What I have seen makes it clear that at the same time that you were skeptical of our intellig...