Tulsi Gabbard secures support from another key senator



Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced Monday that she will vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard, who was nominated to serve as director of national intelligence.

Murkowski's announcement came just moments after Gabbard cleared another procedural hurdle in the Senate on Monday night, teeing up her confirmation vote this week.

'I am counting on her to ensure the safety and civil liberties of American citizens remain rigorously protected.'

"I will vote to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence," Murkowski said. "While I continue to have concerns about certain positions she has previously taken, I appreciate her commitment to rein in the outsized scope of the agency, while still enabling the ODNI to continue its essential function in upholding national security."

"As she brings independent thinking and necessary oversight to her new role, I am counting on her to ensure the safety and civil liberties of American citizens remain rigorously protected," Murkowski added.

Throughout the confirmation battles of President Donald Trump's nominees, Murkowski has been a senator to watch. Most notably, Murkowski voted to block Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine.

Although these lawmakers have historically been holdouts, Collins also announced her support for Gabbard in early February.

"After extensive consideration of her nomination, I will support Tulsi Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence," Collins said in a statement. "As one of the principal authors of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that established this coordinating position, I understand the critical role the DNI plays in the Intelligence Community."

While McConnell has not yet confirmed how he plans to vote, the former GOP leader voted alongside Murkowski to advance Gabbard's nomination on Monday night.

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Kash Patel won’t be lectured by Democrats about ‘election denial’



The Associated Press, which has given up its role as a dispassionate news source to become a handmaiden of the Democratic Party, recently savaged "MAGA favorite" Kash Patel, whom we are warned would politicize the presumably nonpartisan FBI if he were put in charge of it. As proof that Patel could never equal the political impartiality of a Merrick Garland or perhaps James Comey, the legacy media have pointed to his unwillingness to say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) almost twisted himself into a pretzel during Patel’s confirmation hearing on Thursday, trying to get the nominee to recognize Biden as the victor in the 2020 presidential election. Patel kept responding to Welch’s query with the statement that Biden was declared the certified winner. When Welch in exasperation asked if Biden won that contest just as Trump did in 2024, Patel calmly replied: “Both were certified as winners.”

The reality is that Patel had no intention of vouching for the integrity of an election he may still view askance.

Allow me to confess that I love how Patel responded to Welch’s grilling for several reasons. One, the nominee had no reason to let a hostile opposition party push him into distancing himself from his presidential benefactor. Patel took the proper, indeed obligatory, position by stating the obvious about both presidential victors being certified and leaving the matter at that.

Two, Welch and just about every other Democratic senator is Patel’s enemy and will undoubtedly vote against him. You should never try to accommodate your adversaries by letting them drive a wedge between you and the president you intend to serve. I can’t imagine why Patel, unless he were an utter fool (which he obviously is not), would fall into that trap.

Three, Congress is full of Democratic election deniers, starting with Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). If Welch is so concerned about election deniers in government, then perhaps he could show his sincerity by going after the offenders in his own party.

In fact, Welch’s party has a long history of election denying, going back well before 2020; one can easily find statements by Hillary Clinton and even Joe Biden questioning Republican presidential victories. As early as 2005, 31 Democratic members of Congress denied that George W. Bush won the state of Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. As Karl Rove shows, Bush won Ohio easily, and Clyburn, the black activist Democratic congressman to whom Biden owed his nomination in 2020, engineered the attempt to remove the Buckeye State from W’s column. Why should Patel submit to being questioned about election denial by members of a party that has regularly indulged in that practice?

Although I don’t know for sure whether Democratic cheating determined the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, it wouldn’t surprise me if it did. Everything the Democrats have done suggests they will employ any trick to win elections. Blocking voter identification laws, trying to register those illegal aliens they’ve obviously brought into the country as future Democratic voters, working to move elections from more to less supervised settings, and trying to throw a powerful presidential opponent into jail or having him removed from state ballots to keep him from running were all actions that Democrats have taken against Trump. Let’s also remember those Democratic Party officials who tried to keep social media from sharing anything that might hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning the 2020 election.

The Democrats belabor Republicans with the charge that they don’t really recognize Biden’s victory in 2020, and they expect Republican candidates and nominees to answer this charge by loudly affirming the indisputable character of Biden’s election. But the Republicans will be given no brownie points even if they provide the desired answer.

