NO SPY GAME

Donald Trump’s pick to be America’s spy master, Tulsi Gabard, could do “limitless damage” to the United States, one former intelligence officer-turned-congresswoman told What A Day.

• President-elect Donald Trump has made so many wild-eyed, screwball choices for his cabinet that it’s hard to know which one to be most hair-on-fire about. (The kooky brain-worm guy with the public health portfolio? The weekend TV host who’s supposed to lead the military? The guy who was recently investigated, though never charged, for possible sex trafficking, who’s supposed to take over federal law enforcement?) But it’s worth focusing on Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence — aka, the country’s spy chief. This is the person with their hands on all the country’s biggest secrets, who mainlines intel straight to the president. That’s why the news that Trump wants to give this job to former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, of all people, made America’s spies spit out their martinis.

• “Her nomination is just … comically outrageous, and there’s not even a fig leaf of a rationale that he can assign to it,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), a former CIA officer who now sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told What A Day.

• Gabbard is most notorious for cozying up to foreign dictators. She’s been accused of repeatedly parroting Russian propaganda. In 2017, Gabbard visited Russian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has been accused of killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, even though the U.S. cut diplomatic ties with the Syrian strongman five years earlier. Despite those steps, she doesn’t even have very much experience in this complicated field. She once called on Russia, Ukraine and the U.S. to “embrace the spirit of aloha” and recognize Ukraine as a neutral country after Moscow’s invasion. Amid all this, the intel world is freaking out. “We are all reeling,” a current intelligence official told Time.

• “It’s just absolutely dangerous to our own national security,” Spanberger told me on a call last night, while struggling for words to describe the depth of her alarm. If confirmed, Gabbard would oversee 18 intelligence agencies with a budget of $70 billion. She simply isn’t someone who should be tasked with viewing intelligence threats without political intent, Spanberger argued, and she shouldn’t be allowed access to the most classified information, including spy agencies’ sources and methods. “It’s an unbelievably terrible choice,” the congresswoman said.

Tulsi Gabbard isn’t America’s spy chief yet — and there’s a chance she never will be.

• She’s expected to face tough questioning from Senate Republicans who understand what’s at stake, and many have criticized her views in the past. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that Gabbard is an example of “a nominee that illustrates the importance of a full background check.”

• What makes Gabbard’s potential position so frightening, Spanberger explained, is that everything she would do would be out of the public eye. There would be no court of public opinion — because the DNI’s duties are usually closely-held.

• “What happens if we have a DNI who is not so interested in protecting America’s secrets, or who’s not so interested in protecting the legitimacy of American leadership on the global stage?” Spanberger said. “She can do limitless damage, and no one will see it, which is why it is so, so, so dangerous … It’s so incredibly important that people recognize it’s good that nobody knows who the DNI is.”

Sorry, Avril Haines. I know who you are, thanks to this superb Politico profile by my former colleague Erin Banco. Read it — then compare Haines’s extensive experience to Tulsi Gabbard’s total lack thereof.

THE STRUGGLE ISRAEL

Only a week after the election, Donald Trump is already showing how disastrous his policy toward Israel could be for Palestinians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies cheered Trump’s return to office, believing Republicans will further their interests and challenge them less than the Biden administration has. Israel is even planning to give Trump a “gift” when he assumes office — a possible cease-fire deal to pause the fighting in Lebanon, according to the Washington Post.

The clearest sign that Trump will give Netanyahu whatever it wants: He chose former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel. Huckabee’s history shows that he won’t advocate for Palestinians, even though more than 40,000 have been killed during Israel’s war in Gaza. “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” he said in 2008.

Huckabee could also give Israel’s far-right leaders the green light to annex the occupied West Bank, a territory where nearly 3 million Palestinians live. “There are certain words I refuse to use,” Huckabee said in 2017. “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They are communities, they’re neighborhoods, cities. There is no occupation.” This week, Huckabee indicated that he’d support Israel annexing the territory.

What’s more, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, sports tattoos that celebrate the Crusades, and has cheered Israel’s war in Gaza, which he described as“stacking bodies.” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), Trump’s national security adviser, has echoed Trump’s call to let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the nominee for secretary of state, criticized Canada’s move to accept Palestinian war refugees, saying “terrorists and known criminals continue to stream across US land borders, including from Canada.”

One thing is becoming painfully clear: Palestinian human rights will be much more difficult to fight for while Trump’s in office.

NEWS NEWS NEWS

A fellow service member once flagged Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, as an “insider threat” due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacists, according to the Associated Press. Great! Let’s give this man all our tanks and drones!

Oh, and Hegseth was once the subject of a sexual assault complaint filed with California police in 2017, although charges were never filed (and his lawyer said he was “cleared.”) Stuff like this would normally complicate his bid to become secretary of defense. Then again, Donald Trump managed to win the election as a convicted felon, and here we are.

Former Vice President Mike Pence called on senators to reject brain worm survivor Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services — because RFK Jr. isn’t anti-abortion. There are so many other serious reasons why he shouldn’t be allowed to lead HHS, and I didn’t see this one coming!

Trump chose Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) to lead the Department of the Interior. He also chose former Rep. Doug Collins, who defended Trump during his first impeachment hearing, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs. And he named Steven Cheung, an insult-prone former UFC spokesman with the personality of a blowtorch, to be his director of communications.

The death toll from Sudan’s civil war is around 60,000 in one of the country’s regions, nearly three times higher than previous counts, according to new research. Earlier this year, U.S. special envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello estimated that as many as 150,000 people have been killed during the two years of fighting

The ACLU knows exactly what kind of threats we’re up against in a second Donald Trump term.

Mass deportations. Nationwide abortion bans. Unprecedented expansion of executive power and crackdowns on free speech and other First Amendment rights. Project 2025.

The ACLU is prepared for these threats. They took legal action against Trump’s administration 434 times when he was first in office, and they will do it again. The ACLU has the playbook to fight back – and win – once again.

Join the ACLU today to help protect immigrants’ rights, abortion rights, free speech and so much more in a Trump presidency.

The ACLU is built for moments like this. With your support, they will hold the Trump administration accountable and defend our most fundamental civil rights.

Join today to ensure the ACLU can put lawyers in courtrooms, advocates in front of state legislatures, and organizers in communities all over the country who will stop the Trump administration from enacting their extreme Project 2025 agenda.