Important Takeaways:

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune defended Gabbard’s nomination in a speech on the Senate floor Monday afternoon, in which he highlighted her military service and focused on her promise to “right-size” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “I am glad that Ms. Gabbard plans to focus on identifying and eliminating redundancies and inefficiencies to restore the office to what it was originally designed to be,” he said.
• Gabbard is Trump’s 14th nominee to be confirmed since January 20.
• Gabbard’s confirmation would make her the most markedly anti-surveillance official to lead the intelligence community in the post-9/11 era. Her previous animus toward what she has described as the “national security state and its warmongering friends,” hell-bent on using the Espionage Act and other tools to punish its enemies, has raised questions about whether she might seek to reshape the rules by which American intelligence agencies have been collecting, searching and using intelligence for decades.

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