Tulsi Gabbard’s Chances of Becoming Trump’s Intel Chief Plummet

Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination for director of national intelligence may be in serious jeopardy.

Multiple Senate Republicans have cooled on Gabbard, dashing hopes that she’d receive the same warm treatment the GOP gave Trump’s now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a slightly more controversial pick. Though there are many national security concerns about Gabbard becoming the nation’s top intel chief, most of the conservative qualms about Gabbard appear to be due to her refusal to label NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a “traitor” in her confirmation hearing Thursday.

“Do you believe, as the chairman of this committee believes, as the vast majority of members of our intelligence agencies believe, that Edward Snowden was a traitor to the United States of America?” asked Democratic Senator Michael Bennet. “He broke the law,” Gabbard replied, refusing to answer the question.

“I think it would befit you and be helpful to the way you are perceived by members of the intelligence community, if you would at least acknowledge that the greatest whistleblower in American history, so-called, harmed national security by breaking the laws of the land around our intel authority,” Republican Todd Young told Gabbard. He was “visibly frustrated” by Gabbard’s refusal to fully denounce Snowden.

Other Republicans echoed these sentiments.

“With Ms. Gabbard, I have said that it was like having a sheet of music that was missing notes.… There are many notes still missing and a number of sour notes and awkward silences that simply don’t ring true as a political philosophy on critical national security issues,” said Senator John Curtis after Gabbard’s confirmation hearing. “I leave today’s hearing with more questions than answers.”

A top-ranking official in the U.S. Department of the Treasury is resigning after a fight with Elon Musk over a sensitive payment system.

The Washington Post reports that David Lebryk, who has worked in the department for decades and is its longest-serving career official, will depart soon, after conflicting with Musk’s deputies over access to the government’s payment system used to distribute trillions of dollars every year. Until Scott Bessent’s confirmation as treasury secretary on Monday, Lebryk served as acting head of the department.

Musk’s people at his “Department of Government Efficiency” have sought access to the system since the election, the Post reports, and their requests continued after Donald Trump’s inauguration. However, the Treasury’s payment systems have usually only been accessed by a small number of career officials.

The Bureau of Fiscal Service operates the systems, controlling $6 trillion of money disbursement around the country. Tens, and possibly hundreds, of millions of people rely on the systems, which distribute Social Security and Medicare benefits, federal salaries, payments to government contractors, grants, and tax refunds, as well as thousands of other things.

Lebryk joined the department in 1989 as an intern, and has worked for three decades under 11 different treasury secretaries. His departure at this time doesn’t bode well, especially since he served in the previous Trump administration and was praised by Trump’s current deputy treasury secretary, Michael Faulkender, in 2023.

“I could not, to this day, tell you his politics,” said Faulkender, who worked with Lebryk in sending out stimulus payments during the Covid-19 pandemic, an effort Lebryk led. “He always seemed to be relaxed and under control.”

It appears that Musk, while upending the lives of federal workers, is now causing chaos with the U.S. government’s money flow. If federal officials who have served for decades under different presidents, including Trump, see a need to quit, that’s not a good sign for the country.

The Trump administration’s changes to its email settings has federal employees getting endlessly spammed with vulgar content.

When Trump took office, he changed the email system so that every single federal worker could be contacted with one email. People are taking advantage of that. According to online reports, all 13,000 employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, were flooded with spam emails on Thursday.

“I haven’t laughed this hard in weeks. From a Scientology confirmation email to an Important Weather Alert that the next 4 years has a 99% chance of shit showers,” one federal worker wrote on the r/fednews subreddit. “I guess this is what happens when you plug in an unsecured server.”

“Aren’t you tired of working for a complete cunt?” one of the NOAA emails read. “TRUMP TRIED TO SUCK MY COCK,” said another. The email with the subject “Important Weather Alert” read, “The next 4 years has a 99% chance of shit showers. Our president is a retard and his VP is a f—. We’re cooked. Please reply.”

Not everyone is using this basic lack of security oversight for crassness.

