Donald Trump's appointee to be the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, reportedly failed to impress key Republican Senators who would oversee her confirmation hearing. Now it's being revealed she may have previously bungled a key moment in the effort to recover American hostage Austin Tice.
The Economist's Steve Coll told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that while Gabbard and others were on a trip to Syria in 2017 a member of her team "was led by the Syrian regime to meet an American prisoner who that colleague of Miss Gabbard later identified as Austin Tice, the missing American journalist who was abducted near Damascus in 2012."
The detail became a critical "thread of intelligence" and "ultimately reached the Trump administration's lead hostage negotiator," said Coll.
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According to the report, Gabbard met with Trump in late 2016 at Trump Tower after he was elected. Afterward, she said their meeting focused on Syria. Not long after, Gabbard was on a trip to Syria, carrying a message from Trump asking if the two could chat. She reportedly gave Assad Trump's cell phone number, something she denies.
Both Trump and President Joe Biden have worked on trying to get Americans released abroad. Since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, a Biden hostage negotiator "has been over there sifting through prisons," searching for Austin Tice to no avail.
Gabbard's trip would have been the last time any American saw him and had any intelligence that he was alive. It was two years before Gabbard even knew the incident unfolded.
Gabbard disputes the story.
"It's a sad and important story, this abduction," Coll said of Tice. "It's been front and center for a number of administrations. And in fairness, I think all of them have made an effort. We quote Deborah Tice, Austin's mother, as saying that she nonetheless worries that the government sat on leads across all administrations that they could have pursued."
He said that one question raised in the reporting is if Syria had Tice for all these years and was interested in bargaining, why it never happened under Assad.
"I think one of the things I came away with was that the Syrians under Assad considered that if they released Tice, they will lose more than they gained," said Call. "They didn't trust the United States to deliver on promises. But more, they feared that if Austin Tice came home and told the truth about what he had endured in Syria, the United States would turn hostile very quickly. So, it's a, unfortunately, a recurring part of American foreign policy to a greater and greater degree."
All of the information ultimately reached Trump's hostage negotiator, but not until years later.
Gabbard denies the report, but questions about it are now resurfacing, given her appointment.
See the interview below or click here.