WASHINGTON (AP) — When Tulsi Gabbard returned to Washington from a clandestine sit-down with Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad eight years ago this month, she was greeted with a flurry of criticism.

At the time, Gabbard defended the trip by saying she had gone to try to find a peaceful resolution to a long and bloody conflict. But what the details of what the pair discussed remain a mystery -- one that dogs Gabbard to this day and has taken on new salience as rebels have swept Assad from power and President-elect Donald Trump has nominated her to be the nation’s spy chief.

A key moment in Gabbard’s eight-year stint on Capitol Hill, the Assad sit-down also provides insights into the nominee’s worldview and is emblematic of an unorthodox and iconoclastic approach to politics that has fueled her rise from progressive favorite to one of Trump’s most vocal defenders in the 2024 campaign.

Alexa Henning, a spokesperson for the Trump transition, said the trip was approved by the House ethics panel at the time, included debriefings with top U.S. officials and congressional leaders upon her return, and has generated very little interest from senators in the nominee’s private meetings on Capitol Hill.

But those who study national security issues say there has never been as enigmatic a choice for the post as Gabbard.

“She’s a highly unusual choice to be director of national intelligence,” said Jamil N. Jaffer, executive director of the National Security Institute at George Mason University and a former senior Capitol Hill staffer and Bush administration official.

Gabbard's rise

A combat veteran and a one-time rising star in the Democratic Party who was a progressive darling, Gabbard has drifted rightward and found common cause with Trump and other populist figures in his political orbit.

One of the throughlines in Gabbard’s career is her skepticism about the wisdom of using U.S. power abroad. That view has won her plaudits in certain circles on both the progressive left and Trump’s MAGA base, amid a roiling debate in both political parties over whether the U.S. should play a leadership role in global affairs or look more inward.

She departed on her 2017 trip to Syria just before Trump took office the first time. It was arranged by two Arab-American brothers, Bassam and Elias Khawam. According to people who know the Khawams but did not want to speak publicly against fellow members of the tight-knit Arab American community, they are Lebanese Americans with a history of activism in Arab American political circles, particularly on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Khawams also have ties to a foreign political movement: the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, a right-wing nationalist movement that advocates the integration of Lebanon into an enlarged Syria state. The party was allied for a time with the Assad regime — and the brothers were part of a broader split inside the Arab American community over how to respond to the Syrian civil war.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who received campaign donations over the years from the Khawams, joined Gabbard on the trip. Kucinich, like Gabbard, is a Democrat-turned-independent and a longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy. Kucinich and Gabbard are political allies, having endorsed each other’s various runs for office. He did not respond to calls seeking comment — but the trip was a major controversy during his unsuccessful 2018 run for Ohio governor.

The Syria trip

Gabbard did not publicize her trip before she left, and upon her return she described it as a “fact-finding” mission. Even her own staff was unaware of her plans and struggled to reconstruct the trip when she began filing required congressional disclosure forms, according to a Washington Post report. She did not disclose many details about what she discussed in her meetings in Lebanon and Syria. Under questioning from reporters upon her return, she admitted she sat down with Assad.

“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,” Gabbard told CNN at the time. In 2019, she went further, saying in an interview on MSNBC, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States because Syria does not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

Gabbard’s official itinerary, filed three weeks after she returned in a disclosure report to Congress, showed two meetings with Assad that lasted a total of two hours — plus an additional meeting with the first lady of Syria, the Syrian foreign minister and the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations. In Lebanon, she also met with a wide variety of civil society figures.

To Gabbard’s supporters and allies, she was merely expressing a realpolitik critique of the U.S. rush to push out Assad — a conflict that she feared might lead to another protracted war. “In no way was she defending Assad. She has called him a brutal dictator,” said Henning, the Trump transition spokeswoman.

Lots of questions

But others saw her rhetoric as echoing talking points and policy positions held by America’s adversaries, particularly Russia. The Kremlin was among Assad’s strongest backers in terms of political and military support. Hillary Clinton called her a “Russian asset” in 2019 — a charge that led Gabbard to file a libel lawsuit against the former secretary of state that was later dropped.

Senate Republicans have been more muted in their criticism since her nomination was announced. But they nevertheless hope to glean some answers about her discussions with Assad, who fled to Russia after his regime was toppled.

Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma who sits on the intelligence panel that will consider her nomination, said on CNN: “We’ll have lots of questions. She met with Bashar Assad. We’ll want to know what the purpose and what the direction for that was.”

___

Associated Press writers David Klepper in Washington, Julie Carr Smyth in Cleveland and Bassem Mroue in Lebanon contributed to this report.

News from © The Associated Press, 2025