America's most dangerous woman still serves Trump — and it's not Kristi Noem

Even among a crowd as inept and peculiar as President Donald Trump’s cabinet, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, stands out as quite the loon. And by loon, I mean treacherously duplicitous threat.

Trump has proven himself expert at choosing precisely the worst person for every job, seeming to pick based on who would be the most disastrous possible choice. It’s uncanny. Looking at you, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and you, Pete Hegseth, and you, Kristi Noem.

But particularly, looking at Gabbard, the former member of Congress from Hawaii who ran for president as a Democrat back in 2020.

There are so many reasons Gabbard shouldn’t be within 10,000 miles of a post with “intelligence” in the title, and not merely because she so lacks the quality in question, or even because of that weird gray streak in her hair.

You may have heard about how last week the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 ballots from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of Trump’s ongoing mania surrounding his loss in that election. Talk about a man who can’t take no for an answer.

Lurking there in the shadows of the election center, for reasons no one seemed able to determine, was Gabbard. Why she should have been ordered by Trump to oversee the raid when she’s meant to lead national intelligence is a curious question indeed. But there she was, hanging with and directly questioning FBI agents.

Not only that, but on Monday the New York Times broke the story that after the raid, Gabbard used a cellphone to call Trump. He didn’t pick up but reportedly called back shortly thereafter, to question and praise the agents.

Following up, on Tuesday the Guardianreported that Gabbard is essentially freelancing, conducting her own 2020 investigation and keeping Trump briefed.

“She’s doing her own thing,” an “administration official familiar with the matter” told the paper, which said Trump told Gabbard to go to Georgia.

It is, in a word, madness. In another, it’s frightening.

It all shows us two things:

• One, Trump is taking his 2020 presidential election insanity to a whole new level of involvement and will to overturn a settled issue.
• Two, Gabbard has proven herself, like everyone else in Trump’s administration, a sycophant who will do her boss’s bidding unquestioningly, no matter the bounds of legality.

When it comes to Gabbard, however, there’s more.

She has been openly accused of parroting Russian propaganda, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Her views on foreign policy have been described as promoting Russian interests, including a famous 2017 meeting with then Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.

If there’s one thing you really don’t want in an overseer of sensitive and classified information, it’s to be seen as more sensitive to the views of the enemy. It’s not a good look.

There is also the matter of the drastic, some would say erratic political pivot Gabbard made after serving as a Democratic U.S. Representative to Hawaii from 2013 to 2021.

Gabbard decided 2022 would be a good time to dump her party and go independent, followed two years later by becoming a Republican. It may have had something to do with her feelings being hurt after the failure of her long-shot 2020 presidential campaign.

We also must not forget the unhinged three-minute video she posted to social media last June, warning of a potential “nuclear holocaust” and chastising the “political elite and warmongers” for bringing the world “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.

“And perhaps it’s because they are confident they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.”

As the saying goes: WTF?

The video was posted following a visit to Hiroshima, Japan, near the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on that city. Gabbard also questioned whether “the remilitarization of Japan” was “truly a good idea.”

The woman is clearly bonkers, but her words did speak to the administration’s determination to turn allies into foes and totalitarian foes into allies.

It was also last summer that Gabbard released a series of declassified documents she claimed exposed a “treasonous conspiracy” by President Barack Obama and his intelligence team, designed to sabotage Trump. That led to Attorney General Pam Bondi pushing to convene a grand jury investigation.

It's all delusional. But we’ve come to learn that today’s absurdity is tomorrow’s reality.

One more thing about Gabbard has emerged this week, in a Wall Street Journal report. A whistleblower complaint against her reportedly involves material so classified, it’s been withheld from Congress for eight months and is said to be locked in a safe.

Not even Andrew Bakaj, an attorney for the whistleblower, has been authorized to review it. And yet the person who is the subject of this complaint, Gabbard, has successfully kept it hidden and remains in her job, because apparently no possible misconduct is considered inexcusable when the president is operating a criminal enterprise.

How is it that eight months have passed without this apparently massive disclosure seeing the light of day, a delay that could cause grave danger to national security? Because concealing information is at the heart of all this administration does or refuses to do.

Gabbard is fortunate that to her boss, loyalty matters far more than expertise, or even allegiance to country. It’s true, even when that person’s incompetence jeopardizes us all.

This is why Tulsi Gabbard is the most dangerous woman in America, and why her being booted from her job is at least as important as Noem being dumped from hers.

• Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.