Conceding that the 2020 election was fraud-free also provides at least indirectly a justification for the incarceration of hundreds of January 6 demonstrators, only a small number of whom were involved in physical violence. If the 2020 election was as clean as Democrats and their media friends want us to believe, then should we assume that many of those who have been complaining about electoral fraud have been lying to us?

Perhaps the protesters on January 6 were just looking for an excuse to devastate our Capitol and commit insurrectionary acts. If we believe on the other hand that the 2020 election raised justifiable suspicions, that it looked “rigged” — to borrow the title of Mollie Hemingway’s book — then we are recognizing that there were extenuating circumstances for those who were upset enough to demonstrate unlawfully.

The reality is that Patel had no intention of vouching for the integrity of an election he may still view askance. The election understandably looked fishy to him even if neither he nor I can prove incontestably that massive fraud determined that election’s outcome.

Watch Bernie Sanders melt down when RFK Jr. calls out Big Pharma campaign donations



When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. walked into his second Senate confirmation hearing, he brought a new weapon with him: exposing the hypocrisy.

In the first go-around, several Democrat senators, including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), raked him across the coals for having a conflict of interest. Both were concerned about the profits he has already made and could potentially make as secretary of HHS from exposing the medical-industrial complex. That wouldn’t be ethical, they chided.

Of course, both of these senators received large campaign donations from Big Pharma. But Kennedy never mentioned this convenient information. Maybe because he was constantly being interrupted and was too busy trying to debunk the lies told about him.

But that changed in round two.

Sara Gonzales plays the clip of when Kennedy exposed Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for receiving $1.5 million in donations from the health care industry during his second hearing.

“By the way, Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies. It’s in Congress, too. Almost all the members of this panel, including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry,” he said.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Sanders reacted, wagging his finger.

“I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives, not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical industry. They came from workers,” he added, turning redder by the second.

“In 2020, you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money … $1.5 million,” Kennedy reiterated.

“Because I had small contributions from workers all over this country! Workers! Not a nickel from corporate PACs!” Sanders shouted before trying to rapidly change the subject.

“Guilty conscience got you, Bern?” laughs Sara.

“Can we just get rid of lobbyists?” pleads BlazeTV contributor Matthew Marsden.

Sara agrees that lobbyists need to go but knows it’ll never happen. “They will never agree to that” because “you’re not going to bite the hand that feeds you.”

Jaco Booyens adds that they will never agree to ban lobbyists for the same reason they will never vote to enact term limits: Both would be career suicide.

So much for being public servants.

To hear more of the conversation and watch the footage of Bernie Sanders losing his marbles, watch the clip above.

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'Bobby may be willing to play nice — I won’t': Nicole Shanahan threatens to primary senators who vote against RFK Jr.



Here’s the attitude of those on the left in a nutshell: They’re the party of acceptance, tolerance, and inclusivity … until you disagree with them. The moment you dare to have a different perspective, suddenly their deep-seated animosity is on display for all to see.

Democrats’ treatment of RFK Jr. is a prime example.

“His alignment with Donald Trump is something that they cannot stand because more than they hate you, more than they hate me, because we hold values that are actually based in principle, based in religious belief, based in morality … the left cannot stand when one of their own defects,” says Liz Wheeler.

This was never more obvious than during Kennedy’s Senate confirmation hearings.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), for example, asked Kennedy in a “condescending, accusatory tone” if he was nothing more than a “rubber stamp” for Donald Trump.

Thankfully, this attempt to “trigger” him didn’t impact his response.

With confidence, he answered, “President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again.”

And when Sen. Masto asked if that was the “only reason” he’s headed to HHS, Kennedy was clear again: “President Trump has asked me because I am in a unique position to end that, and that is what I’m doing, and if we don’t solve that problem, Senator, all of the other disputes we have about who’s paying, whether it’s insurance companies, whether it’s providers, whether it’s HMOs, whether it’s patients or families — all of those are moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. Our ship is sinking. ... We have the highest chronic disease burden of any country in the world.”

America’s chronic disease epidemic “is an existential threat economically, to our military, to our health, to our sense of well-being, and it is a priority for President Trump, and that's why he asked me to run the agency, and if I'm privileged to be confirmed, that's exactly what I'll do,” he reiterated.

Senator Masto, says Liz, “has the power to propagate the chronic disease crisis in our children.”

“If she votes no, she's voting in favor of autism and ADHD and childhood obesity and childhood diabetes and autoimmune disorders and cancer and infertility and a mental health crisis, the likes of which no country on Earth has ever seen before,” she condemns.

