It was a moment of triumph.
At a rally in Honolulu in 2002, Tulsi Gabbard wore an orchid lei as she celebrated her victory as the youngest-ever member of the Hawaii State Legislature. She had dropped out of community college to run, and Ms. Gabbard, then 21, was embarking on what would become a dizzying political journey from anti-gay conservative to Democratic Party star to a celebrity in President Trump’s world.
Ms. Gabbard, who grew up in a fringe spiritual movement and was a darling of the left during her early years in Congress, has ricocheted across nearly the entire ideological spectrum of American politics, fueling questions about what she stands for and truly believes. Ms. Gabbard, 43, is now the president’s choice to oversee the nation’s 18 spy agencies as the director of national intelligence.
In what is likely to be a rocky confirmation hearing on Thursday, senators from both parties are certain to ask about her trip to Syria in 2017 to meet with Bashar al-Assad, the country’s dictator who has since been deposed. They are also expected to question her parroting of Russian falsehoods about Ukraine and her lack of relevant experience for the job.
In Hawaii, colleagues, friends and critics debate whether the spiritual movement Ms. Gabbard grew up in — the Science of Identity Foundation, a secretive offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement vehemently opposed to same-sex relationships and abortion, and deeply suspicious of Islam — was a motivation for her policy stances. In Washington, some colleagues say she was more influenced by a military deployment to Iraq during one of the most brutal periods of the insurgency. Others attribute her ideological arc to ambition.
No one disputes that Ms. Gabbard is an unorthodox choice for one of the most sensitive roles in government. Her nomination has alarmed national security officials of both parties, and Mr. Trump has privately told allies that hers is the cabinet confirmation he is most worried about.
Ms. Gabbard’s defenders consider her unconventional background and views to be an asset.
“She’s not reflexively willing to go along with conventional thinking,” said Bernard K. Hudson, a former C.I.A. chief of counterterrorism who informally advised Mr. Trump on national security during the campaign and the transition.
Other intelligence experts find her selection baffling.
“I’m all for disruption — I’ve been a disrupter — but I don’t know how you blow up what you don’t understand,” said Susan M. Gordon, who was the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official during Mr. Trump’s first term until her resignation in 2019. “At a time when the world is on fire, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want the best the world has to offer.”
A Science of Identity Childhood
Ms. Gabbard was born in American Samoa and raised in Hawaii, where she was home-schooled by her parents, who were longtime Science of Identity disciples and teachers.
The group was established in 1977 in Hawaii by Chris Butler, a college dropout, surfer and yoga teacher who split from but still reveres the Hare Krishna movement. Ms. Gabbard has called Mr. Butler her “guru dev,” or divine teacher. Mr. Butler and his disciples have said they have no affiliation with any organized religion, but the foundation now says it is rooted in Vaishnavism, one of the major Hindu denominations.
While its exact numbers are not publicly known, the group claims adherents in Hawaii, California, Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. Its stated purpose is to share the science of yoga and other practices to optimize the well-being of followers. The foundation also owns real estate, health food stores and an array of other ventures.
Ms. Gabbard attended a school run by Science of Identity disciples in the Philippines for a time, worked in her youth in one of the group’s health food stores, married a fellow disciple and has employed several in her political operation.
The group’s followers have contributed volunteers and money to Ms. Gabbard’s campaigns over the years. In turn, she has channeled campaign-related contracts to vendors linked to the foundation, according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a nonprofit news outlet.
Some critics call Science of Identity a cult, in part because Mr. Butler, 77, demands total obeisance. His followers cook, clean and drive for him. Previous disciples talk about competing to wear his castoff clothing and eat his leftovers, and a few have sprinkled his toenail clippings in their food.
Anita van Duyn, a former retail entrepreneur who left Science of Identity in 1994 after more than a decade in the group and knew Ms. Gabbard as a young woman, has written a letter to members of Congress warning that Ms. Gabbard is “under the complete influence of” Mr. Butler, who she said “harbors ambitious political goals.” Ms. van Duyn, who lives with her wife in California, said she had left the group because Mr. Butler “used his disciples like puppets only for his personal gains.”
Like other critics, she could not say specifically what Mr. Butler’s political agenda was, although in 1977, The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that he secretly backed a slate of unsuccessful candidates for Congress and state office in Hawaii the previous year. He did not respond to requests for an interview.