“I just sent this email to all 13,000 federal employees of the NOAA lol,” said journalist Ken Klippenstein, sharing an email asking federal workers to subscribe to his newsletter. “The Trump administration’s changes to their communications system made it so literally anyone can blast messages out to the entire agency.”

Trump has yet to comment on the spam emails.

President Donald Trump made his declaration that the tragic midair crash over Reagan National Airport that killed 67 people late Wednesday was the fault of President Joe Biden’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies before he was even briefed by the chief agency responsible for investigating the tragedy.

Hours after his initial comments, Trump was in the Oval Office Thursday signing another executive order, this time on aviation safety, linking DEI initiatives to the deadly accident.

The order called for a total review of “all hiring decisions and changes to safety protocols” made during the Biden administration, while also alleging the former president “egregiously rejected merit-based hiring, requiring all agencies to implement dangerous ‘diversity equity and inclusion’ tactics, and specifically recruiting individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities in the FAA.

“This review shall include a systematic assessment of any deterioration in hiring standards and aviation safety standards and protocols during the Biden administration,” the order read.

But when pressed by reporters during the signing as to whether he legitimately believed that race or gender played into the tragedy, Trump simultaneously refused to disown the prejudiced statement and failed to express confidence in his administration’s own theory.

“It may have, I don’t know,” Trump said. “Incompetence might have played a role, we’ll let you know that.

“You’re talking about extremely complex things, and if they don’t have a great brain—a great power of the brain, they’re not going to be very good at what they do, and bad things will happen,” he added.

A preliminary safety report on the crash by the Federal Aviation Administration found that staffing at the airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic,” relying on one individual instead of two to handle helicopter traffic as well as incoming and departing planes the night of the crash.

That would imply that the fault of the crash was a systemic issue, rather than the intellectual deficit of one individual as Trump suggested.

The National Transportation Safety Board did not have the opportunity to brief Trump until midafternoon. By then, Trump had already blamed DEI for the crash. He signed the executive order shortly after the briefing, despite the fact that the NTSB had warned it wasn’t yet able to determine what had caused the crash.

“Our investigating team will be on scene as long as it takes in order to obtain all the perishable evidence and all the fact finding that is needed to come to a conclusion of probable cause,” NTSB Board Member Todd Inman told reporters Thursday afternoon. “Since we’re just beginning our investigation, we don’t have a great deal of information to share right now.

“Our goal is to have a preliminary report within 30 days,” Inman added.

A U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines passenger plane collided above Reagan National Airport just outside of Washington. The plane, a Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet operated by a subsidiary of American Airlines, was carrying 60 passengers and four crew members at the time of the crash, according to airline CEO Robert Isom.

Critics have pointed to an executive order–initiated federal hiring freeze as a potential tension point for the Federal Aviation Administration, at a time when the vast majority of the country’s air traffic control sites are significantly understaffed.

It is currently not clear whether the freeze directly affected the FAA. The order provided allowances for roles described as “public safety professionals.”

Donald Trump just will not take Wednesday night’s deadly aviation collision seriously.

While signing yet another batch of executive orders on Thursday, the president was asked whether he planned to visit the site of the deadly midair crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines flight, which killed all 67 people on board the two aircraft.

“I have a plan to visit, not the site, because why don’t you tell me, what’s the site? The water?” Trump said. “You want me to go swimming?”

Trump followed up his flippant response by saying he planned to meet with some of the family members of those who had died in the crash.

The bodies of at least 28 people had been recovered from the Potomac River by Thursday evening, as recovery operations continued, according to the Associated Press.

Earlier on Thursday, Trump had suggested that the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring practices were to blame for the crash, specifically pointing to the Federal Aviation Administration’s practice of hiring people with “targeted disabilities.” The FAA published a report contradicting this outlandish and unserious claim, saying that staffing in the air traffic control tower was “not normal” on Wednesday night when the crash occurred.

It’s also worth noting that Trump went on television to speak about the crash hours before he had actually briefed on the incident. Meanwhile, National Transportation Safety Board member Todd Inman said Thursday it is too early to tell what exactly caused the crash.