Further, just the verbiage of her question — “Is that the only reason why you’re at HHS?” — is evidence that she doesn’t care about the health of Americans.

Liz says she might as well have asked, “Just [ending the chronic disease epidemic]? Not any of my interests? Not the interest of my lobbyists? Just your family and your children and your health? That's all that you're going there to fix?”

While this hearing was maddening to watch, Liz notes that the bright side is that it “exposed the swamp” and ignited the passion of especially MAHA moms to see its demise.

RFK Jr.’s former running mate, Nicole Shanahan — “the prototype of a MAHA mom,” says Liz — posted a video promising to primary senators who vote against Kennedy.

— (@)

“While Bobby may be willing to play nice — I won't. If you vote against him, I will personally fund challengers to primary you in your next election, and I will enlist hundreds of thousands to join me,” she threatened.

“Big Pharma and Big Ag have exploited us for far too long. It ends now. You're either on the side of transparency and accountability, or you are standing in the way. The choice is yours. Please choose wisely,” Shanahan concluded.

“Call your senators!” Liz pleads.

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Criticism Of ‘Big Pharma’ Is An Attack On America’s ‘Sick Care’ System, Not Modern Medicine

Kennedy railing against 'Big Pharma' in this week's Senate hearings wasn't as much an effort to 'scapegoat' the industry as much as it was a rallying cry to pressure the health care system into offering true "health care."

Sens. Wyden & Warren slam RFK Jr. for conflicts of interest, but campaign donor records SCREAM hypocrisy



In yesterday’s heated confirmation hearing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s poised to fill the role of health and human services secretary, was attacked repeatedly by Democrat senators who hurled accusations at him, cherry-picked from his books and podcast interviews, asked him loaded questions, and interrupted him every time he tried to speak.

It was clear that their aim was to villainize Kennedy as a money-grubbing conspiracy theorist with a conflict of interest.

One of the worst offenders was Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (Ore.), who accused Kennedy of prioritizing money above Americans’ health.

“Mr. Kennedy has embraced conspiracy theories, quacks, charlatans, especially when it comes to the safety and efficacy of vaccines. He has made it his life's work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids lifesaving vaccines. It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power. This is the profile of someone who chases money and influence wherever they lead, even if that may mean the tragic deaths of children,” he said.

Hmmm … it almost sounds like he’s protecting Big Pharma.

Which, of course, is exactly what he’s doing. One look at his campaign donors tells you all you need to know.

Sara Gonzales brings the receipts.

“$1.5 million [in donations] from the health care industry,” she says, reading from campaign donation records.

Some of the donors include Molina Healthcare, a “vaccine manufacturer,” “Quest Diagnostics lab testing,” who only gets richer the sicker you get,” says Sara, and “Novo Nordisk,” which is in the “diabetes” branch of health care.

“Yes, Senator Wyden, let's talk about conflicts of interest. Let's talk about placing money over the health and safety of our children,” she condemns.

By no means was Senator Wyden the only reprobate on the panel, though. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was arguably even worse.

In her first line of questioning, Warren asked Kennedy if he would vow not to take money from any company in the medical industry for at least four years following his role at HHS. Kennedy agreed without pushback and even laughed that drug companies would never give him money anyway.

However, in her next line of questioning, Warren took a dramatic turn.

“I want to know if you will commit right now that not only will you not go to work for drug companies, you won't go to work suing the drug companies and taking your rake out of that while you're a secretary and for four years after,” she said, leading to a heated exchange with Kennedy, during which he accused her of trying to get him to agree to not sue vaccine companies.

Why would Warren want to prevent Kennedy from suing Big Pharma?

Again, campaign donation records paint a clear picture.

“She takes $748,158 donor dollars from the health care industry … almost $126,000 from pharmaceuticals, $108,000 from hospitals, and she has also accepted a donation from Beverly Sackler,” who is the matriarch of Purdue Pharma, the company that developed OxyContin.

“But she wants to talk to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about any potential conflicts of interest?” asks Sara.

“These people are disgusting. They act like they care about the health and safety of not only American children but Americans everywhere, and meanwhile, they are profiting off of these pharmaceutical companies.”

To see the campaign donation receipts from other senators who accused Kennedy of having a conflict of interest, watch the clip above.

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Like a dog to vomit, weak Republicans sabotage their own party



We are not a nation of laws, and we never have been. We are a nation of political will, and we always will be. Take Florida for example.

