Qualifications: A former member of the House of Representatives (D-Hawaii) and former Democrat. Ran for a failed presidential bid in 2022. Was a 5-year term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a veteran who served in the Hawaii National Guard for over two decades, earning the rank of Lt. Colonel. She was deployed to Iraq in 2004-05, and in Kuwait in 2008-09, serving as an Army Police Platoon leader. 

Disqualifications: Has never had an intelligence job or sat on a House intelligence subcommittee. Is a pro-Putin apologist whom critics view as a Putin puppet; she opposed US funding for Ukraine. Also, she notoriously met now-deposed “Butcher of Syria” Bashar Assad in 2017, then accused of genocide. That decision has prompted over 100 former National Security officials to sign a petition in December 2024 opposing her nomination as DNI director.  

Views: Gabbard was born in American Samoa and raised in Hawaii in a Hindu family. She has steadily veered from centrist GOP to harder right and was a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022. She joined the Republican party in 2024. In 2020, she said she supported legal abortion in some cases. As a younger person, she worked for a post-9-11 group founded by her father, Stand Up for America, and an anti-gay marriage group he founded, the Alliance for Traditional Values. She also supported the DeSantis “don’t say Gay” bill. She views herself as a hawk against terrorists, frequently attacks Muslim terrorists, and equates Islamism with terrorism. But she is opposed to first-use of nuclear weapons – departing from Project 2025’s position.