Alina Habba Rushes to Brush off Tulsi Gabbard’s Syria Ties

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba is claiming that Tulsi Gabbard was never actually a fan of Syria’s fallen dictatorial regime—even though Gabbard publicly defended it.

During an appearance on Fox News Tuesday, host Laura Ingraham claimed that Trump’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence had been wrongfully smeared as “an apologist” for Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, the dictator who fled Syria for Russia last week after rebels overtook Damascus.

“It looks like, both with Tulsi and with Pete Hegseth, that this stuff doesn’t seem to be sticking. Am I reading this right?” Ingraham asked, almost as if to clarify she’d gotten the Republican messaging right.

“Are you saying that perhaps they could create a dossier, or say that there’s a Russia-Russia hoax and continue it for years on end. I don’t believe it, Laura!” Habba deadpanned. “Yeah, no kidding. This is what they do when they’re desperate, we know this.”

Unfortunately for Habba, Gabbard, and the fate of U.S. foreign relations, Gabbard’s statements supporting Assad aren’t the invention of her critics or the liberal media.

In 2017, Gabbard, the then–Democratic Representative from Hawaii, met with Assad during a secretive four-day trip to Syria. She said she couldn’t turn down the opportunity to meet the leader responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrians.

“When the opportunity arose to meet with him, I did so because I felt that it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace,” she told CNN’s Jake Tapper at the time. She also criticized Assad’s opposition, insisting that there were no moderate rebels left in the country.

“Let the Syrian people themselves determine their future, not the United States, not some foreign country,” Gabbard said.

During an appearance on MSNBC in February 2019, Gabbard proclaimed, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Gabbard has been criticized for her coziness with a slew of autocratic leaders, including Assad, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. When Trump nominated her to become the next director of national intelligence, the reaction in Moscow was reportedly “gleeful.”

Habba went on to describe Gabbard and Hegseth, both of whom are unqualified and preposterous nominees in their own rights, as “really strong candidates, with really amazing backgrounds.”

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is one of the first items on the Trump Justice Department’s chopping block. And they’re willing to destroy the Civil Rights Division to do it.

Trump’s nominee to lead the key division, conservative San Francisco lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, is expected to do a clean sweep of DEI initiatives in universities, government jobs, and other public organizations, sources familiar with the plans told CNN. And if there was any doubt about the DOJ’s new priorities, Trump’s announcement of her nomination put that to rest.

“Harmeet has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday. “Harmeet is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”

Dhillon, yet another faithful MAGA soldier in the right’s broader culture war, will likely overturn Biden-era policies regarding transgender rights, critical race theory, police behavior, and voting.

Book banning, genitalia policing, and censoring American history to make white people feel better will now all be on the table for a Civil Rights Division that is historically known for fighting discrimination and enforcing protective policies like the Voting Rights Act. Under Biden, the Civil Rights Division opened civil rights investigations into countless police departments for brutality and discrimination. The Division usually quiets down during Republican presidencies, but under Trump, it could become an anti-wokeism attack dog.

“The Civil Rights Division’s historical mandate from the beginning was to help fight against othering, was to help fight against societal branding of certain Americans as other,” Justin Levitt, Obama’s deputy attorney general for the division, told CNN. “And I am concerned the prospective nominee’s approach has been to lean into branding people as other rather than fighting against it.”

Luigi Mangione’s notebook details his rationale for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last week.

Police have recovered the notebook, which details Mangione’s thought process behind shooting Thompson on a midtown Manhattan street as he walked to an investor’s conference.

“What do you do? You wack the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention. It’s targeted, precise, and doesn’t risk innocents,” one passage in the notebook said, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke with The New York Times.

Mangione allegedly concluded that using a bomb targeting Thompson “could kill innocents” and that a shooting would be more precise. The notebook also included a list of tasks to be completed before the killing and justifications for it, CNN reported, citing sources close to the case.

The notebook contained writings about the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who killed three people and injured 23 others in a mail bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 in the name of fighting environmental destruction and technological advancement. Mangione had given Kaczynski’s book a nearly four-star review in his (now removed) Goodreads account, attacking the bomber’s methods but appreciating his perspective.

“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution,” Mangione’s review said. “Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun.”

In his alleged manifesto, revealed Tuesday, Mangione stated that he was working alone and that planning the shooting was “fairly trivial,” and referenced the spiral notebook.

“This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there,” he wrote.

“It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty,” Mangione’s manifesto concluded.

