Senate GOP pushes for Gabbard hearing before inauguration, but Democrats resist setting date for next week

By Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, Clare Foran and Ted Barrett, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Senate Republicans are pushing to hold a confirmation hearing for Tulsi Gabbard before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, but Democrats are resisting setting a date for next week as the Intelligence Committee has not yet received key paperwork on the nomination, including an FBI background check, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

A spokesperson for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, told CNN the chairman “intends to hold these hearings before Inauguration Day,” a timeline that would mean a hearing would need to take place either this week or next for Gabbard, Trump’s pick to serve as director of national intelligence.

“The Intelligence Committee, the nominees and the transition are diligently working toward that goal,” the spokesperson said.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has not yet received the necessary paperwork from Gabbard to hold a hearing, one of the sources said, saying the paperwork includes an FBI background check, ethics disclosure or a pre-hearing questionnaire and the background check must be submitted to the committee a week before a confirmation hearing takes place.

A separate source familiar told CNN that the committee expects to receive all the relevant materials to process the nomination shortly, including paperwork from the Office of Government Ethics. The source said that Gabbard has an active clearance so the FBI should be able to expedite the background check. The committee also intends to send an additional pre-hearing questionnaire to the nominee, the source said.

If the committee receives the paperwork by the end of this week, a hearing could still take place at the end of next week with a full week between the hearing and receipt of the materials.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN on Tuesday that he has a “lot of questions” for Gabbard.

“This is an extraordinarily important job,” Warner said about the role of director of national intelligence, or spy chief.

CNN previously reported that Warner was expected to meet with Gabbard privately on Tuesday. “I had questions going in and I had questions coming out,” he told CNN.

“A lot of this is also about protecting the independence of the intelligence community and making sure we continue to have the ability to share classified information with our allies,” Warner added.

When asked if he believes Gabbard is fit for the job of DNI, Warner demurred.

“This not a criticism, we just got her all the questions,” Warner said. “It’s just the beginning of the process.”

The Gabbard nomination is viewed as controversial and has 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.

The former Hawaii congresswoman has taken stances that have been at odds with US foreign policy, including meeting with then-Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria in 2017, and saying in 2019 that he was “not an enemy of the United States.”

In early 2022, she echoed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rationale for its invasion of Ukraine, pinning the blame not on Moscow but on the Biden administration’s failure to acknowledge “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO” — a popular strain of thought in some right-wing circles.

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