On the recordFebruary 10, 2025
I am grateful to be on the floor here tonight with my colleague from California, Senator Schiff, and others to talk about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard--now the successful nomination, I guess, of Tulsi Gabbard--to be the Director of National Intelligence. To say the least, I never thought that we would see a moment in the history of the United States, in the history of our attempt as a Congress to ensure that the American people and that the President get the intelligence they need. In all of these years and over all of these decades, I never imagined we would see someone like Tulsi Gabbard approved on the floor of the U.S. Senate for that job, and I wanted to speak tonight, just briefly, to say why I think that was the wrong direction for the Trump administration and, more importantly, the wrong direction for the American people. Let me say, first of all, intelligence--and being a member of the Intelligence Committee, I know this is unlike anything else we do around here, because a lot of what happens--my colleague Senator King from Maine is here--is done in secret. One of the great privileges of being on the Intelligence Committee is that--I think, in part--because it is in secret, there isn't the kind of partisanship that you see on a lot of the other committees. There isn't the jockeying for position or for political notoriety; that people on that committee are very serious about our work.…