It looks like bullying works. A frenzy of activity from the most determined MAGA acolytes appears to have moved the dial for some Republican senators who voiced their concerns about confirming television host Pete Hegseth to be the next secretary of defense.

During an interview Tuesday on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, Texas Senator John Cornyn said that he and his fellow Senate Republicans planned to confirm Hegseth.

“I’m supporting Pete’s confirmation, and I believe that ultimately he will be confirmed,” Cornyn said. When asked whether Hegseth had secured the “full support of the party,” Cornyn said he wasn’t aware of any Republican holdouts.

“I know of no one who said they will vote against him,” Cornyn explained, despite previous reports indicating at least six Republican senators opposed Hegseth.

This comes after weeks of MAGA losing it online over any Republican who has shown the slightest bit of reticence about Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Defense Department, or voiced their willingness to do their due diligence about the allegations against Hegseth, who is not only radically unqualified but also accused of excessive drinking and sexual assault.

“What a disgrace. If you’re a GOP Senator who voted for Lloyd Austin, but criticize @PeteHegseth, then maybe you’re in the wrong political party,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote in a post on X last week.

Elon Musk replied, “Yes.”

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s reluctance to readily back Trump’s bad pick led to an online firestorm of criticism from MAGA activists, who couldn’t seem to understand why a ​​retired Iowa National Guard lieutenant colonel would vote to confirm Democratic nominees but not a man who made disparaging remarks about how women should not serve combat roles in the military.

“Senator Joni Ernst (R) voted to confirm Lloyd Austin for Secretary of Defense who turned our military into a woke laughingstock but is refusing to say if she will confirm Pete Hegseth,” wrote LibsofTiktok, a prominent far-right troll account on X. “So she supports all this trash but doesn’t support a strong Conservative who will strengthen our military and hold the DC war machine accountable?”

LibsofTikTok was just one among a swarm of MAGA trolls attacking Ernst and threatening to mount challenges to unseat her in the next election.

As a top Trump ally anonymously told Fox News Digital, “It’s really this simple: If you oppose President Trump’s nominees, you oppose the Trump agenda and there will be a political price to pay for that. We are well aware that there are certain establishment Senators trying to tank the President’s nominees to make him look weak and damage him politically, and we’re just not going to allow that to happen.”

At the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Ernst expressed a desire to hear more from Hegseth.

“I am a survivor of sexual assault, so I have worked very heavily on sexual assault measures within the military, so I’d like to hear a little more about that, and I’d like to hear about the role of women in our great United States military,” she said.

And by Monday, after a second meeting with Hegseth, Ernst seemed to have changed her tune.

Without outright saying she’d support his nomination, Ernst said that she’d had “encouraging” conversations with Hegseth, and said she was supporting Hegseth “through the process,” according to Politico. She also said Hegseth was suddenly “very supportive of women in the military.”

Without holdouts such as Ernst, it’s more likely than not that Hegseth’s nomination will go through. How long he’ll last in Trump’s Cabinet is another matter entirely.

Just shy of 75 million Americans voted against a second Donald Trump presidency—but the Capitol police officers who stood between the forty-fifth president’s supporters and Congress on January 6, 2021, are especially aggrieved.

Former Capitol officer Harry Dunn told MSNBC on Tuesday that the MAGA leader’s election night win felt like a “dagger through the heart.”

“I honestly can say I wish I was surprised,” Dunn said. “This has been four years in the making.”

“I had the opportunity to speak to Michael Fanone today, and he said something, that what we spoke out for was just accountability,” Dunn continued, referring to a fellow ex-officer who defended Congress during the riot. “It was doing what’s right. To see that he skated that, and there are people in this country that prioritized him being president over seeking accountability, it was a dagger through the heart, to be very candid with you.

“Election Night it was like our spirits were crushed because we thought all of our efforts had been in vain,” he added.

Dunn, who served 15 years in the Capitol Police, has claimed that Trump’s supporters attacked him and shouted racial slurs at him on January 6. He was a witness for the House select committee on the January 6 attack, and testified in the seditious conspiracy trial of the Oath Keepers.

In the years following the attack, Dunn tried and failed to win one of Maryland’s House seats, but ultimately used his residual funds to continue his fight against Trump, starting a PAC in June to exclusively support candidates running against Trump’s acolytes.

Trump, meanwhile, has made his loyalty to his most violent and ardent followers clear: On Sunday, he reaffirmed his intentions to free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021 on his behalf, forcing the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press, the MAGA leader said he would act “very quickly” to release the January 6 defendents—as soon as his “first day” in office.

“They’ve been in there for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” Trump said.

He also invited one of the protesters to serve on his transition team.