(WASHINGTON) — Although she was just in her mid-20s, Tulsi Gabbard’s hair had already started turning white shortly before she first set foot in the U.S. Senate as a legislative aide in 2006.
Coming from her native Hawaii, she had landed a job with longtime Hawaii Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka, chair of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee and a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who would become her mentor.
Now, almost 20 years later, the former Democratic congresswoman returns to the Senate to meet with lawmakers, including members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence after appearing with him a number of times on the campaign trail and serving as an honorary co-chair of his transition team.
Gabbard spent the past week in Oklahoma on Army National Guard duty. She currently holds the rank of lieutenant colonel, something supporters argue qualifies her for the job as critics cite her lack of experience.
She’s also facing renewed scrutiny over her past comments on Syria and her meeting with now-overthrown dictator Bashar Assad.
From Hawaii to Kuwait to Congress
By the time she came to the Senate, Gabbard had already made history in Hawaii as one of the youngest lawmakers elected to a state legislature at age 21. Serving alongside her father, Hawaii state Sen. Mike Gabbard, she became part of the first father-daughter combination in a legislature in the country.
As a Senate staffer, Gabbard remained in Hawaii’s National Guard, drilling on the weekends.
During her first yearlong deployment at Joint Base Balad in Iraq, nicknamed “Mortaritaville” for being hit with daily attacks, she’s said fumes from a nearby burn pit would regularly sicken her fellow service members, causing flu-like symptoms they called the “crud.”
In 2007, she attended the Accelerated Officer Candidate School at the Alabama Military Academy, graduating at the top of her class as its first distinguished woman honor graduate. After two years working in the Senate, Gabbard volunteered for a deployment to Kuwait.
As a military police platoon leader and trainer for the Kuwait National Guard’s counterterrorism unit, Gabbard achieved another milestone in 2009, becoming one of the first women to set foot in a Kuwaiti military facility and the first woman to be honored by the Kuwait National Guard.
In her limited free time, Gabbard continued working on her bachelor’s degree from Hawaii Pacific University, taking online classes in an education tent.
Although her hair returned to its natural color, she told ABC News in 2019 she eventually kept a distinctive streak of white.
“It’s a reminder, every single day of the cost of war of those we lost and my mission in life to to seek peace and to fight for peace,” Gabbard said.
Gabbard later returned to Hawaii and ran for Honolulu City Council, serving from 2010 until 2012, before being elected to Congress as the then-youngest female member.
Bipartisan outreach
As a new member of Congress, Gabbard worked to forge relationships with members on both sides of the aisle.
She arrived armed with 434 boxes of macadamia nut toffee, homemade by her mother, for every member of Congress and an additional 435 boxes for staffers. Each box came with a handwritten letter, a form of diplomacy as a Democrat facing a Republican-controlled House.
During her freshman year in Congress in 2013, Gabbard was appointed vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, but stepped down from that position to endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid.
She co-chaired the Future Caucus, a bipartisan effort to engage members of Congress under 40 years old. Gabbard also bonded with lawmakers over sports, playing on the Congressional Softball Team with New York Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and joining early morning workouts with colleagues such as Oklahoma GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin. She and Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul co-sponsored legislation, including the Stop Arming Terrorists Act.
After an unsuccessful bid for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination, she left the Democratic Party and became an independent and campaigned for Republicans, including Sens. Mike Lee and Chuck Grassley. She told Trump on a rally stage in October that she was registering as a Republican.
Controversial views on Russia, Syria
Gabbard was one of the first to enter the crowded Democratic 2020 primary and was one of the last three remaining candidates. One of her rivals in that race, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, announced she would oppose Trump’s choice of Gabbard, alleging she had suggested NATO had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.
“Do you really want her to have all the secrets of the United States and our defense intelligence agencies when she has so clearly has been in Putin’s pocket? That just has to be a hard no,” Warren said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in November.
However, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri defended Gabbard in November on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” taking aim at accusations that Gabbard was a “Russian asset.”
“It’s a slur, quite frankly. You know, there’s no evidence that she is an asset of another country. She served this country honorably,” Schmitt said.
Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who entered the Senate as the first female combat veteran while Gabbard was doing the same in the House, has opposed her pick for DNI, alleging she’s been compromised.
“The U.S. intelligence community has identified her as having troubling relationships with America’s foes. And so my worry is that she couldn’t pass a background check,” Duckworth said on CNN’s “State of the Union” in November.
Mullin struck back at Duckworth’s comments, saying “That’s the most dangerous thing she could say — is that a United States lieutenant colonel in the United States Army is compromised and is an asset of Russia.”
“If she was compromised, if she wasn’t able to pass a background check, if she wasn’t able to do her job, she still wouldn’t be in the Army,” he said.
Now, with the rebel takeover of Syria and the fall of Assad, Gabbard is drawing renewed attention to her controversial visit to Syria in 2017 — what she called a fact-finding mission — and sympathy she expressed after meeting with the Syrian dictator, saying the U.S. should stop aiding the “terrorists” trying to overthrow him.
Gabbard noted in 2019 that a CIA program “was directly and indirectly helping to equip and train and provide support to different armed groups, including those who are allied with and affiliated with al-Qaeda, to overthrow the Syrian government.”
The “Stop Arming Terrorist Act” she worked on with Paul in the Senate said the U.S. should stop aiding the “terrorists” trying to overthrow Assad.
Assad has been accused of war crimes against his own people during the Syrian civil war, in which hundreds of thousands have been killed. A few months after meeting with Assad, Gabbard said she was skeptical he had used chemical weapons against his own people, despite evidence from the U.S. government that he had, to argue against military intervention during Trump’s first administration.
Gabbard warned in June of 2019 that she was concerned that the toppling of Assad’s regime could lead to terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda to step in to fill the void and “completely massacre all religious minorities there in Syria.”
In a 2019 interview on ABC’s “The View” while running for president, she called Assad a “brutal dictator,” but said the U.S. regime-change strategy had not improved the lives of the Syrian people.
-ABC News’ Selina Wang contributed to this report.
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