In a statement, Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Ms. Gabbard, characterized questions about Ms. Gabbard’s religious background as “Hinduphobia.” She also sought to distance Ms. Gabbard from Science of Identity, claiming that “she has never and doesn’t have affiliation” with the organization. “Smearing her as being in a cult is bigoted,” she wrote in an email.
In the past, Ms. Gabbard has spoken positively of her experiences with Mr. Butler’s group and disputed critics who call it an abusive cult. “I’ve never heard him say anything hateful, or say anything mean about anybody,” Ms. Gabbard told The New Yorker in 2017. “I can speak to my own personal experience and, frankly, my gratitude to him, for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me, and to so many people.”
In the same article, Mr. Butler praised her as an accomplished “student of mine.”
In anticipation of the scrutiny on Ms. Gabbard ahead of her confirmation hearing, Science of Identity has hired a New York public relations firm, 5W, to conduct an email campaign criticizing news coverage of the group’s influence on her as fomenting “anti-Hindu hate,” a message echoed by the White House.
A Democratic Star
Ms. Gabbard began her political career in the Hawaii statehouse echoing the condemnation of abortion and “homosexual extremists” shared by Mr. Butler and her father, Mike Gabbard, then Hawaii’s most vocal anti-gay crusader. In 1998, Mr. Gabbard produced a TV ad with Ms. Gabbard and her four siblings, who equated gay marriage to marrying one another, or the family dog.
Ms. Gabbard had been in the statehouse only a year when the Iraq war began in 2003. She joined the Hawaii Army National Guard, left her legislative position and in 2005 deployed to Camp Anaconda, in Iraq’s Sunni triangle. In a period when the area was the epicenter of Sunni militant resistance to the U.S. occupation, Ms. Gabbard witnessed the flow of casualties in and out of the camp’s hospital, an experience that gave her an unsparing view of the insurgency’s toll on American soldiers.
Ms. Gabbard later cited her service as shaping her opposition to American involvement in what she calls “regime-change wars.” After a second deployment to Kuwait, she returned to Honolulu and won a seat on the City Council in 2010. Two years later she sought the blessing of Hawaii’s Democratic governor at the time, Neil Abercrombie, to run an underdog campaign for Congress.
Mr. Abercrombie and his wife, Nancie Caraway, a political consultant, had been repelled by the Gabbard family’s campaign against gay marriage. But Ms. Gabbard, who has apologized for those views, assured the couple that she had changed during her military service, when she saw how other countries repressed their citizens’ personal freedoms.
“I believed her, my wife believed her, and I went out and raised money for her and campaigned for her,” Mr. Abercrombie said in an interview. So did several big Hawaii donors and Emily’s List, a powerful funder of Democrats who support abortion rights, which backed Ms. Gabbard after she reversed her position on the group’s central issue.
Science of Identity volunteers plastered Hawaii’s Second District with campaign signs backing her and disciples contributed to her campaign, as they would in later years. It is unclear how much the foundation, its disciples and affiliated businesses have given her in total. Ms. Gabbard also attracted funding from major Democratic donors and from the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group supportive of the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, which has emerged as one of her strongest defenders.
Ms. Gabbard won handily. Telegenic, a veteran and the House’s first Hindu member, she arrived in Washington in 2013 and was soon a Democratic star. She grew close to the liberal commentator Van Jones, befriended Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and posed with a surfboard for Vogue. In her first year in office she was awarded a Democratic National Committee vice chairmanship.
But she found herself at odds with the leadership of her party over foreign policy, an area where she had strong convictions. Although her aversion to “regime-change wars” was common on the Democratic left, she also opposed American support for the Arab Spring uprisings against authoritarian governments in Egypt, Libya and Syria.
Friends recalled how she grew embittered toward senior House Democrats who had not served in the military but voted for the Iraq war and now were encouraging U.S. support for rebels in Libya and Syria.
In her new position she sought a connection with Mr. Modi, whom she visited twice in 2014, in New York and in India. Sunil Khemaney, an adviser whom Ms. van Duyn described as one of Mr. Butler’s most trusted disciples, accompanied Ms. Gabbard on the India trip. Mr. Modi later sent a personal gift and the general secretary of his Bharatiya Janata Party to Ms. Gabbard’s wedding to Abraham Williams, a fellow Science of Identity disciple and photographer who documents her public appearances.
Mr. Butler has spoken about India as a rightfully Hindu nation. “The reason why there’s any Muslims in India at all,” he said, according to a transcript of a 2001 lecture to his followers, is that “so-called Islamic terrorists came down into India and by force converted people into their religion.”
