Consortium News: 15-01-2025,

By professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has just told America it’s the same old imperium after all. 

Former U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard in 2022 at an event hosted by Young Americans for Liberty in Kissimmee, Florida. (Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

Well, Tulsi Gabbard now says she is all for the unconstitutional law that permits the national security state to surveil Americans without obtaining legal warrants beforehand — a law Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has previously and vigorously pledged to repeal.

As President-elect Trump’s inauguration approaches and his cabinet appointments will be confirmed or rejected in Senate hearings, Gabbard’s in-your-face betrayal of public trust ought to focus our minds very sharply and very fast. Some of these minds, I will say straightaway, have drifted far from reality since Trump began announcing his nominees. This was especially so in the case of Gabbard. 

As soon as Trump proposed Gabbard as his DNI, the shared expectation in some quarters, most of whose inhabitants I respect, was that she would — singlehandedly, I gathered from the commentaries — bring the hydra-headed monster euphemistically called “the intelligence community” under some semblance of political-civilian control. 

And now this: Professing support for Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after opposing it for years,

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