Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who was chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to be his director of national intelligence, has drawn criticism for purported peddling of Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine.
Now some former Gabbard aides have told ABC News that they don't believe that Gabbard is a Russian intelligence asset -- rather, they believe that she has come to advocate for Russia through her regular consumption of Russian propaganda, primarily through the state-controlled media outlet Russia Today.
The aides even provided ABC News with a lengthy internal memo that she sent around to staff in 2017 explaining her foreign policy views, which by then had become overtly sympathetic to the Kremlin.
Among other things, Gabbard bemoaned the United States' "hostility toward Putin" and complained that "there certainly isn't any guarantee to Putin that we won't try to overthrow Russia's government."
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Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration, tells ABC News that the views outlined by Gabbard in the memo are "basically the Russian playbook" and he expressed alarm that she could soon be in charge of overseeing America's most sensitive intelligence secrets.
"It's dangerous," Daalder tells ABC News. "That strain of thinking is not unique to Tulsi Gabbard, but it is certainly not where you would think a major figure in any administration would like to be, intellectually."
Gabbard's enthusiasm for Russian propaganda has not gone unnoticed by many within the country, ABC News notes.
"Experts say RT and other Russian state-controlled news agencies have frequently capitalized on Gabbard's public comments to support the biolab conspiracy theory and other disinformation, recirculating clips in which she repeats the Kremlin propaganda as evidence backing the false claims -- effectively engineering an echo-chamber to magnify their propaganda machine," writes ABC.