Defending a Dictator
In June 2015, Ms. Gabbard joined a congressional delegation to visit refugees from the conflict in Syria in a camp on the Turkish-Syrian border.
Meeting several young girls who had been badly burned in an aerial bombing of the camp, she asked them, “How do you know it was the Russians and Assad who did it, and not ISIS?” recalled Mouaz Moustafa, an activist with the Syrian Emergency Task Force who coordinated the trip. But the Islamic State did not have an air force.
Mr. Moustafa later told reporters he was so mortified by Ms. Gabbard’s question that he did not accurately translate it. Ms. Gabbard has denied that the conversation occurred.
Later that year, during a congressional visit to Paris after a wave of Islamic terrorist attacks, Ms. Gabbard said on CNN, “If Assad is removed and overthrown, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, these Islamic extremist groups will walk straight in and take over all of Syria.”
Advisers close to Ms. Gabbard watched with alarm as what they considered her reasonable questions about U.S. policy in Syria hardened into a defense of the Assad regime.
In early 2016, Ms. Gabbard resigned her post on the Democratic National Committee and formally endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, enraging the party’s pro-Hillary Clinton establishment.
Ms. Gabbard’s next stop was Trump Tower. Shortly after Mr. Trump won the 2016 election, he told The Wall Street Journal that he favored fighting the Islamic State in Syria rather than deposing Mr. al-Assad. “We’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are,” he said. Soon afterward Stephen K. Bannon, then one of Mr. Trump’s top advisers, invited Ms. Gabbard to Trump Tower to discuss Syria and other foreign policy issues with the president-elect.
If her sudden entrance into Mr. Trump’s orbit shocked her Democratic colleagues, it was only a prelude to her surprise visit with Mr. al-Assad two months later.
Travel forms Ms. Gabbard later filed with the House Ethics Committee say she met twice with Mr. al-Assad for a total of more than two hours. S he also had an hourlong meeting with his foreign minister. In a post-trip interview on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, Ms. Gabbard said that Mr. al-Assad was looking for a “shared interest” with Mr. Trump in “this commitment to defeating ISIS,” and warned that his toppling would result in the genocide of religious minorities in the country.
Joining Team Trump
In 2019, Ms. Gabbard embarked on a quixotic Democratic campaign for president that effectively ended her relationship with her party. The pivotal moment came in October that year, when Mrs. Clinton, in a podcast interview, implied that Ms. Gabbard was “a Russian asset.”
Mrs. Clinton provided no evidence for the claim, and Ms. Gabbard sued her for defamation. She dropped the lawsuit four months later, but the clash earned her sympathy on the right.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, Ms. Gabbard blamed the United States and NATO for provoking the war by ignoring Russia’s security concerns and suggested the United States was culpable for the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022. European prosecutors and U.S. officials say that sabotage was carried out by Ukrainian operatives.
In October of that year, Ms. Gabbard debuted “The Tulsi Show,” an online TV show and podcast, and in the first episode announced that she was no longer a Democrat. Days later she endorsed a slate of far-right Republican candidates known for their false claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump.
In a 2024 book, “For Love of Country: Leave the Democrat Party Behind,” Ms. Gabbard called her former party “unrecognizable,” with “the mentality and mind-set of dictators.”
Ms. Gabbard, who joined the Republican Party a month before the 2024 election, has new political friends now. They include Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News host, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary. She earned $1.2 million last year, most of it from work as a news commentator, according to her financial disclosure form.
“Tulsi’s foreign policy and Trump’s foreign policy have been in line basically as long as they’ve been in public,” said Joe Kent, a former Green Beret and C.I.A. paramilitary officer and a friend of Ms. Gabbard’s who has run for Congress twice as a Republican.
But in the run-up to her hearing, Ms. Gabbard has struggled to explain views that rile some conservatives on the intelligence committee considering her nomination. One concern is her defense of Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor, now a Russian citizen, who leaked highly classified documents about mass surveillance techniques to The Guardian and The Washington Post in 2013. Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the intelligence panel, has said he should “rot in jail.”
Ms. Gabbard has also abandoned her vigorous opposition to Section 702, a law allowing the government to collect without a warrant the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including their interactions with Americans.
“She is a shape-shifter,” said Mr. Abercrombie, the former Hawaii governor. “She’s going to shape-shift for those Republicans on the committee, and they’re not going to give her a hard time,” he said. “You watch.”
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