What is happening in the Sunshine State is a reminder that the Bible is always correct. The dog returns to its own vomit. Which is another way of saying no one rises above his own worldview. No one. If you’re a junkie, you’ll continue to be one until your worldview has changed. If you’re an abuser, you’ll continue to be one until your worldview has changed. If you’re a simp, you’ll continue to be one until your worldview has changed. If you’re a resident of Covidstan, you will continue to hate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. until your worldview has changed.

The opposition to RFK Jr., Trump, or DeSantis isn’t really about principles — it’s about the fragile male egos of the 'nicer than God' Christian-GOP establishment.

If there were ever a place where people instinctively did the right thing because it benefited them — without necessarily believing in the underlying principles — it would be Ron DeSantis’ Florida.

He rejected every GOP consultant’s playbook to transform Florida from a place that narrowly gave him a victory over a guy who once snorted cocaine off a gay hooker’s behind to a place that awarded him a decisive 20-point landslide four years later. And incidentally, his victory contributed to the near-total collapse of the Florida Democratic Party. So obviously, a lot of GOP consultants should never work again, right?

Nope! Oh, look! Vomit!

The Florida Republican legislature is eating it up in the name of protecting illegal immigration in Florida by trying to give the state agriculture commissioner more power to police the matter than the governor possesses, thus trying to turn DeSantis into a lame duck as we speak.

Take notes, my friends, because I promise you this: If the GOP loses the 2026 midterms by pulling its punches and channeling the spirit of Mitt Romney, the same type of Republicans in Washington will try to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. They resent that both Trump and DeSantis forced them to take actions they had long avoided.

If they can’t accept victory in Florida, seize the momentum, and ride the wave to success elsewhere, they won’t do it anywhere. There is no real conservative movement — only men wielding power.

Which brings us back to RFK Jr. and the opposition to his nomination as secretary of health and human services, led by evangelical figures like Mike Pence.

The GOP’s problems stem largely from the same issues that plague the church. In this case, Republicans with weak pro-life records use RFK Jr.’s stance on baby-killing as a smokescreen to excuse their broader failures. Take Francis Collins, for example — a so-called pious Christian who rubber-stamped Anthony Fauci’s disastrous policies that upended American life and pushed the poisonous jab. Collins has never expressed a shred of remorse.

Meanwhile, within two weeks of retaking office, Trump reinstated 8,000 service members to full rank and back pay after they were purged from the military, cracked down on transgender ideology in hospitals and women’s sports, and ramped up deportations of rapists and drug traffickers who prey on children.

That looks pretty pro-life to me, far more pro-life than anything Mike Pence has done. The opposition to RFK Jr., Trump, or DeSantis isn’t really about principles — it’s about the fragile male egos of the “nicer than God” Christian-GOP establishment, whose only true conviction is maintaining a grifty hold on power.

I’m absolutely done with that vomit. And you should be, too. Be honest with yourself and realize that there is more pro-life action being taken by the Trump administration than in all other GOP administrations combined. Take “yes” for an answer and let RFK Jr. go to work in the battle of wills before us.

5 WILD moments from RFK Jr.’s Senate hearing that you NEED to see



Yesterday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will hopefully head the Department of Health and Human Services, sat before the Senate Finance Committee for his highly anticipated hearing.

As expected, things got intense over the session that lasted several hours.

Liz Wheeler, however, has boiled down the long list of heated exchanges into a handful of the wildest moments that everyone should see. Before she gives her list, however, there are two things everyone should know, she says.

One: “The United States Senate is the most intolerable place on Earth. It is filled to the brim with self-centered, elitist snobs who only want to hear the sound of their own voices.”

Two: “Every senator in the United States Senate is bought off by Big Pharma, bought off by Big Food lobbyists.”

That said, here are Liz’s top moments from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearing.

1. Samoa / measles false narrative

Senator Wyden (D-Ore.) accused Kennedy of causing the deaths of dozens of children in Samoa. According to his phony narrative, parents stopped giving their children the measles vaccine because of Kennedy’s vaccine fearmongering, and children died as a result — an egregious lie.

The truth, which Kennedy attempted to explain through constant interruptions, is that after a handful of Samoan children died after taking the MMR vaccine, the Samoan government banned it. This happened before Kennedy ever arrived in the country, and when he did arrive, he came to “introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records.” His presence had nothing to do with vaccines. Further, of the 83 Samoans who died, the majority did not have measles, according to postmortem tissue sample analyses.

