Lawmakers voted Tuesday to advance Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination as national security director to the Senate floor, a boost that greatly increases the embattled pick's chances of confirmation.
The Senate Intelligence Committee backed Gabbard in a 9-8 party-line vote. Republican senators Todd Young (Ind.) and Susan Collins (Maine), who had expressed misgivings about Gabbard before and during her confirmation hearing last week, joined their GOP colleagues in supporting the nominee.
Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman who backed President Donald Trump in 2024, faced bipartisan pushback from the committee last week over her support for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
The vote indicates that Republican lawmakers were willing to put aside their concerns. Gabbard will now face a confirmation vote by the full Senate.
In a statement released ahead of the committee vote, Young said he decided to support Gabbard after she gave him written reassurances that she would crack down on classified intelligence leaks and wouldn’t use her role to advocate for Snowden.
"I appreciate Tulsi Gabbard’s engagement with me on a variety of issues to ensure that our intelligence professionals will be supported and policymakers will receive unbiased information under her leadership," wrote Young.
The vote comes after weeks of uncertainty over Gabbard’s path to Senate approval, as she worked to win over some GOP lawmakers skeptical of her foreign policy record.
During the confirmation hearing last week, Gabbard repeatedly refused to say if Snowden—a former U.S. intelligence contractor who leaked thousands of classified documents and has spent the last decade living as a foreign asset in Russia—was a "traitor," drawing criticism from Young and other committee members. She also struggled to defend her efforts to pardon Snowden.
"Did he betray the trust of the American people?" asked Young, who added that "according to Merriam-Webster, that's the definition of a traitor."
In turn, Gabbard said Snowden "broke the law, and he released this information in a way that he should not have. He also acknowledged and exposed information that was unconstitutional, which drove a lot of the reforms that this body has made over the years."
Gabbard also walked back her longtime opposition to a U.S. program that allows surveillance of foreign targets without a court warrant. Before the hearing, Collins said she was concerned about Gabbard’s attempts in Congress to quash that program. Gabbard said she has come to view the program as a national security tool and would not oppose its continuation.
Gabbard left the Democratic Party in 2022, claiming it was "now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness." She was a prominent surrogate for the Trump campaign in the 2024 election.
Her committee vote came shortly after the Senate Finance Committee voted to advance the nomination of another controversial cabinet pick, health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy. Of Trump's cabinet picks, Gabbard and Kennedy were considered the most likely to face Senate opposition.