Tulsi Gabbard is showing why her job shouldn't exist - Ignatius, WaPo

[question everything]

Tulsi Gabbard can do one great service to the country as director of national intelligence: help abolish her agency. Gabbard’s job is to oversee the 18 sometimes fractious intelligence units that in theory report to her. Because she had no experience in intelligence before taking the job, expectations were low. But she has managed to underperform them. Her most visible role has been as a political commissar, campaigning for President Donald Trump’s agenda of retribution and for his personal attention.

Gabbard’s poor performance has exposed a deeper flaw. The ODNI, as her office is called, has been an accident waiting to happen since it was created in 2004 as a response to the 9/11 disaster. It’s an awkward fit, between politics and professionalism. It has worked best when run by experienced intelligence managers like Michael Hayden or James Clapper. Even then, it risked being a “bureaucratic fifth wheel” in the intelligence community, as the conservative manifesto Project 2025 put it.

Gabbard has made these structural problems vastly worse. Her signature accomplishment has been creating what she calls the “Director’s Initiatives Group” to frame innovative policy. That sounds like a good idea. But when you look on the ODNI website for its achievements, they’re all backward-looking efforts to settle political scores for Trump.

The five listed “initiatives” include two attacks on the intelligence community’s review of Russian election interference in 2016, a tirade about Biden administration criticism of covid-19 dissenters, a review (yet again) of the “Manufactured Russia Hoax,” and an attack on the Biden administration’s attempt to deal with domestic terrorism. The same revenge agenda is evident in Gabbard’s online list of “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” They’re nearly all about payback.

(snip)

“If it doesn’t scare the heck out of you, it should,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Virginia), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about Gabbard’s election-monitoring role. “She has no role in executing search warrants, and she does not belong on the scene of a domestic FBI search, particularly one tied to the president’s personal grievances carried out under the pretense of normal law enforcement.”

More..

https://wapo.st/4rGBR1P

[underpants]

1. Why would a DNI have any public presence?

Let alone how much she has. RW Twitter is awash with INCREDIBLE REVELATIONS she’s found about OBAMA’s attempted coup. Yeah that makes as much sense as it sounds.

She got completely frozen out of Venezuela which is astounding given her position.

I thought we had 17 Intel agencies