“You cannot find a single Samoan who will say I didn't get a vaccine because of Bobby Kennedy,” he declared in the hearing.

Kennedy went on to assure the panel that he does indeed support the measles vaccine and will do nothing as HHS secretary to prevent or discourage people from taking it, but Sen. Wyden continued to interrupt him, dismiss his statements, and insist that he is a liar.

“[Senator Wyden] is not interested in the truth; he's interested in trying to slander RFK Jr.,” says Liz.

2. “The profile of someone who chases money”

Crazy moment No. 2 also belongs to Senator Wyden.

He stated, “Mr. Kennedy has embraced conspiracy theories, quacks, charlatans, especially when it comes to the safety and efficacy of vaccines. He has made it his life's work to sow doubt and discourage parents from getting their kids lifesaving vaccines. It has been lucrative for him and put him on the verge of immense power. This is the profile of someone who chases money and influence wherever they lead, even if that may mean the tragic deaths of children and other vulnerable people.”

“I think Wyden was looking in the mirror and reading his own bio, because if you look at the campaign donations to Senator Ron Wyden, he has received over $1.5 million from the health care industry,” says Liz. “Who do you think he represents?”

3. Kennedy gives abortion stance

Liz argues that Kennedy was grilled repeatedly about his stance on abortion not because any of the senators actually care about his views but rather because he “hitched his wagon to Trump” and “MAGA married MAHA.”

Even so, Kennedy’s statement on abortion was “an interesting answer,” she says.

“I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy; I agree with him that we cannot be a moral nation if we have 1.2 million abortions a year; I agree with him that the states should control abortion. President Trump has told me that he wants to end late-term abortions, and he wants to protect conscious exemptions, and that he wants to end federal funding for abortions. … I serve at the pleasure of the president. I'm going to implement his policies,” he said.

“That seems to me a very reasoned response, a very logical response, a very calm response, and what does he get in return? He gets the craziest person in the United States Senate,” says Liz, bringing us to the fourth craziest moment.

4. Sen. Elizabeth Warren “shrieking her head off”

When Sen. Warren (D-Mass.) tried to trap Kennedy into vowing not to sue vaccine companies, he pushed back, which resulted in her yelling like an angry child.

“No, I am not!” she screamed at him when he called her out.

“Elizabeth Warren styles herself as being anti-big-corporation, anti-billionaire, and yet who is she defending sitting here on the Senate Finance Committee? She's defending Big Pharma,” says Liz, who can’t help but laugh at her temper tantrum.

5. “Our ship is sinking”

“You keep citing the Trump administration and you’re just going to follow what they say. Is that what you’re doing? You’re just a rubber stamp?” said Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.). “How do you live with that?”

“President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again,” was Kennedy’s tasteful and honest reply.

Masto then pressed, “Is that the only reason why then you're at the HHS?”

Liz translates her inquiry — “That's the only thing that you’re going there for? … Not any of my interests? Not the interests of my lobbyists? Just your family and your children and your health?”

Kennedy’s response, however, was superb.

“President Trump has asked me because I'm in a unique position to end that, and that is what I'm doing. And if we don't solve that problem, Senator, all of the other disputes we have about who's paying and whether it's insurance companies, whether it's providers, whether it's HMOs, whether it's patients or families — all of those are moving deck chairs around in the Titanic. Our ship is sinking,” he said, before reminding her that America, even at 4% of the global population, has the highest chronic disease rate in the world.

A “profound response,” praises Liz.

“This hearing has exposed the swamp,” she says. The senators who vote no are “voting in favor of autism and ADHD and childhood obesity and childhood diabetes and autoimmune disorders and cancer and infertility and mental health [crises].”

To see footage from yesterday’s hearing and hear more of Liz’s commentary, watch the episode above.

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Stop the nonsense and confirm Tulsi Gabbard



Conservatives of all stripes have enjoyed the first week of Donald Trump’s presidency. The events of the past week have made it very clear that President Trump has come in well-prepared and is laser-focused on fulfilling the many promises that won him the election. Whether it’s securing the border, breaking the DEI cartel, or ending Department of Justice lawfare, the president is executing his agenda with unprecedented energy and aggression.

In the long term, though, securing the president’s promises can’t be done with executive orders alone. Success will come down to the president picking appointees who can carry out his will.

The American intelligence world is arrogant, wayward, and in dire need of reform. That is precisely why President Trump chose Tulsi Gabbard to be his DNI.

President Trump chose Tulsi Gabbard as his director of National Intelligence for a very clear reason. Ever since he entered the political scene 10 years ago, Trump has faced not just opposition but outright sabotage and deceit from the so-called “intelligence community” of Washington, D.C. They spied on his campaign and gave life to the ridiculous smear that he was a Russian agent. Analysts deliberately withheld information from the president, then leaked about what they were doing to the press.

And of course, during the 2020 election, the intelligence apparatus pressured America’s tech companies to engage in widespread censorship while a network of “former intelligence officials” lied through their teeth to denounce the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.”

The American intelligence world is arrogant, wayward, and in dire need of reform. That is precisely why President Trump chose former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a longtime critic of these agencies, to be his DNI.

Gabbard is indisputably qualified. She is a veteran of the Iraq War, the worst of the wars that the intel agencies blundered us into. She spent eight years in Congress and served stints on the Homeland Security, Armed Services, and Foreign Affairs Committees, all of them relevant to the job. She has authentic bipartisan credentials: She represented the Democrats in Congress, is the choice of a MAGA president, and has the personal endorsement of Meghan McCain (a Republican with whom I have no shortage of differences).

And what do her opponents bring against her? It’s simple: They lie. Every attack on Gabbard is a smear concocted by those desperate to prevent the change voters demanded in November.

Some bad actors in D.C., and even within the Republican Party, think they can rerun the game plan of 2017 when people thought the Donald Trump moment was a fluke that would soon be over. And I mean “rerun” literally because one of the top smears against Gabbard is the same one brought against Trump eight years ago: the wild claim that Tulsi Gabbard is a “Russian asset.”

Just like the attack on Trump, this smear was popularized by Hillary Clinton, and just like the attack on Trump, it’s based wholly on Gabbard’s refusal to endorse the failed groupthink consensus of Washington. Gabbard supported military aid to Ukraine prior to the country’s invasion in 2022. She called Putin a U.S. adversary. But none of that matters because this attack was never about the truth. It’s about smearing Gabbard for opposing regime change, forever wars, and a blank check for the D.C. cabal.

The same rules apply to the wild claim that Gabbard is an “Assad sympathizer” in league with the fallen dictator of Syria. The allegation is utterly ridiculous. Gabbard’s 2017 trip was cleared by the House Ethics Committee beforehand, and she did a debriefing with America’s ambassador to Lebanon afterward.

Members of Congress are free to meet with foreign leaders, especially if those leaders are the ones Americans are supposed to spend billions of dollars fighting, directly or indirectly. This is why President Trump has sought direct diplomacy with Vladimir Putin and even North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

With nothing else to argue, Gabbard’s critics fall back on the complaint that she didn’t believe Assad actually used chemical weapons during his fight to hold onto power. It’s another lie — Gabbard has been saying she believes Assad used chemical weapons for more than five years.

But it wouldn’t even matter if she thought otherwise. Unlike nearly all of Washington’s war hawks, Gabbard has direct experience fighting in a misbegotten war sold with bad intelligence. Unlike most of Washington, Gabbard learned the lesson that spectacular claims about weapons of mass destruction should be backed with proof, not ridiculous threats against anyone showing skepticism.

Other attacks are even more pathetic. There’s the Hail Mary that she is “soft on Iran” when her track record makes it clear she simply shares the president’s goal of avoiding another fruitless war in the Persian Gulf. Attacks on Gabbard’s Hindu religious beliefs are so puerile they don’t even merit a reply.

Gabbard brings to the table exactly what President Trump needs in a DNI: an independent thinker who isn’t shackled to decades of Beltway consensus and who has learned to be skeptical. This isn’t just what President Trump wants, though. It’s what the American public voted for in 2024 — and the election was not a squeaker.

Republicans who hold office right now hold it thanks to voters who expect them to help Trump keep his promises. If those same Republicans instead scuttle one of the president’s essential appointments based on establishment smears, then I have a simple promise: They will face a primary challenge. I, and many others, will do whatever it takes to see them replaced. Republicans can either participate in the president’s reform agenda or they can be trampled by it.

It’s up to them. Any questions?

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

Dem Senators Side With Big Pharma Over Kennedy’s Bipartisan MAHA Message

Democrats greeted President Donald Trump's pick to lead HHS with hostile interrogations over abortion and vaccines.